Quotes
“It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system for, if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
Henry Ford
“Primitive people play primitive roles. They are no less intelligent than the rest of us, but they would be out of character if they began doing calculus. They have their parts to play just as we do.”
Addison Wiggin & William Bonner, The New Empire of Debt
“How will it end? What will happen next? We don’t know, but we note that people do not give up their self-serving conceits and illusions readily. They hold on to them as long as possible. ‘America still has the greatest, most dynamic economy on earth,’ they tell themselves, even as the nation loses money (its income is less than its expenses). This kind of madness is hard not to like; it is like an aging woman who thinks she becomes more fetching with each passing year.”
Addison Wiggin & William Bonner, The New Empire of Debt
“Gold has a long history. And during its history, many was the time that humans were tempted to replace it with other forms of money-which they believed would be more convenient, more modern, and most importantly, more accommodating. Gold is hard to find and hard to bring up out of the earth. By its nature, the quantity of gold is always limited.”
Addison Wiggin & William Bonner, The New Empire of Debt
“It is true you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
President Abraham Lincoln
“Products leave Asia for North America. Money leaves North America for Asia. The money comes back to Asia within days. America’s economists breathe easy. What is there to worry about, they ask, as long as it comes back to us. ‘It is a form of tribute,’ they claim; the Empire works. But it works in a perverse way. The money that comes back is not the same as the money that left. It has been transformed: it goes out as an asset and comes back as a liability.”
“Americans still grow their own wheat, but the trucks to move it may be manufactured in Europe or Asia, and the pans it cooks in are probably made in China. They get their electronic paraphernalia from Taiwan, clothes from Malaysia, and automobiles from Japan. They get scientists from India and classical musicians from Korea. And money comes from all over the Eastern periphery to keep it all going.”
William Bonner & Addison Wiggin, The New Empire of Debt
“While we all finally acknowledged that reckless borrowing and spending got us into this mess, we are now assured that even more reckless borrowing and spending are necessary to get us out…actually it’s more like coaxing the errant dog back to maul us to death. When you are broke, the only true antidote is to be more productive and save more money. So it is with individuals; so it is with nations. But since this involves less borrowing and and thus some long-overdue self-sacrifice, our leaders want no part of it.”
Peter Schiff, Crash Proof 2.0
“While we were away, the dot-com bubble went bang. People remarked on how ‘lucky’ I was to have avoided all the pain. I tried to be kind. I was now old enough to know that any time you move away from the herd, the herd will criticize you, indeed revile you; it will call you ‘crazy.’ But that’s a good thing for an investor: nearly every time I strayed from the herd, I’ve made a lot of money. Wondering away from the action is the way to find the new action. I had touted commodities and China, and everyone said I was crazy. But when you make some money going against the grain you are no longer crazy; you’re just ‘lucky.’”
“Whenever I see everyone rushing to bet their money on what’s hot, I remind myself of Bernard Baruch, the Wall Street legend and adviser to U.S. Presidents. During the stock market craze of the late 20’s, Baruch stopped for a shoeshine one day and the guy working on his shoes began giving him stock tips. His shoes looking fine, Baruch headed back to the office and sold everything.
Jim Rogers, Hot Commodities
“They are going to have to take from the rich and give to the poor, and we who are in the middle will have to see just how much we can endure.
Our country is right on the verge of bankruptcy and none in Washington seem to have the guts to keep it from happening.
Pastor Adrian Rogers said, ‘you cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.’”
“Robbing Rich to Pay Poor is Killing the Middle Class,”
Article by Lucian K. Oldham, Rome News Tribune
