This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"He who promises runs in debt." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL
"Debt is the worst poverty." - Thomas Fuller
"Debt is an evil conscience." - Thomas Fuller
"Old Thanks pay not for a new Debt." - Thomas Fuller
"The doer of the favor is the firmer friend of the two, in order by continued kindness to keep the recipient in his debt; while the debtor feels less keenly from the very consciousness that the return he makes will be a payment, not a free gift." - Thucydides NULL
"A debt is always new." - Estonian Proverbs
"This world is so full of care and sorrow that it is a gracious debt we owe to one another to discover the bright crystals of delight hidden in somber circumstances and irksome tasks." - Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
"Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that being a natural and unalienable right. To guard a man's house as his castle, to pay public and enforce private debts with the most exact faith, can give no title to invade a man's conscience, which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection for which the public faith is pledged by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact." - James Madison
"A duty dodged is like a debt unpaid; it is only deferred, and we must come back and settle the account at last." - Joseph Fort Newton
"Worrying about something is like paying interest on a debt you don't even know if you owe." - Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
"One sacrifice, however great, is insufficient to pay the debt of sin. The atonement requires constant self-immolation on the sinner’s part. That God’s wrath should be vented upon His beloved Son, is divinely unnatural. Such a theory is man-made." - Mary Baker Eddy
"Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations. Thus the individual, his freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not vice versa: society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the higher, the more fully the individual is developed, the greater his freedom — and the more he is the product of society, the more does he receive from society and the greater his debt to it." - Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
"A believer's soul is attached to his debt till it is paid." - Muhammad, also spelled Mohammad, Mohammed or Mahomet, full name Muhammad Ibn `Abd Allāh Ibn `Abd al-Muttalib NULL
"First our pleasures die - and then our hopes, and then our fears - and when these are dead, the debt is due dust claims dust - and we die too." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"At this time - we're in a dramatic crisis - euro bonds are precisely the wrong answer. They lead us into a debt union, not a stability union. Each country has to take its own steps to reduce its debt." - Angela Merkel, fully Angela Dorothea Merkel, née Kasner
"A small debt produces a debtor; a large one, an enemy." - Publius Syrus
"The world, and everyone in it is subject to environmental limits. Conventional economics believes that these limits are not there and anything can be substituted if the price is right. Acclaimed environmentalist Richard Heinberg disagrees. He thinks we have reached the end of two centuries of frenetic growth powered by fossil fuels. The current financial crisis is one of the symptoms of a system that is being wrecked, not just by debt but resource depletion and environmental devastation. [Central assertion of his book, "The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality"" - Richard Heinberg
"Meanwhile, the unwinding of decades of buildup in debt has created the conditions for a once-in-a-century financial crash " - Richard Heinberg
"One key factor was the severance of money from its moorings in precious metals, a process that started over a century ago. Once money came to be based on debt (so that it was created primarily when banks made loans), growth in total outstanding debt became a precondition for growth of the money supply and therefore for economic expansion. With virtually everyone " - Richard Heinberg
"The end of growth is the ultimate credit event, as everyone gradually comes to realize there will be no surplus later with which to repay interest on debt that is accruing now." - Richard Heinberg
"Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience. You will find it a calamity." - Robertson Davies
"A promise made is a debt unpaid." - Robert Service, fully Robert William Service
"Millions for defence, but not one cent for tribute." - Silvio Pellico
"We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one!" - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
"Let me assure my countrymen of the Southern States that it is my earnest desire to regard and promote their truest interest — the interests of the white and of the colored people both and equally — and to put forth my best efforts in behalf of a civil policy which will forever wipe out in our political affairs the color line and the distinction between North and South, to the end that we may have not merely a united North or a united South, but a united country." - Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes
"The filth and noise of the crowded streets soon destroy the elasticity of health which belongs to the country boy." - Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes
"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres." - Saint Paul, aka The Apostle Paul, Paul the Apostle or Saul of Tarsus NULL
"Be every man's friend, but in your mind remain alone." - Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL
"Do not discourage your children from hoarding, if they have a taste to it; whoever lays up his penny rather than part with it for a cake, at least is not the slave of gross appetite; and shows besides a preference always to be esteemed, of the future." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"One reason God created time was so that there would be a place to bury the failures of the past." - Samuel Rutherford
"The government of a nation itself is usually found to be but the reflux of the individuals composing it. The government that is ahead of the people will be inevitably dragged down to their level, as the government that is behind them will in the long run be dragged up." - Samuel Smiles
"The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?" - Stephen Hawking
"No foreign policy-no matter how ingenious-has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of few and carried in the hearts of many." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"What is the lesson to us to-day? Are we to go the way of the older civilizations? The immense increase in the area of civilized activity to-day, so that it is nearly coterminous with the world's surface; the immense increase in the multitudinous variety of its activities; the immense increase in the velocity of the world movement—are all these to mean merely that the crash will be all the more complete and terrible when it comes? We can not be certain that the answer will be in the negative; but of this we can be certain, that we shall not go down in ruin unless we deserve and earn our end. There is no necessity for us to fall; we can hew out our destiny for ourselves, if only we have the wit and the courage and the honesty." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"I advance with obedience to the work, ready to retire from it whenever you become sensible how much better choice it is in your power to make." - Thomas Jefferson
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." - Thomas Jefferson
"I... proposed three distinct grades of education, reaching all classes. 1. Elementary schools for all children generally, rich and poor. 2. Colleges for a middle degree of instruction, calculated for the common purposes of life and such as should be desirable for all who were in easy circumstances. And 3. an ultimate grade for teaching the sciences generally and in their highest degree... The expenses of [the elementary] schools should be borne by the inhabitants of the county, every one in proportion to his general tax-rate. This would throw on wealth the education of the poor." - Thomas Jefferson
"If the freedom of religion, guaranteed to us by law in theory, can ever rise in practice under the overbearing inquisition of public opinion, then and only then will truth, prevail over fanaticism." - Thomas Jefferson
"It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape." - Thomas Jefferson
"The art of printing secures us against the retrogradation of reason and information." - Thomas Jefferson
"The great object of my fear is the Federal Judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting with noiseless foot and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them." - Thomas Jefferson
"The tax which will be paid for [the] purpose [of education] is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance." - Thomas Jefferson
"There is a fullness of time when men should go, and not occupy too long the ground to which others have a right to advance." - Thomas Jefferson
"Not a place on earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wrangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them." - Thomas Paine
"The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances hath, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all Lovers of Mankind are affected, and in the Event of which, their Affections are interested. The laying a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling; of which Class, regardless of Party Censure, is the AUTHOR." - Thomas Paine
"The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government." - Thomas Paine
"A Democrat is just like a baby. If it's hollering and making a lot of noise, there is nothing serious the matter with it. When it's quiet and doesn't pay much attention to anything, that's when it's really dangerous." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"If he has no sympathy for the man that does love horses then there is something worse the matter with him." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers