#Economy Quotes

“Don't make a novel to establish a principle of political economy. You will spoil both.”

“It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.”

“The greatest meliorator of the world is selfish, huckstering Trade.”

“Personal initiative, competitive selection, the profit motive, corrected by failure and the infinite process of good housekeeping and the personal ingenuity-here constitute the life of a free society.”

“I've always taught that a poor economy is the best opportunity for salespeople because the naysayers and grumblers have already given up, leaving more territory, more opportunities to be successful than in a good economy when virtually all salespeople are out there, giving it their best.”

“Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.”

“Prosperity is something the businessmen created for politicians to take credit for”

“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 who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom.”

“The great monopoly in this country is the money monopoly. So long as it exists, our old variety of freedom and individual energy of development are out of the question.”

“Paper is poverty, it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself.”

“The system of banking have[for]ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our Constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption, and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens.”

“Our wish is that...[there be] maintained that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry or that of his fathers.”

“Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.”

“We must use a good deal of economy in our wood, never cutting down new, where we can make the old do.”

“Scenes are now to take place as will open the eyes of credulity and of insanity itself, to the dangers of a paper medium abandoned to the discretion of avarice and of swindlers.”

“Our business is to have great credit and to use it little.”

“But harder still it has proved to resist and rule the dragon Money, with his paper wings. Chancellors and Boards of Trade, Pitt, Peel, and Bobinson, and their parliaments, and their whole generation, adopted false principles, and went to their graves in the belief that they were enriching the country which they were impoverishing.”

“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 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 duress of a small group of dominant men.”

“The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands.”

“If everybody (traded his car for a horse) they would be out of debt in a couple of years. Just think, no gas, no tires, no roads to pay for.”

“Invest in inflation. It is the only thing going up.”

“There is not a man in the country that can't make a living for himself and family. But he can't make a living for them and his government, too, the way his government is living. What the government has got to do is live as cheap as the people”

“One wants recovery to start from the bottom, and the other wants it to start from the top. I don't know which is right. I've never heard of anybody suggesting that they might start it in the middle, so I hereby make that suggestion. To start recovery halfway between the two, because it's the middle class that does everything anyhow. But I don't know anything about it.”

“Alexander Hamilton started the U.S. Treasury with nothing, and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even.”

“Show me a healthy community with a healthy economy and I will show you a community that has its green infrastructure in order and understands the relationship between the built and the unbuilt environment.”

“The stock market has spoiled more appetites than bad cooking.”

“Big business is not dangerous because it is big, but because its bigness is an unwholesome inflation created by privileges and exemptions which it ought not to enjoy.”

“The truth is we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless.”

“I am a most unhappy man. I accidentally ruined my country. A great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit. Our government is no longer based on the freedom of opinion, nor on the conviction and the majority decision, it is now a government which is subjected to the conviction and the compulsion of a small group of dominant men.”

“If you got a dollar, soak it away, put it in a savings bank, bury it, do anything but spend it. Spending when we didn't have it put us where we are today. Saving when we've got it will get us back to where we was before we went cuckoo.”

“We are the first nation in the history of the world to go to the poorhouse in an automobile.”

“When you figure it right down, none of us are in a really essential business but the farmer, and he raises so much that even his business is partly non-essential.”

“Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral bak'd meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.”

“Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.”

“There was a time when corporations played a minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of corporations.”

“The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.”

“Land taxes is the thing. They got so high that there is no chance to make anything. Not only land but all property tax. You see in the old days, why the only thing they knew how to tax was land, or a house. Well, that condition went along for quite awhile, so even today the whole country tries to run its revenue on taxes on land. They never ask if the land makes anything. "It's land ain't it? Well tax it then."”

“If this depression stays with us, the loser Tuesday is going to be the winner.”

“Alexander Hamilton originated the put and take system in our national treasury: the taxpayers put it in, and the politicians take it out”

“Like I say, I don't think it'll be done perfectly. Maybe we'll end up with a little bit better [economy] system.”

“The nation is prosperous on the whole, but how much prosperity is there in a hole?”

“Why don't somebody print the truth about our present economic situation? We spent six years of wild buying on credit - everything under the sun, whether we needed it or not - and now we are having to pay for 'em, and we are howling like a pet coon.”

“Rotation of crops and less automobiles will relieve the farmers whenever they decide to try it.”

“Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome after-effects. Their precise nature is anyone's guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation.”

“There's nothing inappropriate about having debt in America. It's what helped us grow over time. And it's when debt gets out of control that you worry.”

“The good thing is, we have household formation in this country.”

“We've got more productive capacity now than we ever have.”

“Our financial ills will never be settled till you fix it so every man will pay an income tax on what he earns, be it a farm, grocery store or municipal or government bonds.”

“If we could just go back the last two or three years and do our buying a little more carefully, why... we would be O.K.”

“People want just taxes more than they want lower taxes. They want to know that every man is paying his proportionate share according to his wealth.”