Commerce

"If you are different, you had better hide it, and pretend to be solemn and wooden-headed. Until you make your fortune. For most wooden-headed people worship money; and, really, I do not see what else they can do."

"“The answer to ‘Why’ is always ‘Money.’”"

"Get to live; Then live, and use it; else, it is not true That thou hast gotten. Surely use alone Makes money not a contemptible stone."

"Would you know what money is, go borrow some."

"Fight thou with shafts of silver, and o'ercome When no force else can get the masterdome."

"Every era has a currency that buys souls. In some the currency is pride, in others it is hope, in still others it is a holy cause. There are of course times when hard cash will buy souls, and the remarkable thing is that such times are marked by civility, tolerance, and the smooth working of everyday life."

"How widely its agencies vary,— To save, to ruin, to curse, to bless,— As even its minted coins express, Now stamp'd with the image of good Queen Bess, And now of a Bloody Mary."

"They may talk of the plugging and sweating Of our coinage that's minted of gold, But to me it produces no fretting Of its shortness of weight to be told: All the sov'reigns I'm able to levy As to lightness can never be wrong, But must surely be some of the heavy, For I never can carry them long."

"Quærenda pecunia primum est; virtus post nummos."

"... rem facias, rem, si possis, recte, si non, quocumque modo, rem"

"Quo mihi fortunam, si non conceditur uti? Of what use is a fortune to me, if I cannot use it?"

"Et genus et formam regina pecunia donat."

"Licet superbus ambules pecuniæ, Fortuna non mutat genus."

"Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo Ipse domi, simul ac nummos contemplor in arca."

"Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion."

"MAKE MONEY. MAKE MORE MONEY. MAKE OTHER PEOPLE PRODUCE SO AS TO MAKE MORE MONEY."

"Here then we may learn the fallacy of the remark... that any particular state is weak, though fertile, populous, and well cultivated, merely because it wants money. It appears that the want of money can never injure any state within itself: For men and commodities are the real strength of any community. It is the simple manner of living which here hurts the public, by confining the gold and silver to few hands, and preventing its universal diffusion and circulation. On the contrary, industry and refinements of all kinds incorporate it with the whole state, however small its quantity may be: They digest it into every vein, so to speak; and make it enter into every transaction and contract."

""That's sixty thousand!" cried Vorobyaninov."

"The almighty dollar, that great object of universal devotion throughout our land, seems to have no genuine devotees in these peculiar villages."

"There should, I feel, be one branch [of the Black Panther Party] that is purely political, operating the rent strikes, the breakfast programs, the People's Bazaar's where all sorts of food are sold, hospitals or clinics (free, of course), and what I will term cottage shops to employ those who will work for the new medium of exchange—love and loyalty."

"Now, throughout history, the right to coin money has been a symbol of sovereignty. If states do not have the right to coin money, they are not sovereign."

"Whilst that for which all virtue now is sold, And almost every vice, almighty gold."

"Get money; still get money, boy; No matter by what means."

"Quantum quisque sua nummorum condit in arca, Tantum habet et fidei."

"Ploratur lacrimis amissa pecunia veris."

"Crescit amor nummi quantum ipsa pecunia crescit."

"Lost money is wept for with real tears."

"Crescit amor nummi quantum ipsa pecunia crescit, Et minus hanc optat, qu non habet."

"Increase of wealth increases our desires And hew, who least possesses, least requires."

"Alt. Translation: The love of money grows as the money itself grows."

"It is maintained by some that the bank is a means of executing the constitutional power "to coin money and regulate the value thereof." Congress have established a mint to coin money and passed laws to regulate the value thereof. The money so coined, with its value so regulated, and such foreign coins as Congress may adopt are the only currency known to the Constitution. But if they have other power to regulate the currency, it was conferred to be exercised by themselves, and not to be transferred to a corporation. If the bank be established for that purpose, with a charter unalterable without its consent, Congress have parted with their power for a term of years, during which the Constitution is a dead letter. It is neither necessary nor proper to transfer its legislative power to such a bank, and therefore unconstitutional."

"I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing."

"And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

"No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money."

"No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction."

"Throw money at a problem and it will remain."

"The spark for a relationship might come for free—a look, a word. But the fuel to keep it going would always be expensive. Money might not buy happiness, but the lack of money could buy endless unhappiness for any two people."

"Things are simply so arranged that not all men can have money. Prometheus and Epimetheus, you say, were undeniably very wise, but all the same it is incomprehensible that when in other respects they endowed men so gloriously it did not occur to them to give them money also."

"It would undeniably be a superb invention by laughter to imagine eternity in a financial predicament-ah, but then let us weep a little because temporality has so completely forgotten eternity and forgotten that from the eternal point of view money is less that nothing! Alas, many are of the opinion that the eternal is a delusion and that money is the reality, whereas in the understanding of eternity and of truth money is a delusion. Think of eternity in whatever way you want to; only admit that many of the temporal things you have seen in temporality you wished to find again in eternity, that you wished to see the trees and the flowers and the stars again, to hear the singing of the birds and the murmuring of the brooks again, but, could it ever occur to you that there would be money in eternity? No, then the kingdom of heaven itself would again become a land of misery, and therefore this cannot possibly occur to you, just as it cannot possibly occur to someone who believes money is reality that there is an eternity."

"Any man who spends his income, whether large or small, benefits the community by putting money in circulation."

"Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go, Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!"

"Money in the pocket, devil in the heart."

"To borrow money, big money, you have to wear your hair in a certain way, walk in a certain way, and have about you an air of solemnity and majesty — something like the atmosphere of a Gothic cathedral."

"Jefferson "Jax" Jackson: Is there anything you think about other than yourself?Leonard Snart: Yes. Money."

"Money is like an iron ring we've put through our noses. We've forgotten that we designed it, and it's now leading us around. I think it's time to figure out where we want to go--in my opinion toward sustainability and community--and then design a money system that gets us there."

"For the first time in human history we have available the production technologies to create unprecedented abundance. All this converges into an extraordinary opportunity to combine the hardware of our technologies of abundance and the software of archetypal shifts. Such a combination has never been available at this scale or at this speed: it enables us to consciously design money to work for us, instead of us for it. I propose that we choose to develop money systems that will enable us to attain sustainability and community healing on a local and global scale. These objectives are in our grasp within less than one generation's time. Whether we materialize them or not will depend on our capacity to cooperate with each other to consciously reinvent our money."

"While economic textbooks claim that people and corporations are competing for markets and resources, I claim that in reality they are competing for money - using markets and resources to do so. So designing new money systems really amounts to redesigning the target that orients much human effort... Greed and competition are not a result of immutable human temperament... greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being continuously created and amplified as a direct result of the kind of money we are using. For example, we can produce more than enough food to feed everybody, and there is definitely enough work for everybody in the world, but there is clearly not enough money to pay for it all. The scarcity is in our national currencies. In fact, the job of central banks is to create and maintain that currency scarcity. The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive."

"Greed and competition are not a result of immutable human temperament... greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being continuously created and amplified as a direct result of the kind of money we are using. For example, we can produce more than enough food to feed everybody, and there is definitely enough work for everybody in the world, but there is clearly not enough money to pay for it all. The scarcity is in our national currencies. In fact, the job of central banks is to create and maintain that currency scarcity. The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive."

"Money is created when banks lend it into existence. When a bank provides you with a $100,000 mortgage, it creates only the principal, which you spend and which then circulates in the economy. The bank expects you to pay back $200,000 over the next 20 years, but it doesn't create the second $100,000 - the interest. Instead, the bank sends you out into the tough world to battle against everybody else to bring back the second $100,000."

"Your money's value is determined by a global casino of unprecedented proportions: $2 trillion are traded per day in foreign exchange markets, 100 times more than the trading volume of all the stockmarkets of the world combined. Only 2% of these foreign exchange transactions relate to the "real" economy reflecting movements of real goods and services in the world, and 98% are purely speculative. This global casino is triggering the foreign exchange crises which shook Mexico in 1994-5, Asia in 1997 and Russia in 1998. These emergencies are the dislocation symptoms of the old Industrial Age money system."