Gold related quotes, of the ages

"For centuries, gold had a profound impact on history, as a symbol and a storehouse of wealth accepted universally around the world"
"When people are worried about political instability, war or inflation, they often put their savings into gold."
-- New York Federal Reserve Bank
"Gold, unlike all other commodities, is a currency...and the major thrust in the demand for gold is not for jewelry. It’s not for anything other than an escape from what is perceived to be a fiat money system, paper money, that seems to be deteriorating."
-– Alan Greenspan, ex-US Federal Reserve Chairman, August 23, 2011
"Gold is the money of kings; silver is the money of gentlemen; barter is the money of peasants; but debt is the money of slaves."
-- Norm Franz
"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
"... Member Countries shall take necessary action and/or shall establish negotiations, individually or in groups, with the oil companies with a view to adopting ways and means to offset any adverse effects on the per barrel real income of Member Countries resulting from the international monetary developments as of 15th August 1971."
-- OPEC, Sept. 1971, in a communiqué sent out after President Nixon severed the dollar’s link to gold
"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, "Nikkei Weekly" Nov. 15, 2004 (original incident on February 12, 1973)
Additional comment from Paul Volcker in 2012 regarding the above quote:
"The quotation you cite is about an event almost 40 years ago. It pertained to the possibility of speculation in the gold market leading to exchange rate instability at a critical point.
"It is a sobering fact that the prominence of central banks in this century has coincided with a general tendency towards more inflation, not less. [I]f the overriding objective is price stability, we did better with the nineteenth-century gold standard and passive central banks, with currency boards, or even with ‘free banking.’ The truly unique power of a central bank, after all, is the power to create money, and ultimately the power to create is the power to destroy."
-- Paul Volcker, ex Federal Reserve Chairman (in the Foreword of "The Central Banks")
"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 )
"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
"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, "Gold and Economic Freedom" in Ayn Rand, ed., Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Penguin Group, 1967), 101-108
"I can't remember the exact quote but when I used to trade and Mr. Volcker was Fed chairman, he said something like 'gold is my enemy, I'm always watching what gold is doing', we need to think why he made a statement like that. If you're a central banker or one of the congressmen or senators, watch what gold is doing because this is a no-confidence vote in fiscal and dollar policy."
-- Rick Santelli, CNBC
"For central banks this [gold] is a reserve of safety, it’s viewed by the country as such. In the case of non-dollar countries it gives you a value-protection against fluctuations against the dollar."
-- Mario Draghi, ECB President, Q&A after a presentation at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, 2014
"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
"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.
"It is a terrible situation when the Government, to insure the National Wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges, at the hands of men, who control the fictitious value of gold. Interest is the invention of Satan."
-- Thomas Edison
"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. Therefore at any price, at any cost, the central banks had to quell the gold price, manage it. It was very difficult to get the gold price under control but we have now succeeded. The US Fed was very active in getting the gold price down. So was the U.K."
-- Eddie George, Governor Bank of England, in a conversation with Nicholas J. Morrell, CEO of Lonmin, September 1999
"For in that universal call,
Few bankers will to heaven be mounters;
They'll cry, "Ye shops, upon us fall!
Conceal and cover us, ye counters!

When other hands the scales shall hold,
And they, in men's and angels' sight
Produced with all their bills and gold,
'Weigh'd in the balance and found light!'"
-- Jonathan Swift, The Run on the Bankers
"You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the Government. And, with due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold."
-- George Bernard Shaw
“To me the gold price takes the form of a very uncomplicated formula, and all you have to do is divide one by ‘n.’ And ‘n’, I’m glad you ask, ‘n’ is the world’s trust in the institution of paper money and in the capacity of people like Ben Bernanke to manage it. So the smaller ‘n’, the bigger the price. One divided by a receding number is the definition of a bull market."
-- Jim Grant
"I warn you that politicians of both parties will oppose the restoration of gold, although they may outwardly seemingly favor it. Also those elements here and abroad who are getting rich from the continued American inflation will oppose a return to sound money."
-- Howard Buffett, Warren Buffett's father
"Before 1933 the people themselves had an effective way to demand economy. Before 1933, whenever the people became disturbed over Federal spending, they could redeem their paper currency in gold, and wait for common sense to return to Washington."
-- Howard Buffett, father of Wall Street legend Warren Buffett
"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
Adrian Douglas: More Fed minutes likely document some gold market manipulation
"Years of study have convinced me that there is a strong and criminal agenda to illegally suppress the price of gold."
-- Late Ferdinand Lips (Managing Director of Rothschild Bank, Zurich), 2001
"…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 R. White, the head of the Bank for International Settlements’ Economics Department, June 2005 in his speech, "Past and Future of Central Bank Cooperation"
"The intermediate objectives of central bank cooperation are more varied.
First, better joint decisions, in the relatively rare circumstances where such coordinated action is called for.
Second, a clear understanding of the policy issues as they affect central banks. Hopefully this would reflect common beliefs, but even a clear understanding of differences of views can sometimes be useful.
Third, the development of robust and effective networks of contacts.
Fourth, the efficient international dissemination of both ideas and information that can improve national policy making.
And last, 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." (emphasis ours)
-- William White, "Past and Future of Central Bank Cooperation", BIS 4th annual conference
"Gold will not always get you good soldiers, but good soldiers can get you gold."
-- Niccolo Machiavelli
"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)
"The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account Overdrawn.'"
-- Ayn Rand, ""
"My efforts to prevent closing of the gold window--working through Connally, Volcker, and Shultz--do not seem to have succeeded. The gold window may have to be closed tomorrow because we now have a government that is incapable, not only of constructive leadership, but of any action at all. What a tragedy for mankind!"
-- Arthur Burns, Federal Reserve Chairman, Aug. 12, 1971, The Secret Diary of Arthur Burns

Note: we have checked the validity of these quotes to the best of our ability, but may have inadvertently added one or more that is provably false. Corrections appreciated.