“Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value - zero.”
- Voltaire (1694-1778)

“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.”
- President James A. Garfield

“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, President of the Bank of England in the 1920’s

“Those few who can understand the system (check book money and credit) will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on it favors, that there will be little opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear it burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.”
- Rothschild Brothers

“Give me the power to issue a nation’s money; then I do not care who makes the law.”
- Mayer Amschel Rothschild (formerly Bauer)

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. 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, Chair of the Federal Reserve, 1987-2006
It should be noted that Mr. Greenspan wrote the above quote in 1966 in an essay entitled “Gold and Economic Freedom”. Some people dismiss this as not valid as this was written before he became the Chair of the Fed. This is not true. He was asked by Ron Paul in 2002 if he “still believed what he wrote back then was still valid today”. Greenspan responded to Ron Paul, “I wouldn’t change a single word.”.

“I cannot morally blame all Americans for allowing, for instance, the birth of the Federal Reserve System (a private cartel with full control over the issuance of national debt) and the money destruction that has followed. They are simply ignorant about it and don’t know what happened or what is happening. They think that prices go up rather than that dollars go down. Unsound money imposes an environment of immorality, which in turn makes people behave in different ways for reasons they know not. Sometimes you can blame immorality for the imposition of bad structures (bad people do it with full knowledge of what they are doing), but sometimes it is simply stupidity. People revere democracy, but democracy ends in plunder by the majority. Are people immoral for supporting democracy? I think rather that they lack a deep understanding of its essence. At a very deep level, I would say that the reason such structures are created is due to both a lack of knowledge and a false morality, which in turn is due to a lack of knowledge.”
- Bob Pretcher

“The system of banking we have both equally and ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, … 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.”
– Thomas Jefferson

“The eyes of our citizens are not sufficiently open to the true cause of our distress. They ascribe them to everything but their true cause, the banking system; a system which if it could do good in any form is yet so certain of leading to abuse as to be utterly incompatible with the public safety and prosperity. I sincerely believe 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.”
– Thomas Jefferson

“… we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt…If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labors and in our amusements, for our callings and our creeds…our people…must come to labor 16 hours in the 24, give the earnings of 15 of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the 16th being insufficient to afford us bread,…We have no time to think, no means of calling the mis-managers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves, to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers. Our land holders, too…retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury,. . .this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering…And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in it’s train, wretchedness and oppression.”
– Thomas Jefferson

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a money aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. This issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, 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 conquered. I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of the moneyed corporations which already dare to challenge our Government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country”
– Thomas Jefferson

“I sincerely believe … 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.”
– Thomas Jefferson

“I place economy among the first and important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our choice between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.”
– Thomas Jefferson

“The Central Bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the principles and form of our Constitution.”
– Thomas Jefferson

“Capital must protect itself in every possible manner by combination and legislation. Debts must be collected, bonds and mortgages must be foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When, through a process of law, the common people lose their homes they will become more docile and more easily governed through the influence of the strong arm of government, applied by a central power of wealth under control of leading financiers. This truth is well known among our principal men now engaged in forming an imperialism of Capital to govern the world. By dividing the voters through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance. Thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves what has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished.”
– US Bankers Magazine, Aug 25, 1924

“We have gold because we cannot trust Governments.”
- President Herbert Hoover

“People who will not turn a shovel of dirt on the project, nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money, from the United States, than will the people, who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest (usury) … But here is the point: If the nation can issue a dollar bond, it can also issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good, makes the bill good, also. The difference, between the bond and the bill, is that the bond lets the money-broker collect twice the amount of the bond, and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort, provided by the Constitution, pays nobody, but those, who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd, to say that our country can issue bonds, and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the people. If the currency issued by the people were no good, then the bonds would be no good, either. It is a terrible situation, when the Government, to insure the national wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges, at the hands of men, who control the fictitious value of gold. Interest is the invention of Satan.”
– Thomas Edison