Some favorite quotes

Investing, miscellaneous

Political

Conspiracy

Jesse Livermore

Warren Buffett

"Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too."
-- Voltaire
"…the United States has experienced high rates of inflation in the past and appears to be running the same type of fiscal policies that engendered hyperinflations in 20 countries over the past century."
-- Laurance Kotlikoff, Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis "Review", July/Aug 2006
"To buy when others are despondently selling and sell when others are greedily buying requires the greatest fortitude and pays the greatest reward."
-- Sir John Templeton
"Bull markets are born in pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die of euphoria."
-- Sir John Templeton
"It is the long-term investor, he who most promotes the public interest, who will in practice come in for the most criticism... For it is in the essence of his behaviour that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of average opinion."
-- John Maynard Keynes (attributed)
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
-- John Maynard Keynes
"... a speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware."
-- John Maynard Keynes
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again."
-- John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform, 1924
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
-- John Maynard Keynes
"It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens."
-- John Maynard Keynes
"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth."
-- John Maynard Keynes - The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919. pp. 235-248.
"A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him. It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances, and to confess a conventional respectability, which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men."
-- John Maynard Keynes, "The Consequences to the Banks of the Collapse in Money Values", 1931
"... the benefits of a depreciating currency are not restricted to the government. Farmers and debtors and all persons liable to pay fixed money dues share in the advantage. As now in the persons of business men, so also in former ages these classes constituted the active and constructive elements in the economic scheme… The tendency of money to depreciate has been in past times a weighty counterpoise against the cumulative results of compound interest and the inheritance of fortunes. … By this means each generation can disinherit in part its predecessors’ heirs; and the project of founding a perpetual fortune must be disappointed in this way, unless the community with conscious deliberation provides against it in some other way, more equitable and more expedient."
-- John Maynard Keynes - Essays In Persuasion
"By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls . . . become 'profiteers', who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished not less than the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds . . . all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless."
-- John Maynard Keynes, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace", pages 220-223 (1919).
"In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic. All of us, from the Governor of the Bank of England downwards, are now primarily interested in preserving the stability of business, prices, and employment, and are not likely, when the choice is forced on us, deliberately to sacrifice these to outworn dogma, which had its value once, of 3 pounds, 17 shill ings, 10 1/2 pence per ounce. Advocates of the ancient standard do not observe how remote it now is from the spirit and the requirements of the age. A regulated nonmetallic standard has slipped in unnoticed. It exists."
-- John Maynard Keynes, 1932, in "A Retrospective on the Classical Gold Standard, 1821-1931"
"If you owe your banker a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe your banker a million pounds, he is at your mercy."
-- John Maynard Keynes
"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back... soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil."
-- John Maynard Keynes
"the theory of aggregated production, which is the point of ['The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money'], nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire."
-- John Maynard Keynes, in forward of the German edition of "The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money"
"In my opinion it is a grand book ... Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement." ... "What we need therefore, in my opinion, is not a change in our economic programmes, which would only lead in practice to disillusion with the results of your philosophy; but perhaps even the contrary, namely, an enlargement of them. Your greatest danger is the probable practical failure of the application of your philosophy in the United States."
-- John Maynard Keynes, after reading after reading Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom"
"I should... conclude rather differently. I should say that what we want is not no planning, or even less planning, indeed I should say we almost certainly want more. But the planning should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers wholly share your own moral position. Moderate planning will be safe enough if those carrying it out are rightly oriented in their own minds and hearts to the moral issue. This is in fact already true of some of them. But the curse is that there is also an important section who could be said to want planning not in order to enjoy its fruits but because morally they hold ideas exactly the opposite of yours, and wish to serve not God but the devil."
-- John Maynard Keynes, in response to Hayek's criticism of his theory of deficit spending during bad times and payback during good times (Heilbroner, Robert (2000). The Worldly Philosophers, 278–8)
"The roots of violence are wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principals."
-- Mahatma Gandhi
"An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it."
-- Mahatma Gandhi
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed."
-- Mahatma Gandhi
"From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time."
-- Friedrich Hayek, "The Road to Serfdom"
"To combat depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection or production, we want to create further misdirection- a procedure which can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end."
-- Fredrich Hayek, 1933
"There can be no doubt that besides the regular types of the circulating medium, such as coin, notes and bank deposits, which are generally recognised to be money or currency, and the quantity of which is regulated by some central authority or can at least be imagined to be so regulated, there exist still other forms of media of exchange which occasionally or permanently do the service of money. Now while for certain practical purposes we are accustomed to distinguish these forms of media of exchange from money proper as being mere substitutes for money, it is clear that, other things equal, any increase or decrease of these money substitutes will have exactly the same effects as an increase or decrease of the quantity of money proper, and should therefore, for the purposes of theoretical analysis, be counted as money".
-- Friedrich Hayek, Prices and Production, 1935, p. 96
"We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle."
-- Winston Churchill
"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else."
-- Winston Churchill
"In finance, everything that is agreeable is unsound."
-- Winston Churchill
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
-- Winston Churchill
"If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions."
-- Winston Churchill
"When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber."
-- Winston Churchill
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
-- George Santayana
"Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly."
-- George Santayana
"Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."
-- Sir Walter Scott - "Marmion", Canto VI, Stanza 17
"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."
-- Winston Churchill
"Ponzi’ finance units must increase its outstanding debt in order to meet its financial obligations. A transition occurs over the course of an expansion as increasingly risky positions are validated by the booming economy that renders the built in margins of error superfluous - encouraging adoption of riskier positions. Eventually, either financing costs rise or income comes in below expectations, leading to defaults on payment commitments."
-- Hyman Minsky
"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
"While I live I will never resort to irredeemable paper."
-- Napoleon Bonaparte (in the context of funding the government)
"Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain."
-- Napoleon
"The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children."
-- Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
"...if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen."
-- Harry Truman, U.S. President 1945-1952
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity."
-- Marshall McCluhan
"You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself."
-- Galileo Galilei
"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them."
-- Galileo Galilei
"Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened."
-- Winston Churchill
"To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle."
-- George Orwell
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value - zero."
-- Voltaire, 1729
"... it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
-- Voltaire
"An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics."
-- Plutarch
"It is the part or wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not venture all his eggs in one basket."
-- Miguel de Cervantes
"Life is a banquet - and most poor suckers are starving."
-- Auntie Mame
"The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is."
-- Tom Vogl
"The only thing that is necessary for evil to triumph is for men of good will to do nothing."
-- Edmund Burke
"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little."
-- Edmund Burke
"It is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true."
-- James Branch Cabell
"Don’t gamble! Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it ‘till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it."
-- Will Rogers
"If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?"
-- Will Rogers
"Inside every cynical person is a disappointed idealist."
-— George Carlin, comedian & social commentator
"Essentially, all models are wrong, but some models are useful."
-- George E.P. Box (Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin)
"The US dollar is our currency but your problem."
-- US Secretary of the Treasury John Connolly, 1971
"Before this century is over, the Dow Jones Industrial Average will probably be over one million versus around 10,000 now. So for the long-term, the outlook is tremendously bullish if you buy stocks blindly to keep for a century."
-- John Templeton, 1999
"No human has yet grasped 1% of what can be known about spiritual realities" "I grew up Presbyterian. Presbyterians thought the Methodists were wrong. Catholics thought all Protestants were wrong. The Jews thought the Christians were wrong. So, what I'm financing is humility. I want people to realize that you shouldn't think you know it all."
-- John Templeton, BusinessWeek 2005
"What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality."
-- Plutarch
"As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters."
-- Seneca
"Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future ones."
-- Seneca (5 B.C. - 65 A.D.)
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."
-- Milton Friedman
"...the burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes, but by how much it spends."
-- Milton Friedman
"Central bankers always try to avoid their last big mistake. So every time there's the threat of a contraction in the economy, they'll over stimulate the economy, by printing too much money. The result will be a rising roller coaster of inflation, with each high and low being higher than the preceding one."
-- Milton Friedman
"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program."
-- Milton Friedman
"[Milton Friedman] has always hated the fragmentation and bickering between schools of economics, which has occurred ever since Marx detached himself from the "classical" school of Smith and Ricardo. In 1974, when vacationing at his summer home in Vermont, Friedman spoke informally at a nearby conference about Austrian economics. He bluntly told the audience, 'There is no Austrian economics--only good economics and bad economics'. (Dolan 1976: 4). His point was that any useful concepts coming out of Austrian economics (he specifically had reference to Hayek's contributions) should be incorporated into the body of mainstream economic theory. In 1982, he made the same point at a conference on supply-side economics. 'I am not a supply-side economist. I am not a monetarist economist. I am an economist.' (Friedman 1982: 53)."
-- Mark Skousen, The Making of Modern Economics, pg 432
"In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."
-- Eric Hoffer
"It was probably a mistake to allow gold to rise so high."
-- Paul Volcker, ex Federal Reserve Chairman in looking back at the rise of gold from $35 to $850 during the 1970s, per "Paul Volcker: The Making of a Financial Legend" by Joseph B. Treaster
"That day the U.S. announced that the dollar would be devalued by 10 percent. By switching the yen to a floating exchange rate, the Japanese currency appreciated, and a sufficient realignment in exchange rates was realized. Joint intervention in gold sales to prevent a steep rise in the price of gold, however, was not undertaken. That was a mistake."
-- Paul Volcker,from the Nikkei Weekly, which in 2004 published excerpts from his memoirs, of the events of February 12, 1973
"A nation's exchange rate is the single most important price in its economy; it will influence the entire range of individual prices, imports and exports, and even the level of economic activity. So it is hard for any government to ignore large swings in its exchange rate..."
-- Paul Volcker and Toyoo Gyohten, "Changing Fortunes: The World's Money and the Threat to American Leadership", page 232
"There are five main purposes of central bank cooperation"..."the provision of international credits and joint efforts to influence asset prices (especially gold and foreign exchange) in circumstances where this might be thought useful."
-- William S. White, head of the monetary and economic department of the Bank for International Settlements in a speech to a BIS conference in Basel, Switzerland, in June 2005
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" (Who will guard the guardians?)
-- Juvenal
"Significant changes in the growth rate of money supply, even small ones, impact the financial markets first. Then, they impact changes in the real economy, usually in six to nine months, but in a range of three to 18 months. Usually in about two years in the US, they correlate with changes in the rate of inflation or deflation."
"The leads are long and variable, though the more inflation a society has experienced, history shows, the shorter the time lead will be between a change in money supply growth and the subsequent change in inflation."
-- Milton Friedman
"Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works".
-- John Stuart Mill
"We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power."
-- Alan Greenspan (Chairman of the Federal Reserve US Central Bank), appearing before the Senate Banking Committee on February 15, 2005, in response to Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island on the topic of funding Social Security.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world. Fiat money in extremis is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted."
-- Alan Greenspan, May 20, 1999
"I have one other issue I'd like to throw on the table. I hesitate to do it, but let me tell you some of the issues that are involved here. If we are dealing with psychology, then the thermometers one uses to measure it have an effect. I was raising the question on the side with Governor Mullins of what would happen if the Treasury sold a little gold in this market. There's an interesting question here because if the gold price broke in that context, the thermometer would not be just a measuring tool. It would basically affect the underlying psychology."
-- Alan Greenspan, May 18, 1993 ( Page 42 )
"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them."
-- Pierre Beaumarchais (1732 - 1977)
"The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"
-- "War Games", 1983 movie
"The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe."
-- John Walter Wayland, 1899
"As soon as you think you've got the key to the stock market, they change the lock."
-- Joe Granville
"The most exciting returns are to be had from an asset class where those who know it best, love it least."
-- Don Coxe's definition of a bull market
"If falsehood like truth had only one face, we would be in better shape. For we would take as certain the opposite of what the liar said. But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field."
Michel de Montaigne
"True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success; the glorious inequality of talent, of genius; for inequality, not mediocrity, individual superiority, not standardization, is the measure of the progress of the world."
-- Felix Emmanuel Schelling, American educator and scholar (1858-1945)
"The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios.. The idea that you can actually predict what's going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market."
-- George Soros
"You get recessions, you have stock market declines. If you don't understand that's going to happen, then you're not ready, you won't do well in the markets."
-- Peter Lynch
"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"
-- Captain Renault, "Casablanca"
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
-- Henry David Thoreau
"Is there any reason why the American people should be taxed to guarantee the debts of banks, any more than they should be taxed to guarantee the debts of other institutions, including the merchants, the industries, and the mills of the country?"
-- Senator Carter Glass during Senate debate on the Banking Act of 1933 (Glass-Steagall Act) [source: Rixey Smith and Norman Beasley, Carter Glass: A Biography (1939)]
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that men of good will do nothing."
-- Cicero, B.C.
"A country does not go bankrupt."
-- Walter Wriston, Chairman of Citi Group, 1982, right after Mexico massively defaulted
"Felix qui nihil debet." ("Happy is he who owes nothing.")
-- Proverb from ancient Rome
"Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works."
--John Mills, 'Credit Cycles and the Origin of Commercial Panics'
"One... with courage makes a majority."
-- Andrew Jackson
"The opinion of ten thousand men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject."
-- Marcus Aurelius
"The illiterates of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."
-- Alvin Toffler
"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."
-- Buddha
"The paper system being founded on public confidence and having of itself no intrinsic value, it is liable to great and sudden fluctuations, thereby rendering property insecure and the wages of labor unsteady and uncertain. The corporations which create the paper money can not be relied upon to keep the circulating medium uniform in amount. In times of prosperity, when confidence is high, they are tempted by the prospect of gain or by the influence of those who hope to profit by it to extend their issues of paper beyond the bounds of discretion and the reasonable demands of business; and when these issues have been pushed on from day to day, until public confidence is at length shaken, then a reaction takes place, and they immediately withdraw the credits they have given, suddenly curtail their issues, and produce an unexpected and ruinous contraction of the circulating medium, which is felt by the whole community. The banks by this means save themselves, and the mischievous consequences of their imprudence or cupidity are visited upon the public. Nor does the evil stop here. These ebbs and flows in the currency and these indiscreet extensions of credit naturally engender a spirit of speculation injurious to the habits and character of the people. We have already seen its effects in the wild spirit of speculation in the public lands and various kinds of stock which within the last year or two seized upon such a multitude of our citizens and threatened to pervade all classes of society and to withdraw their attention from the sober pursuits of honest industry. It is not by encouraging this spirit that we shall best preserve public virtue and promote the true interests of our country; but if your currency continues as exclusively paper as it now is, it will foster this eager desire to amass wealth without labor; it will multiply the number of dependents on bank accommodations and bank favors; the temptation to obtain money at any sacrifice will become stronger and stronger, and inevitably lead to corruption, which will find its way into your public councils and destroy at no distant day the purity of your Government."
-- President Andrew Jackson, in his farewell address of March 4, 1837 Source
"In the hands of this formidable power, thus organized, was also placed unlimited dominion over the amount of circulating medium, giving it the power to regulate the value of property and the fruits of labor in every quarter of the Union, and to bestow prosperity or bring ruin upon any city or section of the country as might best comport with its own interest or policy....Yet, if you had not conquered, the government would have passed from the hands of the many to the hands of the few, and this organized money power from its secret conclave would have dictated the choice of your highest officers and compelled you to make peace or war, as best suited their wishes. The forms of your government might for a time have remained, but its living spirit would have departed from it."
-- President Andrew Jackson, in his farewell address of March 4, 1837 and talking about not having renewed the charter of the U.S. Central Bank (full section below)
"But when the charter for the bank of the United States was obtained from Congress, it perfected the paper system, and gave to its advocates the position they have struggled to obtain from the commencement of the Federal Government down to the present hour. The immense capital and peculiar privileges bestowed upon it enabled it to exercise despotic sway over the other banks in every part of the country. From its superior strength it could seriously injure, if not destroy, the business of any one of them that would incur its resentment; and it openly claimed for itself the power of regulating the currency throughout the United States. In other words, it asserted (and undoubtedly possessed) the power to make money plenty or scarce, at its pleasure, at any time, and in any quarter of the Union, by controlling the issues of other banks, and in permitting an expansion, or compelling a general contraction of the circulating medium according to its own will.

The other banking institutions were sensible of its strength, and they soon became generally its obedient instruments, ready at all times to execute its mandates; and with the other banks necessarily went also that numerous class of persons in our commercial cities who depend altogether on bank credits for their solvency and means of business, and who are therefore obliged, for their safety, to propitiate the favor of the money power by distinguished zeal and devotion in its service. The result of the ill-advised legislation which established this great monopoly, was to concentrate the whole moneyed power of the Union, with its boundless means of corruption, and its numerous dependents, under the direction and command of one acknowledged head; thus organizing this particular interest as one body, and securing to it unity of action throughout the United States, and enabling it to bring forward, upon any occasion, its entire and undivided strength to support or defeat any measure of the government. In the hands of this formidable power, thus perfectly organized, was also placed unlimited dominion over the amount of circulating medium, giving it the power to regulate the value of property, and the fruits of labor in every quarter of the Union; and to bestow prosperity, or bring ruin upon any city or section of the country as might best comport with its own interests or policy.

We are not left to conjecture how the moneyed power, thus organized, and with such a weapon in its hands, would be likely to use it. The distress and alarm which pervaded and agitated the whole country, when the Bank of the United States waged war upon the people in order to compel them to submit to their demands, cannot yet be forgotten. The ruthless and unsparing temper with which whole cities and communities were oppressed, individuals impoverished and ruined, a scene of cheerful prosperity suddenly changed into one of gloom and despondency, ought to be indelibly impressed on the memory of the people of the United States. If such were its power in a time of peace, what would it not have been in a season of war, with an enemy at your doors? No nation but the freeman of the United States could have come out victorious from such contest; yet, if you had not conquered, the Government would have passed from the hands of the many to the hands of the few; and this organized money power, from its secret conclave, would have dictated the choice of your highest officers, and compelled you to make peace or war, as best suited their own wishes. The form of your Government might for a time have remained, but its living spirit would have departed from it."
-- President Andrew Jackson’s farewell speech upon leaving office on March 4, 1837
"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"If the governments devalue the currency in order to betray all creditors, you politely call this procedure 'inflation'."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"When the international monetary system was linked to gold, the latter managed the interdependence of the currency system, established an anchor for fixed exchange rates and stabilized inflation. When the gold standard broke down, these valuable functions were no longer performed and the world moved into a regime of permanent inflation. What will be the character of the international monetary system in the next century and how will gold intersect with it? This subject may strike modern audiences as a strange topic, but back in the 1960s, when people were deliberating about the future of the international monetary system, gold figured importantly in the discussions. Even today, the importance of gold in the international monetary system is reflected in the fact that it is today the only commodity held as reserve by the monetary authorities, and it constitutes the largest component after dollars in the total reserves of the international monetary system."
-- Robert A. Mundell, Nobel Laureate for Economics, 1999
"Governments lie; bankers lie; even auditors sometimes lie: gold tells the truth."
-- Lord Rees Mogg, economist & former editor of The Times
"Although gold and silver are not by nature money, money is by nature gold and silver."
-- Karl Marx, Das Kapital - Volume 1, Chapter 2
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside it is too dark to read."
-- Groucho Marx
"Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast,
To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak."
-- William Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 1697
"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."
-- Charles Darwin
"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."
-- Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)
"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful."
-- Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)
"Justice [the human virtue of not harming others]…is the main pillar that supports the whole building. If justice is removed, the great fabric of human society which seems to have been under the darling care of Nature must in a moment crumble into atoms….Men, though naturally sympathetic, feel so little for others with whom they have no particular connection in comparison to what they feel for themselves. The misery of one who is merely their fellow creature is of so little importance to them in comparison to even a small convenience of their own. They have it so much in their power to hurt him and may have so many temptations to do so that if the principle of justice did not stand up within them in his defense and overawe them into a respect for his innocence, they would like wild beasts be ready to fly upon him at all times. Under such circumstances a man would enter an assembly of others as he enters a den of lions."
...
"The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition... is so powerful, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations. Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things."
-- Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations"
"All jobs are created in direct proportion to the amount of capital employed"
-- Adam Smith
"The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition . . . is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration."
-- Adam Smith
"It is corrupting the public morals. It is converting the business of the country into gambling and seriously diminishing the labour of the country. . . . Men are apparently getting rich while morality languishes . . . . Upon the demoralizing influence of an inconvertible government currency it is not necessary to enlarge. . . . It is not to be expected that a people will be more honest than the government under which they live, and while the government of the United States refuses to pay its notes according to their tenor . . . it practically teaches the people the doctrine of repudiation."
-- Henry McCulloch, U.S. Treasury Secretary 1865-1869
"It is only by not paying one's bills, that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes."
-- Oscar Wilde
"Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."
-- Euripides
"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."
-- Dr. Suess
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge - even to ourselves - that we’ve been so credulous."
-- Carl Sagan
"The period of financial distress is a gradual decline after the peak of a speculative bubble that precedes the final and massive panic and crash, driven by the insiders having exited but the sucker outsiders hanging on hoping for a revivial, but finally giving up in the final collapse."
-- Charles P. Kindleberger, "Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises"
"The propensity to swindle grows parallel with the propensity to speculate during a boom... the implosion of an asset price bubble always leads to the discovery of frauds and swindles"
-- Charles P. Kindleberger, economic historian
"Capital will always go where it’s welcome and stay where it’s well treated. Capital is not just money. It’s also talent and ideas. They, too, will go where they’re welcome and stay where they are well treated.
-- Walter Wriston, Citibank CEO in the 1970s
"An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense - perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire - that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other."
-- Alan Greenspan, "Gold and Economic Freedom", 1966
"That which has been is that which will be, And that which has been done is that which will be done."
-- Solomon
"Never mistake activity for achievement."
-- John Wooden, basketball coach
"All living creatures have an instinct to survive. When a bad system determines the survival of researchers, they have to do all kinds of corrupt and unethical things to live. The outcome is inevitable"
-- Professor Jiang Gaoming, Institute of Botany under the Chinese Academy of Sciences
"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights."
-- Alan Greenspan, 1966
"When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it. But when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be."
-- Lord Kelvin, 19th-century British physicist
"I am not young enough to know everything."
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
"I look to the future because that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life."
-- George Burns (at age 87)
"We can continue to try and clean up the gutters all over the world and spend all of our resources looking at just the dirty spots and trying to make them clean. Or we can lift our eyes up and look into the skies and move forward in an evolutionary way."
-- Buzz Aldrin, astronaut
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
-- Aldous Huxley
"Where all think alike, no one thinks very much."
-- Walter Lippmann (1889 - 1974)
"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."
-- George Orwell (1903 - 1950)
"Action is the antidote to despair."
-- Joan Baez
"The future ain't what it used to be!"
-- Yogi Berra
"... in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice they're different."
-- Yogi Berra
"The proposal of any new law or regulation which comes from [businessmen], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."
-- Adam Smith
"Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity."
-- Marshall McLuhan
"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."
-- Richard Feynman
"The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do."
-– B.F. Skinner
"If some lose their whole fortunes, they will drag many more down with them . . . believe me that the whole system of credit and finance which is carried on here at Rome in the Forum, is inextricably bound up with the revenues of the Asiatic province. If Those revenues are destroyed, our whole system of credit will come down with a crash."
-- Cicero, 66 B.C. (Translation by W.W. Fowler, 1909)
"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But, it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague."
-- Cicero, speech to the Roman Senate per the historian Sallust
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."
-- Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141), William Shakespeare
"The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced, if the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."
-- Cicero, 55 BC
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."
-- Steven Brand
"Economics exists to make astrology look respectable."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
"Economists suffer from a deep psychological disorder that I call ‘physics envy'. We wish that 99 percent of economic behavior could be captured by three simple laws of nature. In fact, economists have 99 laws that capture 3 percent of behavior. Economics is a uniquely human endeavor ..."
-- Andrew Lo, a professor of finance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists."
-- Joan Robinson, Cambridge University
"Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get."
-- Charles Kettering
"Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple."
-- Dr. Seuss
"The rescue operation brings to mind John Kenneth Galbraith's dictum that in the United States, the only respectable form of socialism is socialism for the rich."
-- John Cassidy, "A Bankers' Bailout"
"Successful tape reading is a study of Force; it requires ability to judge which side has the greatest pulling power and one must have the courage to go with that side."
-- Richard Wyckoff
"The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
"Perhaps never before or since have so many people taken the measure of economic prospects and found them so favorable as in the two days following the Thursday [24th October 1929] disaster".
-- John Kenneth Galbraith, "The Great Crash 1929"
"Those who had been riding the upward wave decide now is the time to get out. Those who thought the increase would be forever find their illusion destroyed abruptly, and they, also, respond to the newly revealed reality by selling or trying to sell. And thus the rule, supported by the experience of centuries: the speculative episode always ends not with a whimper but with a bang.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith writes in his book "A Short History of Financial Euphoria"
"It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith, A Journey Through Economic Time(1994)
"There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
"There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith, Wall St. Journal Jan. 22, 1993
"All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
"The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
"To the economist, embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or even years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in -- or more precisely, not in -- the country's businesses and banks. This inventory -- it should perhaps be called the bezzle -- amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression this is all reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
"The Federal Reserve System is treated by nearly all economists with reverence. On no matter is their instruction of the young in the subtlety and benignity of established institutions more admiring-or, in broad effect, more successful. Corporations are flawed by an instinct for monopoly. Trade unions interfere with the market, urge trade restrictions, resist new technology and thus obstruct progress, and they can fall victim to extortionists and racketeers. The regulatory agencies of the government are notably imperfect instruments of economic guidance. The Federal Reserve System is not totally above criticism. It makes many mistakes but these are always interesting errors of judgment. they are examined not critically but respectfully to discover why men of insight went wrong. That for such error anyone should be sacked or even seriously rebuked is, for economists, nearly unthinkable. This approval goes back to the origins and can be highly negligent of circumstance. The most widely read account of the genesis of the System tells glowingly of its birth in the closing weeks of 1913 when the Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Wilson."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith, "Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went"
"Almost every aspect of its (Federal Reserve) history should be approached with a discriminating disregard for what is commonly taught or believed."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith, "Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went"
The Biblical Jubilee
"If we had a truth-in Government act comparable to the truth-in-advertising law, every note issued by the Treasury would be obliged to include a sentence stating: "This note will be redeemed with the proceeds from an identical note which will be sold to the public when this one comes due."
-- Walter Wriston (former Chairman of the Citicorp Bank)
"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"
-- Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winning economist
"The intellectual and social climate needed to allow entrepreneurship to thrive will not exist in advanced capitalism."
-- Joseph Schumpeter
"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain - and most fools do."
-- Dale Carnegie (1888 - 1955)
"Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services."
-- Ben Bernanke, the current (2008) Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States, in a speech he made on November 21, 2002 before the National Economists Club in Washington, D.C.
"The best approach here if at all possible is to use supervisory and regulatory methods to restrain undue risk-taking and to make sure the system is resilient in case an asset price bubble bursts in the future."
--Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman, 2009
"Everyone loves an early inflation. The effects at the beginning of inflation are all good. There is steepened money expansion, rising government spending, increased government budget deficits, booming stock markets, and spectacular general prosperity, all in the midst of temporarily stable prices. Everyone benefits, and no one pays. That is the early part of the cycle. In the later inflation, on the other hand, the effects are all bad. The government may steadily increase the money inflation in order to stave off the latter effects, but the latter effects patiently wait. In the terminal inflation, there is faltering prosperity, tightness of money, falling stock markets, rising taxes, still larger government deficits, and still roaring money expansion, now accompanied by soaring prices and an ineffectiveness of all traditional remedies. Everyone pays and no one benefits. That is the full cycle of every inflation."
...
"Until 1922 and the very brink of collapse, Germans and especially foreign investors were absorbing marks in huge quantities. Only the international reputation of the Reichsmark, the faith that an economic giant like Germany could not fail, made this possible. The storage factor caused by the investors willingness to save marks kept the marks from being dumped immediately into the markets, and thereby for a long while held prices in check. The precise moment when the inflation turned sharply upward, toward its vertical climb, was undoubtedly timed by no event, but by the dawning psychological awareness of the German and foreign investor that Germany was not going to back its money. With that, the rush to get out of the mark was on. Like a damn bursting, the seas of marks flooded into the markets and drove prices beyond all bounds. The German government strove mightily to outflood the sea. The sea of marks which had been stored up by Germans and especially by trusting foreigners flooded forth and fought to buy into other investments, foreign currencies, tangible goods, almost anything but marks."
-- Jens O. Parssons, "Dying of Money: Lessons of the Great German & American Inflations"
"I'll give you the bottom 10% and the top 10% of any move if I get to keep the middle 80%."
-- Bernard Baruch
"Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts."
-- Bernard Baruch
"Often wrong, but never in doubt."
-- Ivy Baker Priest, and others
"Derivatives markets guarantee a winner for every loser, but they will over time concentrate the losses in vulnerable sectors. Nature obeys Mayer’s Third Law, which holds that risk-shifting instruments will tend to shift risks onto those less able to bear them, because them as got want to keep and hedge while them as ain’t got want to get and speculate. The logic behind margin requirements in stock markets and capital requirements in banking also holds in the derivatives markets. Permitting highly leveraged institutions to hold private parties behind closed doors is the political version of selling volatility: the predictable likely gains will one day be overwhelmed by an equally predictable disastrous loss."
-- Martin Mayer, Somebody Please Turn on the Lights, Derivatives Strategy, 1999
"Once public opinion is convinced that the increase in the quantity of money will continue and never come to an end, and that consequently the prices of all commodities will not cease to rise, everybody becomes eager to buy as much as possible and restrict his cash holdings to minimum size… If the credit expansion is not stopped in time, the boom turns to crack-up boom: the flight into real values begins, and the whole monetary system founders."
-- Ludwig von Mises (1949)
"Doctors have been caught using poisons, and those who falsely assume the name of philosopher have occasionally been detected in the gravest crimes. Let us give up eating, it often makes us ill; let us never go inside houses, for sometimes they collapse on their occupants; let never a sword be forged for a soldier, since it might be used by a robber."
-- Marcus Fabius Quintilian, Roman educator - Institutio Oratoria II, xvi
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
-- Mark Twain
"Sacred cows make the best hamburger."
-- Mark Twain
"By the Law of Periodical Repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again and again - and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another’s, and each obeying its own law... the same Nature which delights in periodical repetition in the skies is the Nature which orders the affairs of the earth. Let us not under rate the value of that hint."
-- Mark Twain
"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
-- Mark Twain
"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure."
-- Mark Twain 1835-1910
"Where prejudice exists it always discolors our thoughts."
-- Mark Twain
"A gold mine is a hole in the ground with a liar standing in front of it."
-- Mark Twain
"Few things are more irritating than when someone who is wrong is also very effective in making his point.”
-- Mark Twain
"Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
-- Mark Twain, Autobiography
"Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't."
-- Pete Seeger
"A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties."
-- Harry Truman
"There are no hopeless situations; There are only men who have grown hopeless about them."
-- Clare Boothe Luce
"A strange game - the only way to win is not to play."
-- From the 1983 movie War Games
"Give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world!"
-- Archimedes
"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."
-- Yogi Berra
"The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said."
-- Peter Drucker
"In the long run the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip."
-- Daniel L. Reardon
"Man looks in the abyss, there's nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss."
-- Lou Mannheim, in the movie "Wall Street"
"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
-- Charles Mackay, 1841, "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"
"In all the new states of the Union, land monopolization has gone on at an alarming rate, but in none of them so fast as in California, and in none of them, perhaps, are the evil effects so manifest."
-- Henry George in 1870, as quoted in The Great American Land Bubble (1932)
"The length and severity of depressions depend partly on the magnitude of the 'real' maladjustments, which developed during the preceding boom and partly on the aggravating monetary and credit conditions."
-- Gotfried Haberler, Prosperity and Depression, 1937
"I had come to an entirely erroneous conclusion which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data."
-- Arthur Conan Doyle
"Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences."
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
"The truth is that liquidity, the only significant weapon remaining in the central bank's arsenal as decision making moves to the markets, will not necessarily go where you want it to go when you need it to go there."
-- Martin Meyer writes in The Fed
"To combat depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection or production, we want to create further misdirection- a procedure which can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end."
-Fredrich Hayek, 1933
"Once public opinion is convinced that the increase in the quantity of money will continue and never come to an end, and that consequently the prices of all commodities will not cease to rise, everybody becomes eager to buy as much as possible and restrict his cash holdings to minimum size… If the credit expansion is not stopped in time, the boom turns to crack-up boom: the flight into real values begins, and the whole monetary system founders.”
-- Ludwig von Mises (1949)
"Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty. Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of economic freedom. Where there is no market economy, the best-intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter."
-- Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
"The truth is that liquidity, the only significant weapon remaining in the central bank's arsenal as decision making moves to the markets, will not necessarily go where you want it to go when you need it to go there."
-- Martin Meyer writes in The Fed
"Once public opinion is convinced that the increase in the quantity of money will continue and never come to an end, and that consequently the prices of all commodities will not cease to rise, everybody becomes eager to buy as much as possible and restrict his cash holdings to minimum size… If the credit expansion is not stopped in time, the boom turns to crack-up boom: the flight into real values begins, and the whole monetary system founders."
-- Ludwig von Mises
"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute."
-- Gil Stern
"Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them."
-- Matthew 7:15-23
"A lie can be halfway before the world before the truth gets its boots on."
-- James Callahan (Former UK prime minister)
"It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it."
-- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible."
-- Arthur C. Clarke
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking."
-— A. A. Milne
"You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right."
-— Benjamin Graham
"Mathematics is ordinarily considered as producing precise and dependable results; but in the stock market the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics the more uncertain and speculative are the conclusions we draw there from…Whenever calculus is brought in, or higher algebra, you could take it as a warning that the operator was trying to substitute theory for experience, and usually also to give to speculation the deceptive guise of investment."
-— Benjamin Graham
"That is to say, under the old way any time we wish to add to the national wealth we are compelled to add to the national debt.
Now, that is what Henry Ford wants to prevent. He thinks it is stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 -- that is what it amounts to, with interest."
-- Thomas Edison, The New York Times, December 6, 1921
"... public credit depends on public confidence…The financial crisis in America is really a moral crisis, caused by the series of proofs …that the leading financiers who control banks, trust companies and industrial corporations are often imprudent, and not seldom dishonest. They have mismanaged…funds and used them freely for speculative purposes. Hence the alarm of depositors and a general collapse of credit..."
-- The Economist, November 2, 1907 during the 1907 crash.
"Not much in the history of money supports a linear view of history, one in which the knowledge and experience from one epoch provide the intelligence for improved management in the next. Of those who give guidance on these matters history says even less. Out of the 2500 years of experience and 200 years of ardent study have come monetary systems that are as unsatisfactory as any in the peacetime past. In recent times conservatives have reacted adversely to inflation, though not with great enthusiasm to the measures for preventing it. Liberals have thought unemployment the greater affliction. In fact no economy can be successful which has either. Inflation causes discomfort and frustration for many. Unemployment causes acute suffering for a lesser number. There is no certain way of knowing which causes the most in the aggregate of pain. It was the prime lesson of the thirties that deflation and depression destroyed international order, caused each nation to try for its own salvation, indifferent to the damage that its efforts caused to neighbours. It has equally been the lesson of the late sixties and early seventies that inflation too destroys international order. Those who express or imply a preference between inflation and depression are making a fool's choice. Policy must always be against whichever one has."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it came, where it went (1975), Chapter 20
"The truth is that liquidity, the only significant weapon remaining in the central bank’s arsenal as decision making moves to the markets, will not necessarily go where you want it to go when you need it to go there."
-- Martin Meyer, from his book “The Fed”
"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone."
-- Henry David Thoreau
"Your actions speak so loudly that I can't hear what you're saying."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
-- P.J. O'Rourke
"Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame."
Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.
In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.
-- Dr. Laurence J. Peter (1919-1988)
"Nations are not ruined by one act of violence, but quite often, gradually, and almost imperceptibly, by the depreciation of their currency, through excessive quantity".
-- Nicolas Copernicus, 1525
"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive."
--Sir Walter Scott
"Good tactics can save even the worst strategy. Bad tactics will destroy even the best strategy."
-- George S. Patton
"Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That's not a statement, it's a definition."
-- Milton Friedman
"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensible."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."
-- William Faulkner
"The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice."
-- Mahatma Gandhi
"Men who believe absurdities will commit atrocities."
-- Voltaire
"He who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass."
-- George Herbert (1593-1633)
"A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song."
-- Chinese proverb
"I learned very early and painfully that you have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive."
-- R. Buckminster Fuller
"We have seen security prices soar out of sight of earnings, brokers' loans swell till they absorb a third of the banking resources of the country, and the blind pools of ancient days return and multiply by endless crossing and pyramiding as the investment trusts of today. Banks merge and emerge in chains, trailing trusts and holding companies, while industrial corporations pay dividends not by producing goods but by buying each others' stocks and by borrowing and lending everybody's money in the market. But of all these things can anyone say with surety what they signify, whether they are safe and sound, or what they are leading to? We do not even know, or cannot agree, whether inflation exists, what it means, or how it shall be measured."
-- Business Week - September 7, 1929
"For 5 years at least, American business has been in the grip of an apocalyptic holy-rolling exaltation over the unparalleled prosperity of the 'new era' upon which we have entered."
-- Business Week, 1929
"Anybody who plays the stock market not as an insider is like a man buying cows in the moonlight."
-- Daniel Drew, 19th century speculator
"He who sells what isn't his'n, Must buy it back or go to prison."
-- Daniel Drew, 19th century speculator
"It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men."
-- Samuel Adams
"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free."
--P.J. O'Rourke
"On the issue of inflation, I think I could solve it no matter how much money it took."
-- Pat Paulson: 1968 Presidential Candidate & Comedian
"We looked into the abyss if the gold price rose further. A further rise would have taken down one or several trading houses, which might have taken down all the rest in their wake..."
-- Eddie George, Governor Bank of England, in a conversation with CEO of Lonmin, September 1999
"A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him or her."
-- David Brinkley
"The art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of citizens to give to the other."
-- Voltaire (1764)
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident..."
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
"Dubito ergo cogito; cogito ergo sum. (I doubt, therefore I think; I think therefore I am)".
-- René Déscartes
"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you."
-- Pericles (430 B.C.)
"The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was every invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin . Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again . Take this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in . But if you want to continue to be the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit."
-- Sir Josiah Stamp, president of the Bank of England and the second richest man in Britain in the 1920's, speaking at the University of Texas in 1927
"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding".
-- Marshall McLuhan
"I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it".
-- Marshall McLuhan
"The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty".
-- Marshall McLuhan
"A banker is somebody who lends you an umbrella & takes it away as soon as it starts raining."
-- Mark Twain
"Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see."
-- Mark Twain
"It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed."
-- Kin Hubbard
"If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
-- JP Getty
The Three Laws of Motion
1. An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted on by an unbalanced force. An object in motion continues in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. (This law is often called "the law of inertia".)
2. Acceleration is produced when a force acts on a mass. The greater the mass (of the object being accelerated) the greater the amount of force needed (to accelerate the object).
3. For every action there is an equal and opposite re-action.
-- Sir Isaac Newton
"I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."
-- Issac Newton 1721, after having lost huge amounts of money in the South Sea Bubble
"Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people."
-- W. C. Fields (1880-1946)
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
-- C. S. Lewis
"Anybody who plays the stock market not as an insider is like a man buying cows in the moonlight."
-- Daniel Drew, 19th century speculator
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery."
-- Winston Churchill
"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."
-- Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher (1820-1903)
"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first thing to be bought and sold are legislators."
-- P.J. O'Rourke
"A tyrant... is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader."
-- Plato, The Republic (circa 380 B.C.)
"The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness… This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs, when he first appears he is a protector"
-- Plato, The Republic (circa 380 B.C.)
"It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it."
-- Upton Sinclair, 1935, "I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked"
"But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown--a mountebank. "I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.
-- Pablo Picasso, 1952, In Art/The Artist
The Iron Law of Bureaucracy
In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.
-- Jerry Pournelle
"I would rather err with Galen than be right with Harvey."
-- Comment from an eminent physician in the 1820s when the great Dr. Harvey made the discovery in London that the heart functions as a pump for blood, which contradicted the prevailing wisdom from Galen, a Greek from around 200 AD.
"I don’t throw darts at a board. I bet on sure things."
-- Gordon Gecko in the movie "Wall Street"
"All the perplexities, confusion and distresses in America arise not from defects in the Constitution or confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, as much from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation."
--John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson
"All goods must therefore be measured by some one thing ... now this unit is in truth, demand, which holds all things together ... but money has become by convention a sort of representative of demand; and this is why it has the name nomisma--because it exists not by nature, but by law (nomos) and it is in our power to change it and make it useless. ... Now the same thing happens to money itself as to goods--it is not always worth the same; yet it tends to be steadier ... money then acting as a measure makes good commensurate and equates them ... There must then be a unit, and that fixed by agreement"
-- Aristotle, Ethics 1133.
"Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance."
-- William O. Douglas (1898-1980), with 36 years longest-serving U.S. Supreme Court Justice in history
"There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world."
-- John Maynard Keynes
" ... the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time ..."
-- Thomas Jefferson (Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1779))"
"The four most dangerous words in investing are, 'It's different this time.'"
-- Sir John Templeton
"I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work the more I have of it."
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
"Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"Delay is preferable to error."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"What country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? What country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? :et them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations which grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, 1802
FALSE, not something that Jefferson actually wrote per http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/Private_Banks_(Quotation)
"And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Taylor, 1816
"In the last analysis, luck comes only to the well prepared."
-- Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
"The superior man is distressed by the limitations of his ability; he is not distressed by the fact that men do not recognize the ability that he has".
-- Confucius
"The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell."
-- Confucius
"In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of."
-- Confucius
"In most bull markets there comes a time when the public controls fluctuations and the efforts of the largest operators are insufficient to check the rising tide."
-- Charles H. Dow, 1901
"When a big market breaks badly on good news it is a bear market; when a big market rises sharply on bad news it is a bull market."
-- Unknown, a time honored adage
"... there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past ..."
-- Ray Bradbury, "The Martian Chronicles"
"Find the trend whose premise is false, and bet against it."
-- George Soros
"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost."
-— John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the US
"The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously."
-- Hubert H. Humphrey
"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
-- Sir Karl Popper
"It is against stupidity in every shape and form that we have to wage our eternal battle. But how can we wonder at the want of sense on the part of those who have had no advantages, when we see such plentiful absence of that commodity on the part of those who have had all the advantages?"
-- William Booth (1829 - 1912), founder of the Salvation Army
"If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"He is a barbarian and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."
-- George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra
"The definition of a Dark Age is that we no longer remember what we once could do."
-- Jerry Pournelle
"It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us in trouble. It’s the things we know that ain’t so."
-- normally attributed to Will Rogers, more here.
"Age and treachery overcome youth and skill."
-- Unknown
"There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dimissed as the primative refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present"
-- John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria
"As times get harder, words grow more weaselly. Euphemisms boom in a recession, even if nothing else does."
-- Alison Eadie
"Puritanism—the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy."
--H.L. Mencken
"ECCLES: We created it.
PATMAN: Out of what?
ECCLES: Out of the right to issue credit money.
PATMAN: And there is nothing behind it, is there, except our government's credit?
ECCLES: That is what our money system is."
-- Federal Reserve Board Governor Marriner Eccles in testimony before the House Committee on Banking and Currency in 1941, during questioning by Congressman Wright Patman about how the Fed got the money to purchase two billion dollars worth of government bonds in 1933.
"When a bank makes a loan, it simply adds to the borrower's deposit account by the amount of the loan. It does not take this money from anyone else's deposit; it was not previously paid in to the bank by anyone. It's new money, created by the bank for the use of the borrower."
-- Robert B. Anderson, Secretary of the Treasury under Eisenhower
"Banks do not really pay out loans from the money they receive as deposits. If they did this, no additional money would be created. What they do when they make loans is to accept promissory notes in exchange for credits to the borrowers’ transaction accounts."
-- Chicago Federal Reserve, Modern Money Mechanics: A Workbook on Bank Reserves and Deposit Expansion
"If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed".
-- Mark Twain
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
--H.L. Mencken
"Make haste to reassure us that you at home support and love us as we obey and love you, for if we find that you have sent us to leave our bleached bones in these desert sands for nothing, beware the fury of the legions."
-- A Roman centurion of the 4th Century.
"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds public opinion is greater than he who enacts laws."
-- Abraham Lincoln
"Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom."
-- Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859), French scientist
"I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone."
-- Charles Darwin, in the foreword to his book, The Origin of Species, 1869
"I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself-nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days."
-- Franklin Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address
"Finally, in our progress toward a resumption of work we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order: there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people's money, and there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency."
-- Franklin Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address
Mr. Greenspan: “Let me suggest to you that the monetary aggregates as we measure them are getting increasingly complex and difficult to integrate into a set of forecasts. The problem that we have is not that money is unimportant, but how we define it. By definition, all prices are indeed the “ratio of an exchange of a good for money.” And what we seek is what that is. Our problem is we used M-1 at one point as the proxy of money, and it turned out to be a very difficult indicator of any financial state. We then went to M-2 and had the similar problem. We have never done M-3 per se because it largely reflects the extent of expansion of the banking industry. And when in effect banks expand, in and of itself, it doesn’t tell you terribly much about what the real money is. So our problem is not that we do not believe in sound money. We do. We very much believe that, if you have a debased currency, that you will have a debased economy. The difficulty is in defining what part of our liquidity structure is truly money. We have had trouble ferreting out proxies for that for a number of years. And the standard we employed is whether it gives us a good forward indicator of the direction of finance and the economy.

Regrettably, none of those which (?) have been able to develop, including MZM – has not done that. That does not mean that we think that money is irrelevant. It means that we think our measures of money have been inadequate. And, as a consequence of that, we, as I have mentioned previously, have downgraded the use of the monetary aggregates for monetary policy purposes, until we are able to find a more stable proxy for what we believe is the underlying money in the economy.”

Representative Ron Paul: “So it’s hard to manage something you can’t define?”

Mr. Greenspan: “It is not possible to manage something you can’t define.”
-- Alan Greenspan, Humphrey-Hawkins testimony, February 17,2000
"To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete."
-- Epictetus
"The Americans had not played a very prominent part in the war of 1914-1918, he (Adolf Hitler) thought, and moreover, had not made any great sacrifices of blood. They would certainly not withstand a trial by fire, for their fighting qualities were low. In general no such thing as an American people existed as a unit; they were nothing but a mass of immigrants from many nations and many races."
-- "INSIDE THE THIRD REICH MEMOIRS, Albert Speer,The MacMillan company, New York,1970, Page 121.
"'Statistics’ show that 66% of clients are cured with psychotherapy; what statistics don’t show is that 72% are cured without it."
-- Thomas Szasz, renowned psychiatrist in "The Myth of Mental Illness"
"Only idiots and infants need things. The language of needs is the native tongue of socialists, therapists, and paternalists of all sorts and is addressed to needy dependents. The language of wants is spoken by self-respecting adults and is addressed to other self-respecting adults."
-- Thomas Szasz
"The man who gets on best with women is the one who knows best how to get on without them."
-- Charles Baudelaire
"When popular opinion is nearly unanimous, contrary thinking tends to be most profitable. The reason is that once the crowd takes a position, it creates a short-term, self-fulfilling prophecy. But when a change occurs, everyone seems to change his mind at once."
-- Gustave Le Bon in The Crowd
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-- Arthur C. Clarke
"Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."
-- Arlan Andrews, "Indian Summa" (January 1989)
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity."
-- Marshall McCluhan
"...to conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."
-- Bertrand Russell
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? ...We are all meant to shine, as children do. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
-- Marianne Williamson
"So we poked along back home, and I warn't feeling so brash as I was before, but kind of ornery, and humble, and to blame, somehow -- though I ain't done nothing. But that's always the way; it don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn't know no more than a person's conscience does I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow. Tom Sawyer he says the same."
-- Mark Twain, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"
"Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm - but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves".
-- T. S. Eliot
"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."
-- Thomas Edison
"There is nothing like the ticker tape except a woman—nothing that promises, hour after hour, day after day, such sudden developments; nothing that disappoints so often or that occasionally fulfills with such unbelievable, passionate magnificence."
-- Walter Gutman, Salomon bond trader
"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose."
-- John Maynard Keynes, "Economic consequences of the peace"- Unseen Hand, page 57
List of cognitive biases
"An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative."
-- Benjamin Graham
"You must never delude yourself into thinking that you're investing when you're speculating."
-- Benjamin Graham
"In the stock market the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics the more uncertain and speculative the conclusion we draw therefrom. . . . Whenever calculus is brought in, or higher algebra, you could take it as a warning signal that the operator was trying to substitute theory for experience."
-- Benjamin Graham
"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man."
-- Elbert Hubbard
"The length and severity of depressions depend partly on the magnitude of the 'real' maladjustments, which developed during the preceding boom and partly on the aggravating monetary and credit conditions."
-- Gotfried Haberler, Prosperity and Depression, 1937
"I criticize by creation, not by finding fault."
-- Cicero
"A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him."
-- John Maynard Keynes, "Consequences to the Banks of a Collapse in Money Values", 1931
"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. I do not feel that there will soon, if ever, be a fifty or sixty point break below present levels, such as Mr. Babson has predicted. I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher than it is today within a few months."
-- Irving Fisher, economics professor at Yale University, September 1929 (he reversed himself in Jan 1930 and went on to invent the theory of "debt deflation")
"The U. S. is headed toward a period of business depression... beginning within the next two years, which may exceed that which preceded the War. ... The only thing that will save us is a new gold policy or the discovery of a new process or additional gold fields. If the fall [of gold production] is not prevented by design or accident we shall throttle business, wringing out all profits and experiencing all the evils of deflation."
-- Irving Fisher, Time Magazine, Jan. 20, 1930
"Diversification is an admission of not knowing what to do, and an effort to strike an average"
-- Charles Loeb in 'The Battle for Investment Survival'
"In all likelihood world inflation is over."
-- International Monetary Fund CEO, 1959
"Self-importance requires spending most of one's life offended by something or someone."
-- Carlos Castaneda
"Neither paper currency nor deposits have value as commodities, intrinsically, a 'dollar' bill is just a piece of paper. Deposits are merely book entries."
-- Modern Money Mechanics Workbook, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, 1975
"Four or five frigates will do the business without any military force."
-– British prime minister Lord North, on dealing with the rebellious American colonies, 1774
"It will be years - not in my time - before a woman will become Prime Minister."
-- Margaret Thatcher, future Prime Minister, October 26th, 1969
"Man will not fly for 50 years."
-- Wilbur Wright, American aviation pioneer, to brother Orville, after a disappointing flying experiment, 1901 (their first successful flight was in 1903)
"With over fifteen types of foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn’t likely to carve out a big share of the market for itself."
-- Business Week, August 2, 1968
"The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man."
-- Madame de Stael
"Only a brave person is willing honestly to admit, and fearlessly to face, what a sincere and logical mind discovers."
-- Rodan of Alexandria
"The Americans are good about making fancy cars and refrigerators, but that doesn’t mean they are any good at making aircraft. They are bluffing. They are excellent at bluffing."
-- Hermann Goering, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, 1942
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
-- Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society, 1895
"Lee DeForest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public ... has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company ..."
-- a U.S. District Attorney, prosecuting American inventor Lee DeForest for selling stock fraudulently through the mail for his Radio Telephone Company in 1913.
"To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth - all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances."
-- Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, in 1926
"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will."
-- Albert Einstein, 1932
"We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
-- Albert Einstein
"The search for truth implies a duty. One must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true."
-- Albert Einstein
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
-- Albert Einstein
"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth."
-- Henry David Thoreau
"There are two ways to be fooled: One is to believe what isn't so; the other is to refuse to believe what is so."
-- Soren Kierkegaard
"The Greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."
-- Stephen Hawking
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
-- Martin Luther King Jr.
"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic."
-- Dresden James
"Once your soul has been enlarged by a truth, it can never return to its original size."
-- Blaise Pascal
"Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion."
-- Blaise Pascal
"A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions."
--Oliver Wendell Holmes
"There is nothing so powerful as truth, and often nothing so strange."
-- Daniel Webster
"He who dares not offend cannot be honest."
-- Thomas Paine
"Men hate those to whom they have to lie."
-- Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
-- Albert Einstein
"Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object."
-- Albert Camus
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, it is not certain.
As far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
-- Albert Einstein
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one".
-- Albert Einstein
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
-- George Orwell
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
"In the case of enemy crimes, we find outrage; allegations based on the flimsiest evidence, often simply invented, and uncorrectible, even when conceded to be fabrication; careful filtering of testimony to exclude contrary evidence while allowing what may be useful; reliance on official U.S. sources, unless they provide the wrong picture, in which case they are avoided... vivid detail; insistence that the crimes originate at the highest level of planning, even in the absence of evidence or credible argument; and so on.

"Where the locus of responsibility is at home, we find precisely the opposite: silence or apologetics; avoidance of personal testimony and specific detail; world-weary wisdom about the complexities of history and foreign cultures that we do not understand; narrowing of focus to the lowest level of planning or understandable error in confusing circumstances; and other forms of evasion."
-- Noam Chomsky, Pluto Press, 1991, Necessary Illusions, p.137
"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
-- Alan Kay
"I believe that the industrial prosperity of England is much more than temporarily depressed, and that we are some way down the road of a long decline, at the end of which we shall find our relative industrial position entirely different from what it was in the 19th Century... I would sell the shares of almost all British industrial companies operating at home, particularly the shares of the older industries."

"I believe that the economic, political and climatic advantages of the U.S. and Canada during the next few decades will be so overwhelmingly great that these countries offer the most attractive field for investment. There is room for immense expansion and the desire for it. Wealth is the main objective, the pace will be hot, and the profit high."

"I think it is quite wrong to believe that the currency chaos of the last ten years will now be replaced by a long period of calm stability similar to that of the 19th Century. On the basis of this view, I would invest a large part of any fund in the strongest currency in the world, the American dollar."
-- Oswald T. Falk, a member of the distinguished London house of Buckmaster & Moore, 1930.
"Why do you have to be a non-conformist like everybody else?"
** James Thurber (1894 - 1961)

Warren Buffett

"Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway."
-- Warren Buffett
"Managers should never forget one of Abraham Lincoln's favorite riddles: “How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?” The Answer: Four, because calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg."
-- Warren Buffett
"The future is never clear, and you pay a very high price in the stock market for a cheery consensus. Uncertainty is the friend of the buyer of long-term values."
-- Warren Buffett
"Value investing is so simple that it makes people reluctant to teach it. If you've gone and gotten a PhD and spent several years learning tough mathematics, to have to come back to this is like studying for the priesthood and then finding out that the Ten Commandments were all you needed."
-- Warren Buffett
"I've reluctantly discarded the notion of my continuing to manage the portfolio after my death abandoning my hope to give new meaning to the term "thinking outside the box."
-- Warren Buffett, Feb 29, 2008" (Source)
"The stock market is there only as a reference point to see if anybody is offering to do anything foolish. When we invest in stocks, we invest in businesses. You simply have to behave according to what is rational rather than according to what is fashionable."
-- Warren Buffett
"Never ask a barber if you need a haircut."
-- Warren Buffett
"Buffett once told me there are three 'I's in every cycle. The 'innovator,' that's the first 'I.' After the innovator comes the 'imitator.' And after the imitator in the cycle comes the idiot."
-- Theodore Forstmann, quoting Warren Buffett
"If you're in a card game and you can't figure out who the patsy is, you're it."
-- Warren Buffett
"Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it."
-- Warren Buffett
"You don’t know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out."
-- Warren Buffett
"...holding cash is uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as doing something stupid."
-- Warren Buffett
"You’re neither right nor wrong because other people agree with you. You’re right because your facts are right and your reasoning is right-and that’s the only thing that makes you right."
-- Warren Buffett
"The less prudence with which others conduct their affairs, the greater the prudence with which we should conduct our own affairs."
-- Warren Buffett
"You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant."
-- Warren Buffett
"Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing."
-- Warren Buffett
"Invest only in businesses that an idiot can run, because sooner or later an idiot will."
-- Warren Buffett

Jesse Livermore

"I know from experience that nobody can give me a tip or a series of tips that will make more money for me than my own judgment."
-- Jesse Livermore, one of the greatest stock market traders who ever lived.
"Speculators in stock markets have lost money. But I believe that it is a safe statement that the money lost by speculators alone is small compared with the gigantic sums lost by so-called investors who have let their investments ride."
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks" (page 25)
"From my point of view, the investors are the big gamblers. They make a bet, stay with it, and if all goes wrong, they lose it all."
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks" (page 25)
"let me warn you that the fruits of your success will be in direct ratio to the honesty and sincerity of your own effort in keeping your own records, doing your own thinking, and reaching your own conclusions. "
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks" (page 16)
"Profits always take care of themselves but losses never do. The speculator has to insure himself against considerable losses by taking their first small loss."
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks" (page 21)
"The only reason an investor or speculator should ever want to have pointed out to him is the action of the market itself. Whenever the market does not act right or in the way it should - that is reason enough for you to change your opinion and change it immediately· Remember, there is always a reason for a stock acting the way it does. But also remember: the chances are that you will not become acquainted with that reason until some time in the future, when it is too late to act on it profitably."
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks" (page 71)
"In fact, I always made money when I was sure I was right before I began. What beat me was not having brains enough to stick to my own game - that is, to play the market only when I was satisfied that precedents favored my play."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 14)
"Yet, I can see now that my main trouble was my failure to grasp the vital difference between stock gambling and stock speculation. Still, by reason of my seven years' experience in reading the tape and a certain natural aptitude for the game, my stake was earning not indeed a fortune but a very high rate of interest."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 44)
"It was the change in my own attitude toward the game that was of supreme importance to me. It taught me, little by little, the essential difference between betting on fluctuations and anticipating inevitable advances and declines, between gambling and speculating."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 45)
"One of the most helpful things that anybody can learn is to give up trying to catch the last eighth or the first. These two are the most expensive eighths in the world. They have cost stock traders, in the aggregate, enough millions of dollars to build a concrete highway across the continent."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 51)
"People don't seem to grasp easily the fundamentals of stock trading. I have often said that to buy on a rising market is the most comfortable way of buying stocks. Now, the point is not so much to buy as cheap as possible or go short at top prices, but to buy or sell at the right time. When I am bearish and I sell a stock, each sale must be at a lower level than the previous sale. When I am buying, the reverse is true. I must buy on a rising scale. I don't buy long stock on a scale down, I buy on a scale up."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 63)
"But in starting a movement it is unwise to take on your full line unless you are convinced that conditions are exactly right. Remember that stocks are never too high for you to begin buying or too low to begin selling. But after the initial transaction, don't make a second unless the first shows you a profit. Wait and watch. That is where your tape reading comes into enable you to decide as to the proper time for beginning. Much depends upon beginning at exactly the right time. It took me years to realize the importance of this. It also cost me some hundreds of thousands of dollars."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 67)
"I don't mean to be understood as advising persistent pyramiding. A man can pyramid and make big money that he couldn't make if he didn't pyramid; of course. But what I meant to say was this: Suppose a man's line is five hundred shares of stock. I say that he ought not to buy it all at once; not if he is speculating. If he is merely gambling the only advice I have to give him is, don't!"
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 68)
"If you want to make some money out of wheat I can tell you how to do it."
They all said they did and I told them, "If you are sure you wish to make money in wheat just you watch it. Wait. The moment it crosses $I.20 buy it and you will get a nice quick play in it!"
"Why not buy it now, at $I.I4?" one of the party asked.
"Because I don't know yet that it is going up at all."
"Then why buy it at $1.20? It seems a mighty high price."
"Do you wish to gamble blindly in the hope of getting a great big profit or do you wish to speculate intelligently and get a smaller but much more probable profit?"
They all said they wanted the smaller but surer profit, so I said, "Then do as I tell you. If it crosses $1.20 buy.
As I told you, I had watched it a long time. For months it sold between $1.10 and $1.20, getting nowhere in particular. Well, sir, one day it closed at above $1.I9. I got ready for it. Sure enough the next day it opened at $1.20-1/2, and I bought. It went to $1.21, to $1.22, to $1.23, to $1.25, and I went with it.
Now I couldn't have told you at the time just what was going on. I didn't get any explanations about its behaviour during the course of the limited fluctuations. I couldn't tell whether the breaking through the limit would be up through $1.20 or down through $1.10 though I suspected it would be up because there was not enough wheat in the world for a big break in prices.
...
"What I have told you gives you the essence of my trading system as based on studying the tape. I merely learn the way prices are most probably going to move. I check up my own trading by additional tests, to determine the psychological moment. I do that by watching the way the price acts after I begin."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 97)
"As I have said a thousand times, no manipulation can put stocks down and keep them down. There is nothing mysterious about this. The reason is plain to everybody who will take the trouble to think about it half a minute. Suppose an operator raided a stock -- that is, put the price down to a level below its real value -- what would inevitably happen? Why, the raider would at once be up against the best kind of inside buying. The people who know what a stock is worth will always buy it when it is selling at bargain prices. If the insiders are not able to buy, it will be because general conditions are against their free command of their own resources, and such conditions are not bull conditions. When people speak about raids the inference is that the raids are unjustified; almost criminal. But selling a stock down to a price much below what it is worth is mighty dangerous business. It is well to bear in mind that a raided stock that fails to rally is not getting much inside buying and where there is a raid, that is unjustified short selling -- there is usually apt to be inside buying; and when there is that, the price does not stay down. I should say that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, so-called raids are really legitimate declines, accelerated at times but not primarily caused by the operations of a professional trader, however big a line he may be able to swing.

The theory that most of the sudden declines or particular sharp breaks are the results of some plunger's operations probably was invented as an easy way of supplying reasons to those speculators who, being nothing but blind gamblers, will believe anything that is told them rather than do a little thinking. The raid excuse for losses that unfortunate speculators so often receive from brokers and financial gossipers is really an inverted tip. The difference lies in this: A bear tip is distinct, positive advice to sell short. But the inverted tip -- that is, the explanation that does not explain -- serves merely to keep you from wisely selling short. The natural tendency when a stock breaks badly is to sell it. There is a reason -- an unknown reason but a good reason; therefore get out. But it is not wise to get out when the break is the result of a raid by an operator, because the moment he stops the price must rebound. Inverted tips!"
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 152)
"It has always seemed to me the height of dam foolishness to trade on tips. I suppose I am not built the way a tip-taker is. I sometimes think that tip-takers are like drunkards. There are some who can't resist the craving and always look forward to those jags which they consider indispensable to their happiness. It is so easy to open your ears and let the tip in. To be told precisely what to do to be happy in such a manner that you can eagily obey is the next nicest thing to being happy which is a mighty long first step toward the fulfilment of your heart's desire. It is not so much greed made blind by eagerness as it is hope bandaged by the unwillingness to do any thinking."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 159)
"SPECULATION in stocks will never disappear. It isn't desirable that it should. It cannot be checked by warnings as to its dangers. You cannot prevent people from guessing wrong no matter how able or how experienced they may be. Carefully laid plans will miscarry because the unexpected and even the unexpectable will happen. Disaster may come from a convulsion of nature or from the weather, from your own greed or from some man's vanity; from fear or from uncontrolled hope. But apart from what one might call his natural foes, a speculator in stocks has to contend with certain practices or abuses that are indefensible morally as well as commercially."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 227)
"I have long since learned, as all should learn, not to make excuses when wrong. Just admit it and try to profit by it. We all know when we are wrong. The market will tell the speculator when he is wrong, because he is losing money. When he first realizes he is wrong is the time to clear out, take his losses, try to keep smiling, study the record to determine the cause of his error, and await the next big opportunity. It is the net result over a period of time in which he is interested."
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks"
"All through time, people have basically acted and re-acted the same way in the market as a result of: greed, fear, ignorance, and hope – that is why the numerical (technical) formations and patterns recur on a constant basis."
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks"
"The game of speculation is the most uniformly fascinating game in the world. But it is not a game for the stupid, the mentally lazy, the man of inferior emotional balance, or for the get-rich-quick adventurer. They will die poor."
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks"
"I always have traded in commodities as well as in stocks. I began as a youngster in the bucket shops. I studied those markets for years, though perhaps not so assiduously as the stock market. As a matter of fact, I would rather play commodities than stocks. There is no question about their greater legitimacy, as it were. It partakes more of the nature of a commercial venture than trading in stocks does. A man can approach it as he might any mercantile problem. It may be possible to use fictitious arguments for or against a certain trend in a commodity market; but success will be only temporary, for in the end the facts are bound to prevail, so that a trader gets dividends on study and observation, as he does in a regular business. He can watch and weigh conditions and he knows as much about it as anyone else. He need not guard against inside cliques. Dividends are not unexpectedly passed or increased overnight in the cotton market or in wheat or corn. In the long run commodity prices are governed but by one law -- the economic law of demand and supply. The business of the trader in commodities is simply to get facts about the demand and the supply, present and prospective. He does not indulge in guesses about a dozen things as he does in stocks. It always appealed to me trading in commodities."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences...", page 93
"I cleared about three million dollars in 1916 by being bullish as long as the bull market lasted and then by being bearish when the bear market started. As I said before, a man does not have to marry one side of the market till death do them part. "
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences...", page 143
"Remember too that it is dangerous to start spreading out all over the market. By this I mean, do not have an “Interest in too many stocks at one time. It is much easier to watch a few than many. I made that mistake years ago and I cost me money."
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks"
"Successful traders always follow the line of least resistance. Follow the trend. The trend is your friend."
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks"
"When you make a trade, you should have a clear target where to sell if the market moves against you. And you must obey your rules! Never sustain a loss of more than 10% of your capital. Losses are twice as expensive to make up. I always established a stop before making a trade."
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks"
"A loss never bothers me after I take it. I forget it overnight. But being wrong - not taking a loss - that is what does damage to the pocketbook and to the soul."
-- Jesse Livermore
"I did precisely the wrong thing. The cotton showed me a loss and I kept it. The wheat showed me a profit and I sold it out. Of all the speculative blunders there are few greater than trying to average a losing game. Always sell what shows you a loss and keep what shows you a profit."
-- Jesse Livermore
"I can't tell you how it came to take me so many years to learn that instead of placing piking bets on what the next few quotations were going to be, my game was to anticipate what was going to happen in a big way."
-- Jesse Livermore
"It happened just as I figured. The traders hammered the stocks in which they figured would uncover the most stops, and sure enough, prices slid off."
-- Jesse Livermore
"People who look for easy money invariable pay for the privilege of proving conclusively that it cannot be found on this earth."
-- Jesse Livermore
"You know, a professional gambler is not looking for long shots, but for sure money. Of course, long shots are fine when they come in. In the stock market Pat wasn’t after tips or playing to catch twenty-points-a-week advances, but sure money in sufficient quantity to provide him with a good sense of living. Of all the thousands of outsiders I have run across in Wall Street, Pat Hearne was the only one who saw in stock speculation merely a game of chance like faro or roulette, but nevertheless had the sense to stick to a relatively sound betting method."
-- Jesse Livermore
"I can't tell you how it came to take me so many years to learn that instead of placing piking bets on what the next few quotations were going to be, my game was to anticipate what was going to happen in a big way."
-- Jesse Livermore
"If you cannot make money out of the leading active issues, you are not going to make money out of the stock market as a whole."
-- Jesse Livermore
"Never be afraid of the normal movement. But be very careful of abnormal movements, it is similar to a major change in personality."
-- Jesse Livermore

Download How To Trade Stocks by Jesse Livermore (1941) (7 MB PDF)
Download Reminiscences of a Stock Operator about Jesse Livermore (1923) (500k PDF)

Download Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay (1841) (1.6 MB text document)
Download The Day Traders Bible Or My Secret In Day Trading Of Stocks by Richard D. Wyckoff (1.6 MB text document)

Conspiracy

"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
-- William Colby, (1920-1996) former Director of the CIA. Source: in Derailing Democracy: The America the Media Don’t Want You to See (2000), by Dave McGowan
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the [public] is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."
-- Edward Bernays (1891-1995) "Father" of modern public relations (PR) and director of the U.S. Committee on Public Information during World War I, on government propaganda. Source: writing in "Propaganda" from "Food & Water Journal'' (1928)
"The sovereignty fetish is still so strong in the public mind, that there would appear to be little chance of winning popular assent to American membership in anything approaching a super-state organization. Much will depend on the kind of approach which is used in further popular education."
-- Council on Foreign Relations Source: "American Public Opinion and Postwar Security Commitments", 1944
"I am myself persuaded, on the basis of extensive study of the historical evidence, that... the severity of each of the contractions - 1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38 - is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities and would not have occurred under earlier monetary and banking arrangements."
-- Milton Friedman (1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, Source: 'Capitalism and Freedom'
"The few who understand the system, will either be so interested from it's profits or so dependant on it's favors, that there will be no opposition from that class."
-- Rothschild Brothers of London, 1853
"The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes."
-- Justice Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws."
-- Mayer Amschel Rothschild, 1790
"The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, & perverts its liberty."
-- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
"It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any outcropping of what is now called 'a conspiracy theory of history.' For a search for 'conspiracies,' as misguided as the results often are, means a search for motives, and an attribution of individual responsibility for the historical misdeeds of ruling elites. If, however, any tyranny or venality, or aggressive war imposed by the State was brought about not by particular State rulers but by mysterious and arcane 'social forces,' or by the imperfect state of the world -- or if, in some way, everyone was guilty -- then there is no point in anyone's becoming indignant or rising up against such misdeeds. Furthermore, a discrediting of 'conspiracy theories' will make the subjects more likely to believe the 'general welfare' reasons that are invariably put forth by the modern State for engaging in aggressive actions."
-- Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) Dean of the Austrian School of Economics. Source: For a New Liberty (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 6
"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson. History depicts Andrew Jackson as the last truly honorable and incorruptible American president."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), 32nd US President, Date: November 21, 1933, Source: in a letter written to Colonel E. Mandell House
"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
"We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."
-- David Rockefeller at the Bilderberg Meeting in June 1991 in Baden, Germany, as quoted in the 1991 issue of the Hilaire duBerrier Report
"For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."
-- David Rockefeller, Memoirs, 2002
"We are on the verge of a Global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order."
-- David Rockefeller to the United Nations Business Council on September 23, 1994
"The Trilateralist Commission is international ...(and)...is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateralist Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power: Political - Monetary - Intellectual - and Ecclesiastical."
-- Barry Goldwater , U.S. Senator AZ, "With No Apologies"
"For the first time in its history, Western Civilization is in danger of being destroyed internally by a corrupt, criminal ruling cabal which is centered around the Rockefeller interests, which include elements from the Morgan, Brown, Rothschild, Du Pont, Harriman, Kuhn-Loeb, and other groupings as well. This junta took control of the political, financial, and cultural life of America in the first two decades of the twentieth century."
-- Carroll Quigley (1910-1977) Professor of International Relations, Georgetown University Foreign Service School, Washington, D.C., member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), mentor to Bill Clinton Source: Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966)
"It was not accidental [the 1929 stock-market “crash”]. It was a carefully contrived occurrence. ...The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all."
-- Louis McFadden (1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest - but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."
-- John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963)
"Even if you don't have the authorities -- and frankly I didn't have the authorities for anything -- if you take charge, people will follow" -- Henry Paulson, ex US Traesury secretarySource
"This Act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalized. The people may not know it immediately, but the day of reckoning is only a few years removed. The trusts will soon realize that they have gone too far even for their own good. The people must make a declaration of independence to relieve themselves from the Monetary Power. This they will be able to do by taking control of Congress. Wall Streeters could not cheat us if you Senators and Representatives did not make a humbug of Congress... The greatest crime of Congress is its currency system. The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill. The caucus and the party bosses have again operated and prevented the people from getting the benefit of their own government."
-- Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr. (1859-1924) Congressman (R-MN), father of famous aviator Source: December 22, 1913, the day before President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, in a speech before the House of Representatives
"Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."
-- Frederick Douglass, American Abolitionist, Lecturer, Author and Slave, 1817-1895
"It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations are in a conspiracy to under-value them"
-- Henry James, American expatriate writer 1843-1916
"A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public."
-- Mark Twain
"The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally illiterate about the history of US foreign affairs may be all the more effective because it is not official, heavy-handed or conspiratorial, but woven artlessly into the fabric of education and media. No conspiracy is needed."
-- William Blum
"But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me - not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy."
-- Oliver Stone
"The U.S. acts in markets only when necessary and is trying to save them from their own excesses and improve them."The actions we take are those of necessity, not of choice,"
-- Larry Summers, White House National Economic Council Director, June 12, 2009 source
"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas... [S]oon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil."
-— John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

Political

"It's not the people Who vote that count; it's the people Who count the votes."
-- Joseph Stalin
"To consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy." (context of the quote involves the importance of a jury and the jury system)
-- Thomas Jefferson
"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others."
-- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)
Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato, "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State."
-- unknown
"You have a choice between the natural stability of gold and the honesty and intelligence of the members of government. And with all due respect for those gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, vote for gold."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"For more than six-hundred years, that is, since the Magna Carta, in 1215, there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law, than that, in criminal cases. It is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of the accused; but it is also their right and their primary and paramount duty to judge the justice of the law and to hold all laws invalid, that are in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating or resisting the execution of such laws."
...
"If the government can dictate the evidence, and require the jury to decide according to that evidence, it necessarily dictates the conclusion to which they must arrive. In that case the trial is really a trial by the government, not by the jury. The jury cannot try an issue unless they determine what evidence shall be admitted. The ancient oath, it will be observed, says nothing about 'according to the evidence.'"
-- Spooner
"Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet."
-- St. Augustine
"Freedom is actually a bigger game than power. Power is about what you can control. Freedom is about what you can unleash."
-- Harriet Rubin
"A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular."
-- Adlai Stevenson
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
-- Mahatma Gandhi
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."
-- H. L. Mencken
"A certain type of person strives to become a master over all, and to extend his force, his will to power, and to subdue all that resists it. But he encounters the power of others, and comes to an arrangement, a union, with those that are like him: thus they work together to serve the will to power. And the process goes on."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."
-– John Lennon
"Successful crime is dignified with the name of virtue; the good become the slaves of the wicked; might makes right; fear silences the power of the law."
-- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
"Even men who were engaged in organizing debt-serf cultivation and debt-serf industrialism in the American cotton districts, in the old rubber plantations, and in the factories of India, China, and South Italy, appeared as generous supporters of and subscribers to the sacred cause of individual liberty."
-- H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come - (1936)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
-- H.L. Mencken
"Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied."
-- Otto von Bismarck
"The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time."
-- Larry Laudan
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."
-- Robert Heinlein
"Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not insure "good" government; it simply insures that it will work. But such governments are rare -- most people want to run things but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the "backseat-driver syndrome."
-- Robert Heinlein
"...Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy... censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives."
-- Robert A. Heinlein, -If This Goes On
"What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it ... which for the majority translates as 'Bread and Circuses'," said Jubal Harshaw in "Stranger in a Strange Land"
-- Robert Heinlein
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
-- Isaac Asimov
"Nothing, in my opinion, is more deserving of our attention than the intellectual and moral associations of America. The political and industrial associations of that country strike us forcibly; but the others elude our observation, or if we discover them, we understand them imperfectly because we have hardly ever seen anything of the kind. It must be acknowledged, however, that they are as necessary to the American people as the former, and perhaps more so. In democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made.

Among the laws that rule human societies there is one which seems to be more precise and clear than all others. If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased."

...
"It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. I do not question that, in an age of instruction and equality like our own, sovereigns might more easily succeed in collecting all political power into their own hands and might interfere more habitually and decidedly with the circle of private interests than any sovereign of antiquity could ever do.

...
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned them at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a net-work of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described, might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom; and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people."
-- Alexis de Tocqueville Source
"You have been given the choice between war and dishonor. You have chosen dishonor, and you will have war."
-- Winston Churchill to the English Parliament, 1938 after the English Parliament's 1938 appeasement in Czechoslovakia
"The evils of this deluge of paper money are not to be removed until our citizens are generally and radically instructed in their cause and consequences, and silence by their authority the interested clamors and sophistry of speculating, shaving, and banking institutions. Till then, we must be content to return quoad hoc to the savage state, to recur to barter in the exchange of our property for want of a stable common measure of value, that now in use being less fixed than the beads and wampum of the Indian, and to deliver up our citizens, their property and their labor, passive victims to the swindling tricks of bankers and mountebankers."
--Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1819. ME 15:185
Thomas Jefferson on Money & Banking
"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt
"It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt
"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
-- Mao Tse-tung
"Everything for the State. Nothing against the State. Nothing outside the State."
-- Benito Mussolini
"Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”
-- Benito Mussolini
"The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy."
-- Abraham Lincoln
"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling power. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing."
-– President Franklin Roosevelt
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie."
-- Joseph Goebbels
"The measure of the wealth of a nation is indicated by the measure of its protection of its industry; the measure of the poverty of a nation is marked by the degree in which it neglects and abandons the care of its own industry, leaving it exposed to the action of foreign powers."
-- Congressman Henry Clay, 1824
"The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day."
--Theodore Roosevelt
"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks."
-- Lord Acton
"He who wishes to deceive will never fail to find willing dupes."
-- Niccolo Machiavelli
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
-- Samuel Adams
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of Human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt, Colonial America sympathesizer, British House of Commons, November 18, 1783
"If goods do not cross borders, armies will."
-- Frederic Bastiat
"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder."
-- Frederic Bastiat
"There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen."
-- Frederic Bastiat
"Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives."
-- Abba Eban (1915-2002)
"There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Group has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it...but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known."
-- Carroll Quigley (Bill Clinton's professor at Georgetown), "Tragedy and Hope"
"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."
-- Barry Goldwater
"Unrestricted laissez faire capitalism allocates resources in a most efficient way to satisfy human wants without regard to the rationality or morality of those desires.

The difference between Libertarian and Conservative is that Conservatives understand this, and know that unregulated capitalism will eventually end with human meat sold in market places, and slavery. Alas, many Conservatives think that everything has to be regulated and controlled.
-- Dr. Jerry Pournelle
The Economic Policies of Hitler

"By the mid thirties there was also in existence an advanced demonstration of the Keynesian system. This was the economic policy of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. It involved large-scale borrowing for public expenditures, and at first this was principally for civilian works - railroads, canals and the Autobahnen. The result was a far more effective attack on unemployment than in any other industrial city. By 1935, German unemployment was minimal. 'Hitler had already found how to cure unemployment before Keynes was finished explaining why it occurred.'(17) In 1936, as prices and wages came under upward pressure, Hitler took the further step of combining an expansive employment policy with comprehensive price controls.

"The Nazi economic policy, it should be noted, was an ad hoc response to what seemed over-riding circumstance. The unemployment position was desperate. So money was borrowed and people put to work. When rising wages and prices threatened stability, a price ceiling was imposed. Although there had been much discussion of such policy in pre-Hitler Germany, it seems doubtful if it was highly influential. Hitler and his cohorts were not a bookish log. Nevertheless the elimination of unemployment in Germany during the Great Depression without inflation - and with initial reliance on essentially civilian activities - was a signal accomplishment. It has rarely been praised and not much remarked. The notion that Hitler could do no good extends to his economics as it does, more plausibly, to all else."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith, "Money: Whence it came, where it went", Page 237
"We were not foolish enough to try to make a currency [backed by] gold of which we had none, but for every mark that was issued we required the equivalent of a mark's worth of work done or goods produced ... we laugh at the time our national financiers held the view that the value of a currency is regulated by the gold and securities lying in the vaults of a state bank."
-- Adolf Hitler, quoted in "Hitler's Monetary System", citing C. C. Veith, Citadels of Chaos (Meador, 1949)
"Stop quoting laws to us. We carry swords."
-- Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus
"Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around."
-- Thomas Szasz
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
-- Anaïs Nin
"I propose getting rid of conventional armaments and replacing them with reasonably priced hydrogen bombs that will be distributed equally throughout the world."
-- Rev. Dr. President Idi Amin
"The ultimate effect of shielding man from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."
-- Herbert Spenser
"The FDA calls certain substances "controlled." But there are no "controlled substances," there are only controlled citizens."
-- Thomas Szasz
"His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."
-- United States Office of Strategic Services, Adolf Hitler, p.51
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
-- Plato
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates."
-- Tacitus
"The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun."
-- R. Buckminster Fuller
"You know you get a lot more with a kind word and a gun then you do with a kind word alone."
-- Al Capone
"The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise."
The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.
-- Tacitus
"In a world of businessmen and financial intermediaries who aggressively seek profit, innovators will always outpace regulators; the authorities cannot prevent changes in the structure of portfolios from occurring. What they can do is keep the asset-equity ratio of banks within bounds by setting equity-absorption ratios for various types of assets. If the authorities constrain banks and are aware of the activities of fringe banks and other financial institutions, they are in a better position to attenuate the disruptive expansionary tendencies of our economy."
-- Hyman Minsky, 1986
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"Being against the military because you are against war is like being against the Fire Department because you are against fire."
-- Retired Marine Major Jim McDonough
"I find it hard to understand why those who demand Unitary Education by the State do not also demand a Unitary Press by the State... Either the State is infallible, in which case we could not do better than to submit to it the entire domain of intelligent thought, or it is not, in which case it is no more rational to hand over education to it than the press."
-- Frederic Bastiat
"Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt. (When catapults are outlawed, only outlaws will have catapults.)"
-- Unknown
"None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free."
-- J. W. von Goethe
"When ideas fail, words come in very handy."
-- J. W. von Goethe
"The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith."
-- J. W. von Goethe
"The real art of governing consists, so far as possible, in doing nothing."
-- Lao Tzu
"How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?"
-- Charles De Gaulle, in "Les Mots du General", 1962 - French general & politician (1890 - 1970)
"The onset of one religion can be resisted only by another."
-- C. Northcote Parkinson
"A government big enough to give us everything we want is a government big enough to take from us everything we have."
-- President Gerald Ford
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt!"
-- Marcus Tullinus Cicero, Roman Senator, 63 B.C.
"If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: "President Can't Swim."
-- Lyndon B. Johnson
"The 'private sector' of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and...the 'public sector' is, in fact, the coercive sector."
-- Henry Hazlitt (1778 - 1830)
"When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest."
-- Henry Hazlitt (1778 - 1830)
"Support your country always and your government when it deserves it."
-- Mark Twain
"I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing my temper. To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature, Congressman."
-- Mark Twain
"The single most prevalent form of child abuse in this country is the act of sending a child to a government school. We worry incessantly about the separation of church and state. We would do well to devote half as much attention to the separation of government and education."
-- Neal Boortz
"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."
-- Bertrand de Jouvenel
"The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus."
-- Michael Crichton
"We want a society where people are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. This is what we mean by a moral society; not a society where the state is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the state."
-- Margaret Thatcher Source
"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money."
-- Margaret Thatcher
"Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country."
-- Margaret Thatcher Source
"The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties."
-- James Madison, Federalist 10
"I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left."
-- Margaret Thatcher Source
"It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts... For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth, to know the worst, and to provide for it."
-- Patrick Henry
"The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them."
-- Patrick Henry
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
-- Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776.
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
-- Philip K. Dick
"Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools that don't have brains enough to be honest."
-- Benjamin Franklin
"A Republic, if you can keep it."
-- Benjamin Franklin, after having been asked at the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 - "Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?"
"Give me the money that has been spent in war and I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire of which kings and queens will be proud. I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth. I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to peace."
-- Charles Sumner
"In war the first casualty is the truth."
-- Aeschylus
"When the rich wage war it is the poor who die."
-- Jean-Paul Sartre
"When politicians presume to do God's work, they do not become divine but diabolical."
-- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is most valuable, a most sacred right--a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit."
--Abraham Lincoln, January 12, 1848
"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck".
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber."
-- Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)
"There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away. The British people can face peril or misfortune with fortitude and buoyancy, but they bitterly resent being deceived or finding that those responsible for their affairs are themselves dwelling in a fool's paradise."
-- Winston Churchill
"I am convinced that we can do for guns what we've done with drugs: create a multi-billion dollar underground market over which we have absolutely no control."
-- George L. Roman
"Self-regulation stands in relation to regulation the way self-importance stands in relation to importance."
-- Willem Buiter of the London School of Economics
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere,diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies."
-- Groucho Marx
"Being a leader is like being a lady - if you have to go around telling people you are one, you aren't."
-- Margaret Thatcher
"There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."
-- Marine Major General Smedley Butler
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
-- General Smedley Butler
"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
-- General Smedley Butler
"War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures. The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people.”
-- Ron Paul
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Although a soldier by profession, I have never felt any sort of fondness for war, and I have never advocated it, except as a means of peace."
-- Ulysses S. Grant
"Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them, must share the guilt for the dead."
-- Omar N. Bradley
"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters."
-- Benjamin Franklin
"I must study war and politics so that my children shall be free to study commerce, agriculture and other practicalities, so that their children can study painting, poetry and other fine things."
-- John Adams, U.S. President
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance or conscientious stupidity."
-- Martin Luther King Jr.
"After all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, & it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, a parliament or a communist dictatorship…the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, & exposing the country to greater danger."
-- Hermann Goering, Nazi, Nuremberg trials in 1945
"Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again."
-- Andre Gide
"No Congress of the United States ever assembled, on surveying the state of the Union, has met with a more pleasing prospect than that which appears at the present time. In the domestic field there is tranquillity and contentment, harmonious relations between management and wage earner, freedom from industrial strife, and the highest record of years of prosperity."
-- Calvin Coolidge, State of the Union Address, December 4, 1928
"We have four boxes with which to defend our freedom: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box."
-- unknown, but sometimes attributed to Congressman Larry P. McDonald
"Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist."
-- Edmund Burke
(During World War II, Joseph Stalin) was once asked by an American writer, according to Professor Dean Russell, how he could justify conscripting all the property of all the people for use by the government to fight the war. Stalin answered by asking why they considered it more immoral and illogical to conscript lifeless property than to conscript life itself, as was being done in the United States and all other capitalistic countries. His American challenger had no answer, because there was no answer.
-- "Freedom Under Seige", Ron Paul
"The secret of happiness is freedom. The secret of freedom is courage."
-- Thucydides (c. 460 BC – c. 395 BC)
"As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."
-- Abraham Lincoln, from a November 21, 1864 letter to Colonel William F. Elkins
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."
-- Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Senator of Rome
"When you recall that one of the first moves by Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler was to outlaw individual ownership in gold, you begin to sense that there may be some connection between money, redeemable in gold, and the rare prize known as human liberty."
-- Congressman Howard Buffett (Father of Warren Buffett) from a 1948 issue of the Commercial and Financial Chronicle
"In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant."
-- Charles de Gaulle
"A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing. One that sounds good, and a real one."
-- J.P. Morgan
"I am for freedom of the press, and against all violations of the Constitution to silence by force and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents."
-- Thomas Jefferson 1799. ME 10:78
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage."
-- Attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee. Unverified per the US Library of Congress.
"There is no cause so good or noble that it will not attract fuggheads; and the fuggheads will get all the press."
-- (Larry) Niven's Law
"... the dangers of loose fiscal policy were stated as follows: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury."
-- Attributed to the French author, Alexis de Tocqueville
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin, 1755
"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad."
-- James Madison
"War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings."
-- Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)
"War...is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror."
-- Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)
"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy."
-- Ayn Rand (1905- 1982)
"When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other."
-- Ayn Rand (1905- 1982)
"You think that’s air you’re breathing?"
-- Morpheus to Neo, "The Matrix"
"Change is not reform."
-- John Randolph (1773 - 1833), both Representative and Senator from Virginia
...one Greek city state had a fundamental law: anyone proposing revisions to the constitution did so with a noose around his neck. If his proposal lost he was instantly hanged.
-- Aristotle
"These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people’s money to settle the quarrel."
-- Abraham Lincoln, speech to Illinois legislature, January 1837
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", variously translated in colloquial English as "Who watches the watchmen?", "Who watches the watchers?", "Who will guard the guards?"
-- The Roman poet Juvenal
"Treason doth never prosper; what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason."
-- Sir John Harrington, 1561-1612
"It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"Instruct regulators to look for the newest fad in the industry and examine it with great care. The next mistake will be a new way to make a loan that will not be repaid."
-- William Seidman, in his memoir from 1993
"It is easier for a government to kill a million people than to control a million people."
-- Zbigniew Brzezinski, Chatham House. Nov. 2008 speech
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. "
-- President Eisenhower, January 1961
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
-- General Dwight Eisenhower
"To say Congress is spending like drunken sailors is an insult to drunken sailors."
-- Ronald Reagan
Attacking the Shorts

The turmoil that led to the 1934 turning point and Roosevelt’s confiscation was again a frontal attack upon the financial markets. This time, the Senate also lauched investigations that Herbert Hoover also apologjzed for in his Memoirs. There Are those that reject looking at history claiming that was them - today is different. That is just stupid. For the common reaction in every financial crisis is to attack the "short" players. Short-selling was outlawed briefly aftar the Panic of 1907. During the 1930s, everyone of size was subpoEnaed before the Senate and interrogated as to whether they "short" as if that was proof of being a traitor.

The stock market fell by about 90% into the 1932 low. This decline was massive because of the interrogations of the Senate. Who in their right mind would take a short position knowing they would be publicly questioned? The famous culprit is always the short seller. But what Government and academics with no real world experience fail to get is that when a market is crashing, only the short player has the courage to buy during during a decline to take a profit. Short-covering provides the appearance of buying for the reason of actual bullishness. When the short Cover rally comes, even goverrnment cheers, but like a fool, they delight in they delight in their own applause. Shorts provide the balance and can also create rallies when there are none.

The witch hunts will begin. Every time there is a decline the Government looks for the shorts. They hate them. To be short becomes reason in their mind, which of course cannot understand how the markets work and usually become more of a bull in a china shop.

Law number 1: NEVER OUTLAW SHORT SELLING

Herbert Hoover apologized for the investigations. The treatment of those in the financial markets that included brokers and investors alike, was deplorable. You quickly find out that the Constitution means very little. Hoover wrote; “Sometimes when a government becomes enraged, it burns down the barn to get the rat".
-- Martin Armstring, "It's just time" page 52
"It has long ... been my opinion ... that the germ of dissolution of our Federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body, (for impeachment is scarcely a scarecrow,) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one."
-- The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Chapter 15 page 331-2
"The first casualty of war is the truth."
-- Aeschylus
"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself."
-- Thomas Paine
"Reason obeys itself. Ignorance submits to what is dictated to it."
-- Thomas Paine
"If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace."
-- Thomas Paine
"Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”"
-- George Washington
"How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?"
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"If they are too big to fail, make them smaller."
-- Treasury Secretary George Shultz
"All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved."
-- Sun Tzu
"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."
-- Sun Tzu
"Government is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex."
-- Frank Zappa
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."
-- Robert Heinlein
"The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it."
-- Dr. Josef Mengele
"Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it."
-– Ronald Reagan
"Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."
-- Theodore Roosevelt, April 19, 1906
"And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
-- Lord Acton, English historian - from Lectures on Modern History, 1906, "Beginning of the Modern State"
"The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes."
-- Benjamin Disraeli, 1844
"And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colors. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink or a cup of coffee, disguised as a triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still -- just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naif, or a prig -- the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which is not quite in accordance with the technical rules of fair play: something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which "we" -- and at the word "we" you try not to blush for mere pleasure -- something "we always do." And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man's face -- that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face -- turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude: it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel."
-- C.S. Lewis
"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and vote of majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."
-- President Woodrow Wilson (regretting signing into law the Federal Reserve Act in 1913)
"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
-- Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America - 1835
Bastiat's Moral Law
"See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them; and gives it to persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil in itself, but also is a fertile source for further evils, for it invites reprisals. If such a law is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply and develop into a system.
-- Frederic Bastiat
"Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.
...
"a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
-- Robert Paxton, historian, in a 1998 paper in "The Journal of Modern History"
"Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing a people to slavery."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."
-- Plato
"I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody."
-- James Carville (former Bill Clinton Political Advisor)
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic or servile, but morally treasonable to the American public."
-- Teddy Roosevelt, U.S. President
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt (1759-1806)
"Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination."
-- Harry Truman
"And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.
My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man."
-- John F. Kennedy, 1960 Inauguration speech
"Let us resolve to be masters, not the victims, of our history, controlling our own destiny without giving way to blind suspicions and emotions."
-- John Fitzgerald Kennedy
"The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."
-- George Orwell
"In a system...where the entire continuity of the...process rests upon credit, a crisis must obviously occur -- a tremendous rush for means of payment -- when credit suddenly ceases and only cash payments have validity. At first glance, therefore, the whole crisis seems to be merely a credit and money crisis. And in fact it is only a question of the convertibility of bills of exchange into money. But the majority of these bills represent actual sales and purchases, whose extension far beyond the needs of society is, after all, the basis of the whole crisis. At the same time, an enormous quantity of these bills of exchange represents plain swindle, which now reaches the light of day and collapses; furthermore, unsuccessful speculation with the capital of other people; finally, commodity-capital which has depreciated or is completely unsaleable, or returns that can never more be realized again. The entire artificial system of forced expansion of the [economy] cannot, of course, be remedied by having some bank, like the Bank of England, give to all the swindlers the deficient capital by means of its paper and having it buy up all the depreciated commodities at their old nominal values. Incidentally, everything here appears distorted, since in this paper world, the real price and its real basis appear nowhere, but only bullion, metal coin, notes, bills of exchange, securities. Particularly in centers where the entire money business of the country is concentrated, like London...the entire process becomes incomprehensible."
-- Karl Marx, "Capital", Volume 3, Chapter 30, "Money-Capital and Real Capital"
"Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a Speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston’s job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one."
-- George Orwell, 1984
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
-- George Orwell, Animal Farm
"All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-- George Orwell
"We’re in the integrity business: People pay us to be objective, to be independent and to forcefully tell it like it is." (Reference: Ratings Trouble, Institutional Investor, October 1995: 245)
-- John Bohn Jr., former Moody’s President
"This slow and awful self-hypnotism of error is a process that can occur not only with individuals, but also with whole societies. It is hard to pick out and prove; that is why it is hard to cure. But this mental degeneration may be brought to one test, which I truly believe to be a real test.

A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things, so long as it does them in an extravagant spirit. But whenever we see things done wildly, but taken tamely, then the State is growing insane...

For madness is a passive as well as an active state: it is a paralysis, a refusal of the nerves to respond to the normal stimuli, as well as an unnatural stimulation. There are commonwealths, plainly to be distinguished here and there in history, which pass from prosperity to squalor or from glory to insignificance, or from freedom to slavery, not only in silence, but with serenity."
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, National Madness, 1910
"Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it."
-- attributed to Ronald Reagan
"...throughout recorded time...there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low...The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.

Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims.

But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go deeper than this. There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern."

-- 1984, George Orwell
"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
-- John Adams
"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death."
-- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 3
"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"
-- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 3
"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary."
-- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 3