Monetary System Quotes – Reflections on Money and Economy

"With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people."

Friedrich August von Hayek

"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 corporations that will grow up around these banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

Thomas Jefferson

"Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are US government institutions. They are not... they are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the US for the benefit of themselves and their foreign and domestic swindlers, and rich and predatory money lenders. The sack of the United States by the Fed is the greatest crime in history. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers, but the truth is the Fed has usurped the government. It controls everything here and it controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will."

Louis Thomas McFadden

"It was sheer foolishness to create this system. For centuries people will write about it as a kind of monument of collective stupidity."

William Hague

""...Every decline in the value of money is caused and organized by the state. Paper money and the central bank monopoly are the great super-tricks used to camouflage the violent nature of the state and the predatory basic pattern of ALL politics. Very few citizens are truly aware of the unimaginable extent to which they have been exploited for generations by the combination of progressive income tax and inflation, robbing them of the fruits of their labor.""

Roland Baader

"There is no way to prevent the final collapse of a boom generated by credit expansion. The only alternative is either an earlier crisis resulting from the voluntary termination of credit expansion, or a later, final, and total catastrophe for the currency system involved."

Ludwig von Mises

"Who created orthodox medicine? Where did that come from? Well, it actually came from the Rockefeller Foundation back in 1901. Because of the Standard Oil scandals, no one wanted to be called a Rockefeller. Everybody hated all the Rockefellers. And so . . . Reverend Gates went to John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and told him, he said, "Here's a way we can repair your reputation. And he gave him a good example. He said, "There was this man who everybody hated . . . and he started giving money out for all sorts of philanthropic enterprises, and soon people forgot all of the bad things. . . ." Because Gates' father was a physician, and John D. Rockefeller's father was a quack snake-oil salesman, he said, "Let's form the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research." And so they created this in 1901. . . . Rockefeller owned what was called the drug trust: that's the major drug manufacturing firms all over the world: Merck Pharmaceuticals, Lederle, all of these . . . pharmaceutical companies . . . And of course, the aim was to remove all nutrition, references to nutritional type treatments, from the medical schools. "They closed down half the medical schools in the United States. There were 165 medical schools at the time. . . . Then [Rockefeller] had his anointed medical schools, which he poured his money into, appointed the professors from his own stock of professors. And so they created an educational system that taught the things that he wanted taught. And therefore every professor that came out of those programs taught the same thing.""

Russell L. Blaylock

"The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved."

Henry B. Adams

"When banks place credits into your account, they are merely pretending to lend you money. In reality, they have nothing to lend. Even the money that non-indebted depositors have placed with them was originally created out of nothing in response to someone else's loan. So what entitles the banks to collect rent on nothing? It is immaterial that men everywhere are forced by law to accept these nothing certificates in exchange for real goods and services. We are talking here not about what is legal, but what is moral."

G. Edward Griffin

"We have the best government that money can buy."

Mark Twain

"I make films for money, solely because of the money."

Klaus Kinski

"Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect."

Oswald Spengler

"If you look at history, there seems to be a regular pattern: the country with the most powerful military also happens to be the one with the world trade currency. That gives them an enormous economic advantage, which causes goods to flow into their country."

David Graeber

"Thanks to the central bank, most "monetary experts" and "leading macro-economists" can, by putting them on the payroll, be turned into government propagandists "explaining," like alchemists, how stones (paper) can be turned into bread (wealth)."

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

"The most important thing to remember is that inflation is not an act of God, that inflation is not a catastrophe of the elements or a disease that comes like the plague. Inflation is a policy."

Ludwig von Mises

"Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people's savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments."

Ayn Rand

"The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences."

Carroll Quigley

"And what did the banks do to earn this perpetually flowing river of wealth? Did they lend out their own capital obtained through investment of stockholders? Did they lend out the hard-earned savings of their depositors? No, neither of these were their major source of income. They simply waved the magic wand called fiat money."

G. Edward Griffin