FAMOUS QUOTATIONS ON MONEY

All the perplexities, confusions, and distress in America arise, not from defects in the Constitution or confederation, not from want of honour or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.
PRESIDENT JOHN ADAMS

The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy spending power of the Government and the buying of consumers. The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Governments, but it is the government's greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles, the long-felt want for a uniform medium will be satisfied. The taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. The financing of al public enterprises, and the conduct of he Treasury will become mattes of practical administration. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN

If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that wil grow up around them will deprive the people of al property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied. The issuing of money should be taken from the banks and restored to Congress and to the people tho whom it belongs. I sincerely believe that banking institutions having the issuing power of money are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies.
THOMAS JEFFERSON

My agency in promoting the passage of the National Bank Act was the greatest financial mistake of my life. It has built up the monopoly which affects every interest in the country. It should be repealed; but before that can be accomplished, the people will be arrayed on one side and the banks on the other, in a contest such as we have never seen before in this country.
SALMON M. CHASE

Under the Federal Reserve Act panics are scientifically created; the present panic is the first scientifically created one, worked out as we figure a mathematical problem.
HON. CHARLES A. LINDBERGH SR., writing of the Panic of 1920

The few who can understand the system (check, money and credits) will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favors, that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of the people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interest.
ROTHSCHILD BROTHERS OF LONDON

We have stricken the (slave) shackles from four million human beings being brought and all laborers to a common level, not so much by the elevation of former slaves as by practically reducing the whole working population, white and black, to a condition of serfdom. While boasting of our noble deeds, we are careful to conceal the ugly fact that by our iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which through more refined, is no less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.
HORACE GREELY

The only dynamite that works in this country is the dynamite sound of idea. I think we are getting a sound idea on the money question. The people have an instinct which tells them that something is wrong and that the wrong somehow centers in money. Don't allow them to confuse you and with the cry of "paper money." The danger of paper money is precisely the danger of gold - if you get too much it is no good. There is just one rule for money and that is to have enough to carry all the legitimate trade that is waiting to move. Too little and too much are both bad. But enough to move trade, enough to prevent stagnation on the one hand, not enough to permit speculation on the other hand, is the proper ratio. If your nation can use a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good, makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets money brokers collect the amount of the bond and an additional 20% interest, whereas the currency pays nobody but those who contribute directly to it in some useful way. It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30,000,000 in bonds and not $30,000,000 in currency. Both are promises to pay, but one promise fattens the owner and the other helps the people. It is the people who constitute the basis government credit. Whey then cannot people have the benefit of their own gilt-edge credit by receiving non-interest bearing currency - instead of bankers receiving the benefit of the people's credit in interest-bearing bonds? If the United States Government will adopt this policy of increasing its national wealth without contributing to the interest collector - for the whole national debt is made up on interest charges - they you will see an era of progress and prosperity in this country such as could never have come otherwise.
THOMAS A. EDISON

From the testimony of Marriner Eccles, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, before the House Banking and Currency Committee, Sept. 30, 1941:
Congressman Patman: "Mr. Eccles, how did you get the money to buy those two billions of government securities?"
Eccles: "We created it."
Patman: "Out of what?"
Eccles: "Out of the right to issue credit money."