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"The refusal of King George III to allow the colonies to operate an honest money system, which freed the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators was probably the prime cause of the revolution."
-Benjamin Franklin
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies...If the American people ever allowed the banks to control the issuance of their currency, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied."
-Thomas Jefferson
1789: The U.S. Constitution takes effect. Included is the provision that only "gold and silver" will be U.S. legal tender [Article I Section X].
"Let me issue and control a nation’s money, and I care not who writes the laws."
-Mayer Amschel Rothschild, 1790
1790: Alexander Hamilton proposes a Central Bank to the first U.S. Congress.
1791: The First Bank of the United States is established, with a 20-year charter.
"No man is more ardently intent to see the public debt soon and sacredly paid off than I am. This exactly marks the difference between [Secretary of the Treasury] Hamilton's views and mine, that I would wish the debt paid tomorrow; he wishes it never paid, but always a thing where with to corrupt and manage the legislature."
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to President Washington 1792
"There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt."
-John Adams
"Either the application for renewal of the charter is granted, or the United States will find itself involved in a most disastrous war."
-Nathan Mayer Rothschild, 1811
1811: The charter for The First Bank of the United States in not renewed.
"Teach those impudent Americans a lesson. Bring them back to colonial status."
-Nathan Mayer Rothschild, 1811
1812: The British declare war on the United States.
1816: The Second Bank of the United States is established, with a 20-year charter.
"Jackson And No Bank!"
-Andrew Jackson's re-election campaign slogan, 1832
"You are a den of thieves and vipers, and I intend to rout you out, and by the Eternal God, I will rout you out!"
-Andrew Jackson, 1834
1835: On January 30, President Jackson's life is miraculously spared in a failed assassination attempt.
1836: The charter for The Second Bank of the United States is not renewed.
"The [Constitution does not] confer on Congress the right to establish such a corporation as the Bank of the United States...The paper-money system and its natural associations--monopoly and exclusive privileges--have already struck their roots too deep in the soil, and it will require all your efforts to check its further growth and to eradicate the evil. The men who profit by the abuses and desire to perpetuate them will continue to besiege the halls of legislation in the General Government...many interests are united to resist all reform on this subject that you must not hope the conflict will be a short one nor success easy. My humble efforts have not been spared during my administration of the Government to restore the constitutional currency of gold and silver, and something, I trust, has been done toward the accomplishment of this most desirable object; but enough yet remains to require all your energy and perseverance. The power, however, is in your hands..."
-Andrew Jackson, 1837 in his farewell address
1861: President Abraham Lincoln attempts to fund the ongoing Civil War with the help of New York banks. The banks demand 24% to 36% interest. Lincoln, furious, instead prints his own money...Greenbacks. The remainder of the war is financed debt free, though hefty price inflation ensues.
"We gave the people of this republic the greatest blessing they ever had, their own paper money to pay their own debts."
-Abraham Lincoln, 1862
"The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government's greatest creative opportunity."
-Abraham Lincoln
"I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me, and the financial institutions in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe."
-Abraham Lincoln, 1865 in a statement to Congress
1865: President Lincoln is assassinated on April 14, less than two months before the end of the war.
"Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce...and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate."
-President James A. Garfield, 1881
1881: President Garfield is assassinated.
1913: The Federal Reserve is established on December 23.
"This [Federal Reserve Act] establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President [Wilson] signs this bill, the invisible government of the monetary power will be legalized....the worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency bill."
-Charles A. Lindbergh Sr., 1913
"From now on, depressions will be scientifically created."
-Charles A. Lindbergh Sr., 1913
"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit. We are no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."
-Woodrow Wilson, 1919
"Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are US government institutions. They are not... they are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the US for the benefit of themselves and their foreign and domestic swindlers, and rich and predatory money lenders. The sack of the United States by the Fed is the greatest crime in history. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers, but the truth is the Fed has usurped the government. It controls everything here and it controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will."
-Louis McFadden, Chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency 1920-31
"(The Great Depression resulting from the Stock Market crash) was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence....The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so they might emerge as rulers of us all."
-Louis McFadden
1933: The FDIC is created. Franklin Roosevelt signs Executive Order 6102 requiring all persons to deliver all gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates to the Federal Reserve.
"This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system.... It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied very soon."
-Robert H. Hamphill, Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank, 1935
"...we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence; on infiltration instead of invasion; on subversion instead of elections; on intimidation instead of free choice.... It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned. No rumor is printed. No secret is revealed...I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people, for I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed. I not only could not stifle controversy among your readers, I welcome it. This administration tends to be candid about its errors, for as a wise man once said, "An error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it."...That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solar decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy...government at all levels must meet its obligation to provide you with the fullest possible information outside the narrowest limits of national security, and we intend to do it...and so it is to the printing press, to the recorder of man's deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news, that we look for strength, and his assistance, confident that with your help, Man will be what he was born to be: free and independent."
-John F. Kennedy, in a speech to the American Newspaper Publishers Association, April 4, 1961
1963: On June 4 President Kennedy issues Executive Order 11110 which returned to the U.S. Treasury Department the power to "issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury." This created a legal tender, sound money, competitive alternative currency to Federal Reserve Notes.
1963: On November 22 President Kennedy is assassinated. Executive Order 11110 is nullified soon after.
1964: The 1964 Kennedy Half Dollar is the last 90% silver U.S. coin to be circulated.
1971: President Nixon "officially" ends the gold standard. The Vietnam War is funded with debt.
"I have never yet had anyone who could, through the use of logic and reason, justify the Federal Government borrowing the use of its own money...I believe the time will come when people will demand that this be changed. I believe the time will come in this country when they will actually blame you and me and everyone else connected with the Congress for sitting idly by and permitting such an idiotic system to continue."
-Wright Patman, Chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Banking & Currency 1963-1975
"Failure of government programs prompts more determined efforts, while the loss of liberty is ignored or rationalized away...Whether it's the war against poverty, drugs, terrorism, or the current Hitler of the day, an appeal to patriotism is used to convince the people that a little sacrifice of liberty, here and there, is a small price to pay. The results, though, are frightening and will soon become even more so."
-Congressman Ron Paul 2003
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Quotes
"In all affairs, it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."
-Bertrand Russell
"Inflation discourages all prudence and thrift. It encourages squandering, gambling, reckless waste of all kinds. It often makes it more profitable to speculate than to produce. It tears apart the whole fabric of stable economic relationships. Its inexcusable injustices drive men toward desperate remedies. It plants the seeds of fascism and communism. It leads men to demand totalitarian controls. It ends invariably in bitter disillusion and collapse."
Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson
"The final outcome of the credit expansion is general impoverishment."
-Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
"They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin
"Paper is poverty...it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself."
-Thomas Jefferson
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value --- zero."
-Voltaire
"Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits".
-Sir Josiah Stamp
"When I say liberty I do not simply mean what is referred to as "free enterprise." I mean liberty of the individual to think his own thoughts and live his own life as he desires to think and to live."
-Robert A. Taft
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
-Krishnamurti
"None are more enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
-Goethe
"...while boasting of our noble deeds were careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery."
-Horace Greeley
"The Name of The Game Is Bailout"
G. Edward Griffin, The Creature From Jekyll Island
“It is well 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.â€
-Henry Ford
"Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe. "
-Ludwig von Mises, Defense, Controls, and Inflation
"The most important thing to remember is that inflation is not an act of God, that inflation is not a catastrophe of the elements or a disease that comes like the plague. Inflation is a policy."
-Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy
"The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."
-Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson
"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."
-Edward R. Murrow
"When we enter the field of public economics...elementary truths are ignored. There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: “In the long run we are all dead.†...The long-run consequences of some economic policies may become evident in a few months. Others may not become evident for several years. Still others may not become evident for decades. But in every case those long-run consequences are contained in the policy as surely as the hen was in the egg, the flower in the seed."
-Henry Hazlitt
“There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody.â€
-Adlai E. Stevenson
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
-Albert A. Bartlett, physicist
"Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."
-Kenneth Boulding, economist
"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation...Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard."
-Alan Greenspan (yes, that Alan Greenspan), Gold and Economic Freedom 1967
"Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think paper was so valuable?"
-Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos
"I am more concerned about the return of my money than the return on my money."
-Mark Twain
"Who controls money controls the world."
-Henry Kissinger, Council on Foreign Relations
"The whole profit of the issuance of money has provided the capital of the great banking business as it exists today. Starting with nothing whatever of their own, they have got the whole world into their debt irredeemably, by a trick. This money comes into existence every time the banks “lend†and disappears every time the debt is repaid to them. So that if industry tries to repay, the money of the nation disappears. This is what makes prosperity so “dangerous†as it destroys money just when it is most needed, and precipitates a slump. There is nothing left now for us but to ever get deeper and deeper into debt to the banking system in order to provide the increasing amounts of money the nation requires for its expansion and growth. An honest money system is the only alternative."
-Frederick Soddy
"One thing to realize about our fractional reserve banking system is that, like a child's game of musical chairs, as long as the music is playing, there are no losers."
-Andrew Gause, Monetary Historian
"...I want to abolish the Federal Reserve...The value of our dollar and the level of our interest rates are not supposed to be manipulated by a few members of the powerful elite meeting secretly in a marble palace...Without the Federal Reserve, our money could not be inflated at the behest of big government or big banks. Your income and savings would not lose their value."
-Ron Paul, 2002
"I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts."
-Abraham Lincoln
"The present state of America is truly alarming to every man who is capable of reflection. Without law, without government, without any other mode of power than what is founded on and granted by courtesy."
-Thomas Paine
"We have it in our power to begin the world over again."
-Thomas Paine
"Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God."
-Benjamin Franklin's suggestion for the Great Seal of the United States
