dirknb@hotmail.com
04-23-2008, 04:15 AM
I posted this a couple of months ago, but have added so many to the list I felt it was worth posting again. The list is too long for one posting, it will take 3. The entire list is at: http://www.kokomotion.com/TWH/docs/quotes.html (http://www.kokomotion.com/TWH/docs/quotes.html)
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If you read these in order, they tell a story...
"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." - Plato
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." - Abraham Lincoln
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." - Thomas Jefferson
"Government is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force. And, like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." - George Washington
"Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have." - Davy Crockett
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." - Thomas Jefferson
"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." - Thomas Jefferson
"The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing" - Edmund Burke
"Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day. But a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers (administrations), too plainly proves a deliberate systematic plan of reducing us to slavery." - Thomas Jefferson
"It is well enough that 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
"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and it's issuance." -- James Madison
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." - Thomas Jefferson
"Mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges... which are employed altogether for their benefit." - Andrew Jackson
"If Congress has the right under the Constitution to issue paper money, it was given them to use themselves, not to be delegated to individuals or corporations." - Andrew Jackson
"The bold effort the present (central) bank had made to control the government ... are but premonitions of the fate that await the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it." - Andrew Jackson
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." - Thomas Jefferson
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power (of money) should be taken away from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs." – Thomas Jefferson
"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks." - Lord Acton
"But if in the pursuit of the means we should unfortunately stumble again on unfunded paper money or any similar species of fraud, we shall assuredly give a fatal stab to our national credit in its infancy. Paper money will invariably operate in the body of politics as spirit liquors on the human body. They prey on the vitals and ultimately destroy them. Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice." -- George Washington
“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 such as 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 money and control credit." - Sir Josiah Stamp - former Director of Bank of England
"Issue of currency should be lodged with the government and be protected from domination by Wall Street. We are opposed to...provisions [which] would place our currency and credit system in private hands." - Theodore Roosevelt
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." - Mayer Amschel Rothschild
"Who controls money controls the world." - Henry Kissinger
"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
"The colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction. The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III was the prime reason for the Revolutionary War." - Benjamin Franklin
"This Act (the Federal Reserve Act, Dec. 23rd 1913) establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President (Woodrow Wilson) signs the Bill, the invisible government of the Monetary Power will be legalised... The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency Bill." - Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh Sr.
"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world—no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men." - Woodrow Wilson, reflecting on passage of the Federal Reserve Act
"A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible." - Woodrow Wilson
"Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States." - Barry Goldwater
"While boasting of our noble deeds we're 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 Federal Reserve is one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever seen. There is not a man within the sound of my voice who does not know that this nation is run by the international bankers." - Congressman Louis T. McFadden
"I refer to the Federal Reserve Board.... This evil institution has impoverished the people of the United States and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done this through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it." - Louis T. McFadden
"Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government Institutions. They are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers." - Louis T. McFadden
"When the Federal Reserve Act was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world banking system was being set up here. A super-state controlled by international bankers and international industrialists acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers but the truth is - The Fed has usurped the government!" - Louis T. McFadden
"The financial system has been turned over to the Federal Reserve Board. That Board administers the finance system by authority of a purely profiteering group. The system is Private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other people's money" - Charles A. Lindbergh Sr.
"Those not favorable to the money trust could be squeezed out of business and the people frightened into demanding changes in the banking and currency laws which the Money Trust would frame." - Charles A. Lindbergh Sr.
"I was as secretive - indeed, as furtive - as any conspirator. Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would be wasted. If it were to be exposed that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress." - Frank Vanderlip (referring to the Federal Reserve Act)
"Before passage of this [Federal Reserve] Act, the New York Bankers could only dominate the reserves of New York. Now, we are able to dominate the bank reserves of the entire country." - Senator Nelson Aldrich
"The Aldrich Plan is the Wall Street Plan. It means another panic, if necessary, to intimidate the people. Aldrich, paid by the government to represent the people, proposes a plan for the trusts instead." - Charles A. Lindbergh Sr.
"The Aldrich bill was condemned in the platform when Woodrow Wilson was nominated. The men who ruled the Democratic party promised the people that if they were returned to power there would be no central bank established here while they held the reins of government. Thirteen months later that promise was broken, and the Wilson administration, under the tutelage of those sinister Wall Street figures who stood behind Colonel House, established here in our free country the worm-eaten monarchical institution of the 'king's bank' to control us from the top downward, and to shackle us from the cradle to the grave." - Louis T. McFadden
"The bill [Federal Reserve Act] grants just what Wall Street and the big banks for twenty-five years have been striving for - private instead of public control of currency. It robs the government and the people of all effective control over the public's money, and vests in the banks exclusively the dangerous power to make money among the people scarce or plenty." - Alfred Crozier
"The Federal Reserve Bank is nothing but a banking fraud and an unlawful crime against civilization. Why? Because they "create" the money made out of nothing, and our Uncle Sap Government issues their "Federal Reserve Notes" and stamps our Government approval with NO obligation whatever from these Federal Reserve Banks, Individual Banks or National Banks, etc." - H. L. Birum Sr.
"To cause high prices, all the Federal Reserve Board will do will be to lower the rediscount rate, producing an expansion of credit and a rising stock market; then when business men are adjusted to these conditions, it can check prosperity in mid-career by arbitrarily raising the rate of interest. It can cause the pendulum of a rising and falling market to swing gently back and forth by slight changes in the discount rate, or cause violent fluctuations by a greater rate variation, and in either case it will possess inside information as to financial conditions and advance knowledge of the coming change, either up or down. This is the strangest, most dangerous advantage ever placed in the hands of a special privilege class by any government that ever existed. They know in advance when to create panics to their advantage. They also know when to stop panic. Inflation and deflation work equally well for them whey they control finance." - Charles A. Lindbergh Sr.
"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. ... 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
"In the United States today we have in effect two governments. We have the duly constituted government..... Then we have an independent, uncontrolled and uncoordinated government in the Federal Reserve System, operating the money powers which are reserved to Congress by the Constitution." - Congressman Wright Patman
"The Federal Reserve system is nothing more than legalized counterfeit." - Ron Paul
"Paper is poverty...it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself." - Thomas Jefferson
"Of all contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money." - Daniel Webster
"The few who could understand the system will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of the people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests." - John Sherman - referring to the National Banking Act, a precursor to the Federal Reserve Act
"All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation." - John Adams
"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. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. 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 Hemphill
"It [the depression] was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence worked out as one works out a mathematical equation. The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as the rulers of us all." - Louis T. McFadden
"The Federal Reserve definitely caused the Great Depression by contracting the amount of currency in circulation by one-third from 1929 to 1933." - Milton Friedman
"Whosoever controls the volume of money in any 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." - James A. Garfield
"To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything." - F. A. Hayek
"I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create and destroy money. And they who control the credit of a nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people." - Richard McKenna
"Capital must protect itself in every way... Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd." - J. P. Morgan
"So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?" - Ayn Rand
"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
"...for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 -- that is what it amounts to, with interest. People who will not turn a shovelful of dirt nor contribute a pound of material will collect more money from the United States than will the people who supply the material and do the work. That is the terrible thing about interest. In all our great bond issues the interest is always greater than the principal. All of the great public works cost more than twice the actual cost, on that account. Under the present system of doing business we simply add 120 to 150 per cent, to the stated cost." - Thomas Edison
"But here is the point: If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money brokers collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20 per cent, whereas the currency pays nobody but those who directly contribute to Muscle Shoals (referring to a public works project in Alabama) in some useful way." - Thomas Edison
"It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30,000,000 in bonds and not $30,000,000 in currency. Both are promises to pay; but one promise fattens the usurer (banker), and the other helps the people. If the currency issued by the Government were no good, then the bonds issued would be no good either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to increase the national wealth, must go into debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious values of gold." - Thomas Edison
"I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution -- taking from the federal government their power of borrowing." - Thomas Jefferson
"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. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity." - Abraham Lincoln
"The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more selfish than bureaucracy." - Abraham Lincoln
"The division of the United States into federations of equal force was decided long before the Civil War by the high financial powers of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the United States, if they remained as one block, and as one nation, would attain economic and financial independence, which would upset their financial domination over the world." - Otto von Bismark
"If this mischievious financial policy, which has its origin in North America, shall become endurated down to a fixture, then that government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous without precedent in the history of the world. The brains, and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That country must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe." - Times of London (article referring to Lincoln issuing debt-free currency.)
"The death of Lincoln was a disaster for Christendom. There was no man in the United States great enough to wear his boots.... I fear that foreign bankers with their craftiness and tortuous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America, and use it systematically to corrupt modern civilization. They will not hesitate to plunge the whole of Christendom into wars and chaos in order that the earth should become their inheritance." - Otto von Bismarck
"Right after the Civil War there was considerable talk about reviving Lincoln's brief experiment with the Constitutional monetary system. Had not the European money-trust intervened, it would have no doubt become an established institution." - W. Cleon Skousen
"On Sept. 1st, 1894, we will not renew our loans under any consideration. On Sept. 1st we will demand our money. We will foreclose and become mortgagees in possession. We can take two-thirds of the farms west of the Mississippi, and thousands of them east of the Mississippi as well, at our own price.... Then the farmers will become tenants as in England." - 1891 American Bankers Association as printed in the Congressional Record of April 29, 1913
"The stock of money, prices and output was decidedly more unstable after the establishment of the Federal Reserve System than before. The most dramatic period of instability in output was, of course, the period between the two wars, which includes the severe [monetary] contractions of 1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38. No other 20-year period in American history contains as many as three such severe contractions. This evidence persuades me that at least a third of the price rise during and just after World War I is attributable to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System... and that the severity of each of the major contractions is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities. Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, so that mistakes - excusable or not - can have such a far reaching effect, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic - this is the key political argument against an independent central bank. To paraphrase Clemenceau, money is much too serious a matter to be left to the central bankers." - Milton Friedman
"The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments' plans. " - British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, 1876 - First Prime Minister of England
"Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it." - Woodrow Wilson
"The real menace of our republic is this invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over city, state and nation. Like the octopus of real life, it operates under cover of a self created screen. It seizes in its long and powerful tentacles our executive officers, our legislative bodies, our schools, our courts, our newspapers, and every agency created for the public protection. At the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both political parties, write political platforms, make catspaws of party leaders, use the leading men of private organizations, and resort to every device to place in nomination for high public office only such candidates as will be amenable to the dictates of corrupt big business. These international bankers and Rockefeller Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and magazines in this country." - John F. Hylan, New York City Mayor 1922
"From the days of Sparticus, Wieskhopf, Karl Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemberg, and Emma Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century. And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their head and have become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire." - Winston Churchill, 1922
"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people." - Theodore Roosevelt
"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson." - Franklin D. Roosevelt
"The real rulers of Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes." - Felix Frankfurter - Supreme Court Justice
"But, you know, there's another group that really runs the show. It's very shadowy, just as you've described... Those of us in the Congress of the United States are window dressing." - Congressman Virgil Goode
"The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes." - Benjamin Disraeli
"There is something behind the throne greater than the king himself." - William Pitt, 1770, British House of Lords
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If you read these in order, they tell a story...
"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." - Plato
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." - Abraham Lincoln
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." - Thomas Jefferson
"Government is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force. And, like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." - George Washington
"Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have." - Davy Crockett
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." - Thomas Jefferson
"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." - Thomas Jefferson
"The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing" - Edmund Burke
"Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day. But a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers (administrations), too plainly proves a deliberate systematic plan of reducing us to slavery." - Thomas Jefferson
"It is well enough that 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
"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and it's issuance." -- James Madison
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." - Thomas Jefferson
"Mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges... which are employed altogether for their benefit." - Andrew Jackson
"If Congress has the right under the Constitution to issue paper money, it was given them to use themselves, not to be delegated to individuals or corporations." - Andrew Jackson
"The bold effort the present (central) bank had made to control the government ... are but premonitions of the fate that await the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it." - Andrew Jackson
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." - Thomas Jefferson
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power (of money) should be taken away from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs." – Thomas Jefferson
"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks." - Lord Acton
"But if in the pursuit of the means we should unfortunately stumble again on unfunded paper money or any similar species of fraud, we shall assuredly give a fatal stab to our national credit in its infancy. Paper money will invariably operate in the body of politics as spirit liquors on the human body. They prey on the vitals and ultimately destroy them. Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice." -- George Washington
“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 such as 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 money and control credit." - Sir Josiah Stamp - former Director of Bank of England
"Issue of currency should be lodged with the government and be protected from domination by Wall Street. We are opposed to...provisions [which] would place our currency and credit system in private hands." - Theodore Roosevelt
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." - Mayer Amschel Rothschild
"Who controls money controls the world." - Henry Kissinger
"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
"The colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction. The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III was the prime reason for the Revolutionary War." - Benjamin Franklin
"This Act (the Federal Reserve Act, Dec. 23rd 1913) establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President (Woodrow Wilson) signs the Bill, the invisible government of the Monetary Power will be legalised... The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency Bill." - Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh Sr.
"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world—no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men." - Woodrow Wilson, reflecting on passage of the Federal Reserve Act
"A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible." - Woodrow Wilson
"Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States." - Barry Goldwater
"While boasting of our noble deeds we're 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 Federal Reserve is one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever seen. There is not a man within the sound of my voice who does not know that this nation is run by the international bankers." - Congressman Louis T. McFadden
"I refer to the Federal Reserve Board.... This evil institution has impoverished the people of the United States and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done this through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it." - Louis T. McFadden
"Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government Institutions. They are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers." - Louis T. McFadden
"When the Federal Reserve Act was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world banking system was being set up here. A super-state controlled by international bankers and international industrialists acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers but the truth is - The Fed has usurped the government!" - Louis T. McFadden
"The financial system has been turned over to the Federal Reserve Board. That Board administers the finance system by authority of a purely profiteering group. The system is Private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other people's money" - Charles A. Lindbergh Sr.
"Those not favorable to the money trust could be squeezed out of business and the people frightened into demanding changes in the banking and currency laws which the Money Trust would frame." - Charles A. Lindbergh Sr.
"I was as secretive - indeed, as furtive - as any conspirator. Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would be wasted. If it were to be exposed that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress." - Frank Vanderlip (referring to the Federal Reserve Act)
"Before passage of this [Federal Reserve] Act, the New York Bankers could only dominate the reserves of New York. Now, we are able to dominate the bank reserves of the entire country." - Senator Nelson Aldrich
"The Aldrich Plan is the Wall Street Plan. It means another panic, if necessary, to intimidate the people. Aldrich, paid by the government to represent the people, proposes a plan for the trusts instead." - Charles A. Lindbergh Sr.
"The Aldrich bill was condemned in the platform when Woodrow Wilson was nominated. The men who ruled the Democratic party promised the people that if they were returned to power there would be no central bank established here while they held the reins of government. Thirteen months later that promise was broken, and the Wilson administration, under the tutelage of those sinister Wall Street figures who stood behind Colonel House, established here in our free country the worm-eaten monarchical institution of the 'king's bank' to control us from the top downward, and to shackle us from the cradle to the grave." - Louis T. McFadden
"The bill [Federal Reserve Act] grants just what Wall Street and the big banks for twenty-five years have been striving for - private instead of public control of currency. It robs the government and the people of all effective control over the public's money, and vests in the banks exclusively the dangerous power to make money among the people scarce or plenty." - Alfred Crozier
"The Federal Reserve Bank is nothing but a banking fraud and an unlawful crime against civilization. Why? Because they "create" the money made out of nothing, and our Uncle Sap Government issues their "Federal Reserve Notes" and stamps our Government approval with NO obligation whatever from these Federal Reserve Banks, Individual Banks or National Banks, etc." - H. L. Birum Sr.
"To cause high prices, all the Federal Reserve Board will do will be to lower the rediscount rate, producing an expansion of credit and a rising stock market; then when business men are adjusted to these conditions, it can check prosperity in mid-career by arbitrarily raising the rate of interest. It can cause the pendulum of a rising and falling market to swing gently back and forth by slight changes in the discount rate, or cause violent fluctuations by a greater rate variation, and in either case it will possess inside information as to financial conditions and advance knowledge of the coming change, either up or down. This is the strangest, most dangerous advantage ever placed in the hands of a special privilege class by any government that ever existed. They know in advance when to create panics to their advantage. They also know when to stop panic. Inflation and deflation work equally well for them whey they control finance." - Charles A. Lindbergh Sr.
"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. ... 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
"In the United States today we have in effect two governments. We have the duly constituted government..... Then we have an independent, uncontrolled and uncoordinated government in the Federal Reserve System, operating the money powers which are reserved to Congress by the Constitution." - Congressman Wright Patman
"The Federal Reserve system is nothing more than legalized counterfeit." - Ron Paul
"Paper is poverty...it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself." - Thomas Jefferson
"Of all contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money." - Daniel Webster
"The few who could understand the system will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of the people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests." - John Sherman - referring to the National Banking Act, a precursor to the Federal Reserve Act
"All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation." - John Adams
"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. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. 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 Hemphill
"It [the depression] was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence worked out as one works out a mathematical equation. The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as the rulers of us all." - Louis T. McFadden
"The Federal Reserve definitely caused the Great Depression by contracting the amount of currency in circulation by one-third from 1929 to 1933." - Milton Friedman
"Whosoever controls the volume of money in any 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." - James A. Garfield
"To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything." - F. A. Hayek
"I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create and destroy money. And they who control the credit of a nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people." - Richard McKenna
"Capital must protect itself in every way... Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd." - J. P. Morgan
"So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?" - Ayn Rand
"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
"...for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 -- that is what it amounts to, with interest. People who will not turn a shovelful of dirt nor contribute a pound of material will collect more money from the United States than will the people who supply the material and do the work. That is the terrible thing about interest. In all our great bond issues the interest is always greater than the principal. All of the great public works cost more than twice the actual cost, on that account. Under the present system of doing business we simply add 120 to 150 per cent, to the stated cost." - Thomas Edison
"But here is the point: If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money brokers collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20 per cent, whereas the currency pays nobody but those who directly contribute to Muscle Shoals (referring to a public works project in Alabama) in some useful way." - Thomas Edison
"It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30,000,000 in bonds and not $30,000,000 in currency. Both are promises to pay; but one promise fattens the usurer (banker), and the other helps the people. If the currency issued by the Government were no good, then the bonds issued would be no good either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to increase the national wealth, must go into debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious values of gold." - Thomas Edison
"I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution -- taking from the federal government their power of borrowing." - Thomas Jefferson
"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. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity." - Abraham Lincoln
"The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more selfish than bureaucracy." - Abraham Lincoln
"The division of the United States into federations of equal force was decided long before the Civil War by the high financial powers of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the United States, if they remained as one block, and as one nation, would attain economic and financial independence, which would upset their financial domination over the world." - Otto von Bismark
"If this mischievious financial policy, which has its origin in North America, shall become endurated down to a fixture, then that government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous without precedent in the history of the world. The brains, and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That country must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe." - Times of London (article referring to Lincoln issuing debt-free currency.)
"The death of Lincoln was a disaster for Christendom. There was no man in the United States great enough to wear his boots.... I fear that foreign bankers with their craftiness and tortuous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America, and use it systematically to corrupt modern civilization. They will not hesitate to plunge the whole of Christendom into wars and chaos in order that the earth should become their inheritance." - Otto von Bismarck
"Right after the Civil War there was considerable talk about reviving Lincoln's brief experiment with the Constitutional monetary system. Had not the European money-trust intervened, it would have no doubt become an established institution." - W. Cleon Skousen
"On Sept. 1st, 1894, we will not renew our loans under any consideration. On Sept. 1st we will demand our money. We will foreclose and become mortgagees in possession. We can take two-thirds of the farms west of the Mississippi, and thousands of them east of the Mississippi as well, at our own price.... Then the farmers will become tenants as in England." - 1891 American Bankers Association as printed in the Congressional Record of April 29, 1913
"The stock of money, prices and output was decidedly more unstable after the establishment of the Federal Reserve System than before. The most dramatic period of instability in output was, of course, the period between the two wars, which includes the severe [monetary] contractions of 1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38. No other 20-year period in American history contains as many as three such severe contractions. This evidence persuades me that at least a third of the price rise during and just after World War I is attributable to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System... and that the severity of each of the major contractions is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities. Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, so that mistakes - excusable or not - can have such a far reaching effect, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic - this is the key political argument against an independent central bank. To paraphrase Clemenceau, money is much too serious a matter to be left to the central bankers." - Milton Friedman
"The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments' plans. " - British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, 1876 - First Prime Minister of England
"Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it." - Woodrow Wilson
"The real menace of our republic is this invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over city, state and nation. Like the octopus of real life, it operates under cover of a self created screen. It seizes in its long and powerful tentacles our executive officers, our legislative bodies, our schools, our courts, our newspapers, and every agency created for the public protection. At the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both political parties, write political platforms, make catspaws of party leaders, use the leading men of private organizations, and resort to every device to place in nomination for high public office only such candidates as will be amenable to the dictates of corrupt big business. These international bankers and Rockefeller Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and magazines in this country." - John F. Hylan, New York City Mayor 1922
"From the days of Sparticus, Wieskhopf, Karl Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemberg, and Emma Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century. And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their head and have become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire." - Winston Churchill, 1922
"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people." - Theodore Roosevelt
"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson." - Franklin D. Roosevelt
"The real rulers of Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes." - Felix Frankfurter - Supreme Court Justice
"But, you know, there's another group that really runs the show. It's very shadowy, just as you've described... Those of us in the Congress of the United States are window dressing." - Congressman Virgil Goode
"The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes." - Benjamin Disraeli
"There is something behind the throne greater than the king himself." - William Pitt, 1770, British House of Lords