Sunday, July 19, 2015 – Dealing with Debt
A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing. ~ Alexander Hamilton
Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt. ~ Herbert Hoover
What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clear conscience? ~ Adam Smith
Good times are when people make debts to pay in bad times. ~ Robert Quinlin
Debt is one person’s liability, but another person’s asset. ~ Paul Krugman
If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has. ~ John Maynard Keynes
Small debts are like small gunshot; they are rattling around us on all sides and one can scarcely escape being wounded. Large debts are like canons; they produce a loud noise, but are of little danger. ~ Samuel Johnson
The ideas of debtor and creditor as to what constitutes a good time never coincide. ~ P. G. Wodehouse, Love Among the Chickens
The criminalization of debt, then, was the criminalization of the very basis of human society. It cannot be overemphasized that in a small community, everyone normally was both a lender and borrower. One can only imagine the tensions and temptations that must have existed in a community – and communities, much though they are based on love, in fact because they are based on love, will always also be full of hatred, rivalry and passion – when it became clear that with sufficiently clever scheming, manipulation, and perhaps a bit of strategic bribery, they could arrange to have almost anyone they hated imprisoned or even hanged. ~ David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it’s much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration. ~ Susan George
I like my players to be married and in debt. That’s the way you motivate them. ~ Ernie Banks
First our pleasures die – and then our hopes, and then our fears – and when these are dead, the debt is due, dust claims dust – and we die too. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
Death’s a debt; his mandamus binds all alike – no bail, no demurrer. ~ Richard Brinsley Sheridan
I’m living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart. ~ e. e. cummings
The Sikh gave him the money. When Menon asked for his address so that he could repay the man, the Sikh said that Menon owed the debt to any stranger who came to him in need, as long as he lived. The help came from a stranger and was to be repaid to a stranger. ~ Robert Fulghum
Money is sacred as everyone knows… So then must be the hunger for it and the means we use to obtain it. Once a man is in debt he becomes a flesh and blood form of money, a walking investment. You can do what you like with him, you can work him to death or you can sell him. This cannot be called cruelty or greed because we are seeking only to recover our investment and that is a sacred duty. ~ Barry Unsworth
The ruling passion of the age is to convert wealth into debt in order to derive a permanent future income from it – to convert wealth that perishes into debt that endures, debt that does not rot, costs nothing to maintain, and brings in perennial interest. ~ Frederick Soddy
Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, and are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another’s brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other’s brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little. ~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden
If it isn’t the sheriff, it’s the finance company; I’ve got more attachments on me than a vacuum cleaner. ~ John Barrymore
Interest works night and day in fair weather and in foul. It gnaws at a man’s substance with invisible teeth. ~ Henry Ward Beecher
Always live within your income, even if you have to borrow money to do so. ~ Josh Billings
Money is a poor man’s credit card. ~ Marshall McLuhan
The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware, between these two contradictory necessities. ~ Simone Weil
Modern man drives a mortgaged car over a bond-financed highway on credit-card gas. ~ Earl Wilson
Another way to solve the traffic problems of this country is to pass a law that only paid-for cars be allowed to use the highways. ~ Will Rogers
The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it. ~ Edith Wharton
My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income. ~ Errol Flynn
Lack of money is the root of all evil. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy. ~ Groucho Marx
I have enough money to last me the rest of my life, unless I buy something. ~ Jackie Mason
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. ~ Woody Allen
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied… but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing. ~ John Berger
Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn’t commit. ~ Eli Khamarov, Lives of the Cognoscenti
We didn’t starve, but we didn’t eat chicken unless we were sick, or the chicken was. ~ Bernard Malamud
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time. ~ Willem de Kooning
However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. ~ Henry David Thoreau
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. ~ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929
There is some magic in wealth, which can thus make persons pay their court to it, when it does not even benefit themselves. How strange it is, that a fool or knave, with riches, should be treated with more respect by the world, than a good man, or a wise man in poverty! ~ Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1764
If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves there wouldn’t be enough to go around. ~ Christina Stead, House of All Nations (1938) “Credo”
If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to. ~ Dorothy Parker
Money is the sinew of love as well as war. ~ Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated. ~ H. L. Mencken
If you can count your money, you don’t have a billion dollars. ~ J. Paul Getty
Money can’t buy happiness, but neither can poverty. ~ Leo Rosten
It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. ~ Oscar Wilde, The Model Millionaire, 1912
Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That’s how rich I want to be. ~ Rita Rudner
No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather. ~ Michael Pritchard
Money can’t buy friends, but it can get you a better class of enemy. ~ Spike Milligan
Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce? ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life shouldn’t be printed on dollar bills. ~ Clifford Odets
I don’t like money, actually, but it quiets my nerves. ~ Joe Louis
I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money. ~ Pablo Picasso
It’s a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money. ~ Albert Camus
I’m so poor I can’t even pay attention. ~ Ron Kittle
Business is the art of extracting money from another man’s pocket without resorting to violence. ~ Max Amsterdam
Money is human happiness in the abstract; and so the man who is no longer capable of enjoying such happiness in the concrete, sets his whole heart on money. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851
A woman’s mink coat represents the sacrifice of a lot of little animals, including her husband. ~ Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966
When shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes. ~ Henry Miller
Part of the ten million I spent on gambling, part on booze and part on women. The rest I spent foolishly. ~ George Raft
What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money. ~ Henry Youngman
Just Above Sunset 