Memorable quotes on money and banking

"If anything had or could have a value equal to gold and silver, it would require no tender law; and if it had not that value it ought not to have such a law; and, therefore, all tender laws are tyrannical and unjust and calculated to support fraud and oppression." Thomas Paine, 1786

"Silver Certificates once were a promise to deliver silver. U.S. Notes now are a promise to deliver taxes and inflation." - G. Edward Griffin

"[Inflation] often makes it more profitable to speculate than to produce." Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson

"Without the money-based, bank-based division of labor, most of us would never have been born." -- Gary North

"Thus the sound-money principle has two aspects. It is affirmative in approving the market's choice of a commonly used medium of exchange. It is negative in obstructing the government's propensity to meddle with the currency system." -- Ludwig von Mises, Theory of Money and Credit

"What all the enemies of the gold standard spurn as its main vice is precisely the same thing that in the eyes of the advocates of the gold standard is its main virtue, namely, its incompatibility with a policy of credit expansion."
Ludwig von Mises, Theory of Money and Credit

"For the naive mind there is something miraculous in the issuance of fiat money."
Ludwig von Mises, Theory of Money and Credit

"Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism."
-- Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit

"Everything possible is done to prevent the fraud of the monetary system from being exposed to the masses who suffer from it." Rep. Ron Paul

"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 is able to diagnose."
-- John Maynard Keynes, 1919, Economic Consequences of the Peace, Ch. 6

"The first condition of any monetary reform is to halt the printing presses." Ludwig von Mises, The Causes of the Economic Crisis