Debt

Sunday, February 3, 2013 – Debt

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

Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt. ~ Herbert Hoover

A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing. ~ Alexander Hamilton

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 gun shot; 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, 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

If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves there wouldn’t be enough to go around. ~ Christina Stead

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

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