[Document Changes: A few excellent new quotes and links added, included ones related to PARECON and Joseph Stiglitz that should have been there long ago.]

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
- George Washington

"I am convinced that those societies (such as the Native American peoples) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law, and restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretence of governing they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate."
- Thomas Jefferson

"The modern theory of the perpetuation of debt has drenched the earth with blood, and crushed its inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating."
- Thomas Jefferson

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to George Logan, November 12, 1816

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed 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 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 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

"To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill [chartering the first Bank of the United States] have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States by the Constitution. They are not among the powers specially enumerated."
- Thomas Jefferson

"I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution - taking from the Federal Government their power of borrowing (from privately-owned corporate banks)."
- Thomas Jefferson, 1798

"We are undone, my dear sir, if legislation is still permitted which makes our money, much or little, real or imaginary, as the moneyed interests shall choose to make it."
- Thomas Jefferson

"All the perplexities, confusions, and distresses in America arise, not from defects in the Constitution or confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, as much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation."
- John Adams

"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right...and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers."
- John Adams

"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 its issuance."
- James Madison

"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation and I care not who makes the laws."
- Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the Rothschild international banking dynasty, 1790

"The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They always did...they always will. They will have the same effect here as elsewhere, if we do not, by the power of government, keep them in their proper spheres."
- Gouvernor Morris, head of the committee that wrote the final draft of the U.S. Constitution

"A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins."
- Benjamin Franklin

"You see, a legitimate government can both spend and lend money into circulation, while banks can only lend significant amounts of their promissory bank notes, for they can neither give away nor spend but a tiny fraction of the money the people need. Thus, when your bankers here in England place money in circulation, there is always a debt principal to be returned and usury to be paid. The result is that you have always too little credit in circulation to give the workers full employment. You do not have too many workers, you have too little money in circulation, and that which circulates, all bears the endless burden of unpayable debt and usury."
- Benjamin Franklin, speaking at the London Parliament

"In the colonies, we issue our own money. It is called 'Colonial Scrip'. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the goods pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control it's purchasing power and we have no interest to pay to anyone."
- Benjamin Franklin, speaking at the London Parliament

"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 great unemployment and dissatisfaction. Within a year, the poor houses were filled. The hungry and homeless walked the streets everywhere. The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the International Bankers was the Prime Reason for the Revolutionary War."
- Benjamin Franklin, as quoted from his autobiography

"Unless you become more watchful in your states and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges, you will in the end find that the most important powers of government have been given or bartered away, and the control of your dearest interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations."
- 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

"You (International Bankers) are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the Eternal God, I will rout you out. If the American people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning."
- Andrew Jackson, in an address to Congress, 1829

"The bold effort the present bank has made to control the Government, the distress it has wantonly produced...are but premonitions of the fate that awaits the American People should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution [The Bank of the United States], or the establishment of another like it."
- Andrew Jackson

"Nothing but widespread suffering will produce any effect on Congress. Our only safety is in pursuing a steady course of firm restriction - and I have no doubt that such a course will ultimately lead to restoration of the currency and the recharter of the bank [The Bank of the United States]."
- Nicholas Biddle, President of the American Bankers Association

"When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes...Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain."
- Napoleon Bonaparte, 1815

"We, the People, are the rightful masters of both the Congress and the Courts. Not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who have perverted it."
- 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 in the rear is the greatest enemy. 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 insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes."
- 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 U.S., 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 Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany, 1876

"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. The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government's greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles...the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest [by not having to borrow from privately-owned corporate banks]...Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the Money Power."
- Abraham Lincoln, Senate Document 23, Page 91, 1865

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the Money Power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people (e.g., by pitting the cooperation-oriented political left against the competition-oriented political right), until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war."
- Abraham Lincoln, in a letter written to one of his Generals during the American Civil War

"If that mischievous financial policy which had its origin in the North American Republic [i.e., honest Constitutionally authorized debt-free money] should become indurated down to a fixture, then that government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without a debt (to the International Bankers). It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of the civilized governments of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe."
- The Times Newspaper of London, opinion-editorial commentary, 1862

"The death of Lincoln was a disaster for Christendom. There was no man in the United States great enough to wear his boots and the bankers went anew to grab the riches. I fear that foreign bankers with their craftiness and tortuous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America and use it to systematically 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 inheritence."
- Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany, after Lincoln's assassination

"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."
- Dr. W. Cleon Skousen, author of "The Naked Capitalist", "The Naked Communist" and numerous other works

"I went to America in the winter of 1872-73, authorised to secure, if I could, the passage of a bill demonetising silver. It was in the interest of those I represented - the governors of the Bank of England - to have it done. By 1873, gold coins were the only form of coin money."
- Ernest Seyd, Agent of the Bank of England

"It is advisable to do all in your power to sustain such prominent daily and weekly newspapers, especially the Agricultural and Religious Press, as will oppose the greenback issue of paper money and that you will also withhold patronage from all applicants who are not willing to oppose the government issue of money...To repeal the Act creating bank notes, or to restore to circulation the government issue of money will be to provide the people with money and will therefore seriously affect our individual profits as bankers and lenders. See your congressman at once and engage him to support our interests that we may control legislation."
- Secretary James Buell, speaking at an American Bankers Association meeting, 1877

"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..."
- Memo of the American Bankers Association, as printed in the US Congressional Record of April 29, 1891

"Corporate entities are persons, under the law. They are separate persons from the very real human persons who own them and run them. We have the Supreme Court of the United States to thank for this perversion. Through corruption of our government and courts, corporations subverted their original intended purpose and acquired the legal status of "natural persons" while also preserving their limited-liability legal protections (which results in corporate 'citizens' having more legal rights than human citizens do). This subversion was institutionalized in an 1886 Supreme Court decision of which Judge William O. Douglas would later write, "There was no history, logic, or reason given to support that view." Thus corporations gained Bill of Rights protections, and more, even before women and minorities had full protection. We are currently living in an era of sophisticated corporation-state feudalism."
- [Anonymous]

"Whomsoever 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 Garfield, assassinated within weeks of release of this statement during the first year of his presidency in 1881

"I am afraid that ordinary citizens will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create and destroy money. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people."
- Reginald McKenna, Chancellor of the Exchequer of England, 1924

"From the days of Spartacist-Wieshaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky, Bela Kuhn, Rosa Luxemburg, and Emma Goldman, this world conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, 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 in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920

"Marxists can always be relied upon to defend the International Bankers, to their dying breath, by portraying capitalism as some sort of vague, accidental ideological abstraction that either everybody or nobody is truly responsible for, rather than as a very specific, profoundly evil system perpetrated by very specific individuals, who are acting with full intention to drain the lifeblood from the Republic until it is dead. This fact alone should be enough to raise suspicion of the Marxists' real intention, which is to focus primarily on property-based 'class' conflict (with its implication that everyone ought to be an impoverished peasant) without ever clearly defining the real methods by which the ruling 'class' stays in power, so that they can attempt to convince the public that these methods are some kind of magic that only Marxist intellectuals can understand and con them into merely substituting the existing capitalist tyrannical order with a communist one. The Marxists are totally anti-democratic and seem to truly envy the Money Power more than they despise it."
- [Anonymous]

"Our enemy is not merely the faceless 'system' itself, it is every specific individual who shares ownership, profit and control at the heart of the system at the dire expense of everyone else, entirely in spite of all their efforts to abstract themselves beyond the situation and the responsibility for perpetuating it. This situation needs to be taken much more personally by us all, not less, and the real 'system' involved here is Evil itself."
- [Anonymous]

"Left and Right are monolithic ideas - colossal, abstract, and, as their religious origins suggest, cosmic. They are part of the darker side of humanity that replaces the specific with the general, the personal with the impersonal. If you wanted to find a way of making certain that people would have as little as possible in common, there would be no better way than to divide them, not into ten or three or four, but into two. Dual division turns the largest possible sections of humanity against one another, often causing neighbors and compatriots to have nothing to say to one another. No regeneration of community can begin without a careful demolition of Left and Right; nor can this tearing down be relinquished to academic abstraction, technical philosophy, government, corporations, or ideology. Nothing can be built without a new politics - least of all with a politics that refers outward to ideas of Heaven and Hell rather than inward to the experience of daily life."
- Hugh Graham, in his book "The Vestibule of Hell: Why Left and Right Have Never Made Sense in Politics and Life"

"This isn't just your normal case of shrill, success-hating, bleeding-heart, eat-the-rich, lawsuit-happy, commie-liberal bed-wetters versus slack-jawed, pinheaded, war-mongering, Bible-thumping, woman-hating, eco-rapist knuckle-draggers. But it is politics as usual."
- [Unknown]

"We have only one political party in the USA, the Democratic Republicans, and they just take turns lying to us."
- [Unknown]

"Communism is fascism with a human face."
- Susan Sontag

"Fascists love communism. It goes wrong so easily."
- [Anonymous]

"Obviously, neither communism nor fascism has any interest whatsoever in democracy; they both claim that democracy is an unrealistic Utopian fantasy. In fact, they both use each other as convenient scapegoats for their own crimes against democracy and human rights. True autonomist democracy can only emerge from a radically centered anarchist-libertarian philosophy that values competition and cooperation equally, the so-called meta-political 'third-position', which is the greatest threat to both the left and right extremes. The real struggle that is going on in the world today is the struggle for democracy against ALL tyranny, not merely 'class' war to substitute the tyrannical fiscal aristocracy with some despotic peasant-emporer. Phoney third-positionism is easy to reveal because it embraces both fascist and communist principles, rather than rejecting them."
- [Anonymous]

"If I told you I thought the world was controlled by a handful of capitalists and corporate bosses, you would say I was a left-winger, but if I told you who I thought the capitalists and corporate bosses were, then you would say I was far right."
- Anonymous Anarchist Black Blocker

"An anarchist who does not learn the real agenda behind anarcho-communism and anarcho-fascism will not remain a Real Anarchist for long and will instead merely end up as being somebody's "useful fool". Crypto-communist and crypto-fascist subversion is the most serious threat to any emerging autonomist democracy."
- [Anonymous]

"My political opinions lean more and more to anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs). There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power stations."
- J.R.R. Tolkien, in "Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien"

"The true equation is "democracy" = government by world financiers."
- J.R.R. Tolkien, in "The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien"

"The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or, what is most important of all, the banker of the backer."
- J.R.R. Tolkien, in "The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien"

"Throned above all, in a manner without parallel in all past, is the veiled prophet of finance, swaying all men living by a sort of magic, and delivering oracles in a language not understood of the people."
- J.R.R. Tolkien, in "The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien"

"The world is governed by very different personages to what is imagined by those who are not themselves behind the scenes."
- Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister of Britain

"The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes."
- Judge Felix Frankfurter, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice

"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 something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."
- Woodrow Wilson, 1913

"The real menace of our republic is this invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over city, state and nation. 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. Like the octopus of real life, it operates under cover of a self created screen...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 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, New York Times, March 26, 1922

"This (Federal Reserve) Act establishes the most gigantic trust [monopoly] on earth. When the President [Woodrow Wilson] signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalized. The people may not know it immediately, but the day of reckoning is only a few years removed. The trusts will soon realize that they have gone too far even for their own good. The people must make a declaration of independence to relieve themselves from the Monetary Power. This they will be able to do by taking control of Congress. Wall Streeters could not cheat us if you Senators and Representatives did not make a humbug of Congress...The greatest crime of Congress is its currency system. The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill. The caucus and the party bosses have again operated and prevented the people from getting the benefit of their own government."
- Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., 1913

"But the whole scheme of a Federal Reserve Bank with its commercial-paper basis is an impractical, cumbersome machinery, is simply a cover, to find a way to secure the privilege of issuing money and to evade payment of as much tax upon circulation as possible, and then control the issue and maintain, instead of reduce, interest rates. It is a system that, if inaugurated, will prove to the advantage of the few and the detriment of the people of the United States. It will mean continued shortage of actual money and further extension of credits; for when there is a lack of real money people have to borrow credit to their cost."
- Statement by Alexander Lassen before the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, 1913

"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."
- Woodrow Wilson

"Suppose you go to Washington and try to get at your government. You will always find that while you are politely listened to, the men really consulted are the big men who have the biggest stakes - the big bankers, the big manufacturers, the big masters of commerce...Every time it has come to a critical question, these gentlemen have been yielded to, and their demands treated as the demands that should be followed as a matter of course. The government of the United States is a foster child of the special interests. It is not allowed to have a will of its own."
- Woodrow Wilson, 1912

"If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of government. I do not expect monopoly to restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it."
- Woodrow Wilson

"The fact is that there is a serious danger of this country becoming a pluto-democracy; that is, a sham republic with the real government in the hands of a small clique of enormously wealthy men, who speak through their money, and whose influence, even today, radiates to every corner of the United States."
- William McAdoo, President Woodrow Wilson's National Campaign Vice-Chairman, in his book "Crowded Years"

"We (bankers) must proceed with caution and guard every move made, for the lower order of people are already showing signs of restless commotion. Prudence will therefore show a policy of apparently yielding to the popular will until our plans are so far consummated that we can declare our designs without fear of any organized resistance. The Farmers Alliance and Knights of Labor organizations in the United States should be carefully watched by our trusted men, and we must take immediate steps to control these organizations in our interest or disrupt them. At the coming Omaha Convention to be held July 4th (1892), our men must attend and direct its movement, or else there will be set on foot such antagonism to our designs as may require force to overcome. This at the present time would be premature. We are not yet ready for such a crisis. Capital must protect itself in every possible manner through combination [conspiracy] and legislation. The courts must be called to our aid, debts must be collected, bonds and mortgages forclosed as rapidly as possible. When through the process of the law, the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and easily governed through the influence of the strong arm of the government applied to a central power of imperial wealth under the control of the leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. History repeats itself in regular cycles. This truth is well known among our principal men who are engaged in forming an imperialism of the world. While they are doing this, the people must be kept in a state of political antagonism. The question of tariff reform must be urged through the organization known as the Democratic Party, and the question of protection with the reciprocity must be forced to view through the Republican Party. By thus dividing voters, we can get them to expand their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us, except as teachers to the common herd. Thus, by discrete action, we can secure all that has been so generously planned and successfully accomplished."
- Revealed by Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh before the U.S. Congress sometime during his term of office between the years of 1907 and 1917

"It [Central Bank] gives the National Bank almost complete control of national finance. Those few who understand the system [check book money and credit] will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependant 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 burden without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical [contrary] to their interests."
- Rothschild Brothers of London, 1863

"The type of 'money' we are using is not a neutral value-system in any way whatsoever; it is in fact an elaborate control-system under the direction of the usurers for their own benefit exclusively. We should never be using words like "wealth" or "value" to refer to this 'money' at all because it is purely monetized, illegitimate debt and only terms revealing a form of evil enslavement process should be used to characterize it. The existence of privately-owned corporations set up to run the nation's economy for their own profit cannot be tolerated and they must be permanently removed by whatever means necessary - otherwise, if capitalism is permitted to run its course, they will not stop until they have cheated the planet to death."
- [Anonymous]

"...the lord and master of the money markets of the world, and of course virtually lord and master of everything else. He literally held the revenues of southern Italy in pawn, and monarchs and ministers of all countries courted his advice and were guided by his suggestions."
- Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister of Britain, describing Baron Nathan Rothschild in his novel, "Coningsby: Or The New Generation"

"When the conflict with France ended (at the battle of Waterloo) the House of Rothschild was in control of British finance and was the official banker of the British Government. This odd financial octopus was acknowledged to be in some respects the greatest power on the earth and was acknowledged by some writers as the 'Sixth Great Power of Europe'."
- E.C. Knuth, in his book "The Empire of The City"

"The Federal Reserve Bank is pretty secretive about who it's owning banks or shareholders are. It has been determined that the "Class A" stock in the Federal Reserve Bank are held by the following 8 institutions: Rothschild Banks of London and Berlin, Lazard Brothers Bank of Paris, Israel Moses Seif Bank of Italy, Warburg Bank of Hamburg and Amsterdam, Lehman Bank of New York, Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York, Chase Manhattan Bank of New York, Goldman Sachs Bank of New York. The Remaining Stock is held by the Chemical Trust and the Rockefeller Trust. These stockholders hold Federal Government Obligations which amount to about $6 trillion dollars - the entire U.S. National Debt. Their annual profits from interest payments are over $200 billion dollars per year."
- [Anonymous]

"Bill Gates is not the 'richest man in the world' by a long shot. His $50 billion dollar fortune (give or take) is virtually nothing compared to the wealth and economic power of the House of Rothschild. Baron Jacob Rothschild (who controls the Rothschild banking dynasty) is owed approximately half of the U.S. national debt (which is now some $6 trillion dollars) because the privately-owned Rothschild Bank and its proxies have a 51 percent ownership and controlling interest in the U.S. Federal Reserve System; and this $3 trillion dollar amount obviously does not even include the debt that many other nations ultimately owe to the Rothschild banking network. The interest payments alone provide the Rothschild Bank with $100 billion dollars per year. The reason that the Rothschild dynasty remains generally obscure to the public is because virtually all of their assets are privately-owned and they are very carefully protected from public scrutiny by various ways and means. It has been estimated that the House of Rothschild, directly or indirectly, controls a very substantial portion of the $35 trillion dollars in total overall spending power that exists in the world today."
- [Anonymous]

"To ignore the pivotal role played by particular individuals who are in positions of power is to do violence to historical accuracy. A recognition that the course of economic events can be influenced by individuals who have the imagination and the power to take advantage of prevailing conditions does not constitute acceptance of a 'conspiracy' theory of history."
- John Blair, former Chief Economist for the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Anti-Trust and Monopoly

"The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. 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 money and control credit, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it all back again. However, take this great power away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine 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, Director of the Bank of England in the 1920s, reputed to be the second wealthiest man in England at that time

"A civilization based on a system of parasitic usury economics will ultimately destroy itself, because fractional-reserve 'banking', combined with compound 'interest', is truly and totally contrary to the modern "Establishment" economic theory that it represents some kind of perpetual-motion machine. Our economic system was not designed to, nor was it intended to, function honorably for the benefit and general prosperity of all; it was specifically designed to create a nation of debt slaves under the control of a molesting central bank. The perpetrators of the system understand fully that it is not sustainable and must inevitably collapse in a state of insoluble debt, but by that point they expect to have gained full and indisputable control over everything [NWO]. The 450 richest people in the world now have financial assets equal to the combined wealth of the 3 billion poorest; half of all humanity. The only possible explanation for this is that the international economic system has been subverted and corrupted by fully intentional activities, directed towards undermining national governments and creating institutionalized, privately-owned central banks throughout the world to concentrate and consolidate power into the hands of the financial crimelords who own them."
- [Anonymous]

"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 H. Hamphill, Credit Manager, Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank

"While economic textbooks claim that people and corporations are competing for markets and resources, I claim that in reality they are competing for money - using markets and resources to do so. Greed and fear of scarcity are being continuously created and amplified as a direct result of the kind of money we are using. For example, we can produce more than enough food to feed everybody, and there is definitely enough work for everybody in the world, but there is clearly not enough money to pay for it all. In fact, the job of central banks is to create and maintain that currency scarcity. Money is created when banks lend it into existence. When a bank provides you with a $100,000 mortgage, it creates only the principal, which you spend and which then circulates in the economy. The bank expects you to pay back $200,000 over the next 20 years, but it doesn't create the second $100,000 - the interest. Instead, the bank sends you out into the tough world to battle against everybody else to bring back the second $100,000."
- Bernard Lietaer, former Central Banker (Belgium)

"Your money's value is determined by a global casino of unprecedented proportions: $2 trillion are traded per day in foreign exchange markets, 100 times more than the trading volume of all the stockmarkets of the world combined. Only 2% of these foreign exchange transactions relate to the "real" economy reflecting movements of real goods and services in the world, and 98% are purely speculative. This global casino is triggering the foreign exchange crises which shook Mexico in 1994-5, Asia in 1997 and Russia in 1998. These emergencies are the dislocation symptoms of the old Industrial Age money system."
- Bernard Lietaer, former Central Banker (Belgium)

"In addition to almost unlimited usury, the bankers have another method of drawing vast amounts of wealth. The banks are able to approve or disapprove large loans to large and successful corporations to the extent that refusal of a loan will bring about a reduction in the selling price of the corporation's stock. After depressing the price, the bankers' agents buy large blocks of the company's stock. Then, if the bank suddenly approves a multi-million dollar loan to the company, the stock rises and is then sold for a profit. In this manner, billions of dollars are made with which to buy more stock. This practice is so refined today that the Federal Reserve Board need only announce to the newspapers an increase or decrease in their "discount rate" to send stocks soaring or crashing at their whim. Banks collect billions in interest by loaning to Government and the Corporations."
- Pastor Sheldon Emry

"The basis of money in today's world is not simply the trading of one thing of obvious value (say, a gold coin) for another thing of obvious value (for example, a keg of beer) which, in fact, would be more a form of barter than a modern day monetary purchase. In the modern economy, the value of money is based strictly on mutual faith and faith alone - faith in pieces of paper signed by a Central Banker as having whatever value he decides to give them, such as is the case with Federal Reserve Notes. This faith that the paper has some kind of value is basically a game of "let's pretend" on the part of the banker supported only by the fact that the banker has seized control of the government and he will not tolerate any uncontrolled standard of exchange to compete with his official monopoly of interest-bearing usury 'money'. In essence, this means that every time you spend a Federal Reserve Note you are making a very profound expression of faith that the Central Banker is a kind of 'god' who can create value out of absolutely nothing because this is his 'holy' privilege. Not only that, but you also become perpetually, irreversibly indebted to him, as a form of 'worship', for his creating of the 'money' by the usury that he charges you for this 'service' (e.g., the U.S. $6 trillion dollar debt). This is capitalism - a glorified pyramid scheme for making money off of money."
- [Anonymous]

"There is a large class of people who believe that paper can be, and ought to be, made into money without any promise or hope of redemption; that a note should be printed: "This is a dollar," and be made a legal tender. I regard this as a mild form of lunacy, and have no disposition to debate with men who indulge in such delusions, which have prevailed to some extent, at different times, in all countries, but whose life has been brief, and which have shared the fate of other popular delusions. The Supreme Court only maintained the constitutionality of the legal tender promise to pay a dollar by a divided court, and on the ground that it was issued in the nature of a forced loan, to be redeemed upon the payment of a real dollar; that is, so many grains of silver or gold. I therefore dismiss such wild theories, and speak only to those who are willing to assume, as an axiom, that gold and silver or coined money, have been proven by all human experience to be the best possible standards of value, and that paper money is simply a promise to pay such coined money, and should be made and kept equal to coined money, by being convertible on demand."
- Secretary of Treasury John Sherman, 1877

"I am firmly of the opinion that there never was a paper pound, a paper dollar, or a paper promise of any kind, that ever yet obtained a general currency (as money) but by force or fraud, generally by both."
- John Adams

"If ever again our nation stumbles upon unfunded paper, it shall surely be like death to our body politic. This country will crash."
- George Washington

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, (i.e., the "business cycle") the banks and 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, in the debate over the Recharter Of The Bank Bill, 1809

"The International Bankers have already hedged themselves against any return to a gold-backed currency (gold standard). Such a move would be disastrous for the nation now. After 1913, the Bankers plundered the USA of as much gold as possible (including the US Treasury's gold in Fort Knox) using their new fiat paper money from the Federal Reserve Bank to do so (from 1933 until the 1974 it was illegal for American citizens to even own gold). Fort Knox has never been in any way audited since the Eisenhower days and its gold has been made available for purchase by the banks under various schemes. The Bankers now own most of the world's gold and could easily manipulate its value to their liking if it were to become the basis for a national currency (the IMF is currently the largest gold owner in the world). Thus, when the Bankers create their next financial panic in order to manipulate and exploit the public's terror, they may very well delude them into thinking that the dollar could be strengthened by backing it with gold again, and this would merely tighten the International Bankers' control over the economy even further while simultaneously fostering the illusion in the minds of the people that they would be safe with a new non-fiat currency. Silver is better for backing a currency with than gold (for now) because it is fifteen times more plentiful than gold and the market for silver is much harder to corner. In the long term, however, the only real safety is in having a plurality of different currency standards and barter opportunities continually available for the public to choose from (plus the vital elimination of all interest/usury and fractional-reserve accounting). Collusion and monopoly are where the dangers arise and economic democracy is the only solution."
- [Anonymous]

"Strictly speaking, it probably is not necessary for the federal government to tax anyone directly, it could simply print the money it needs. However, that would be too bold a stroke, for it would then be obvious to all what kind of counterfeiting operation the government is running. The present system of combining taxation and inflation is akin to watering the milk: too much water and the people catch on."
- Congressman Ron Paul

"Taxation has only one real purpose in our present economy, it is used to justify the monopoly fiat currency we are using in the mind of the public by forcing them to pay their taxes with only this currency - and no other alternative currencies. It is merely a mechanism for ensuring that the public is forced to keep the central bank's money in circulation, and thus support the continuation of the Federal Reserve scam. You will find that virtually every complex aspect of macro-economic "science" is carefully designed to obfuscate the fact that the money lords totally own and control the economic system and designed it specifically to enslave the rest of us."
- [Anonymous]

"Examining the organization and function of the Federal Reserve Banks and applying the relevant factors, we conclude that the Federal Reserve Banks are not Federal instrumentalities...but are independent and privately owned and controlled corporations...Federal Reserve Banks are listed neither as 'wholly owned' government corporations [under 31 U.S.C. Section 846] nor as 'mixed ownership' corporations [under 31 U.S.C. Section 856]...It is evident from the legislative history of the Federal Reserve Act that Congress did not intend to give the Federal government direction over the daily operation of the Reserve Banks...The fact that the Federal Reserve Board regulates the Reserve Banks does not make them Federal agencies under the Act...Unlike typical Federal agencies, each bank is empowered to hire and fire employees at will. Bank employees do not participate in the Civil Service Retirement System. They are covered by worker's compensation insurance, purchased by the Bank, rather than the Federal Employees Compensation Act. Employees traveling on Bank business are not subject to Federal travel regulations and do not receive government employee discounts on lodging and services..."
- Lewis vs. U.S., Case #80-5905, 9th Circuit, June 24, 1982

"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."
- Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., 1923

"Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are not Government institutions. They are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lenders."
- Congressman Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, 1932

"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., American Mercury Magazine, August 1957

"A disordered currency is one of the greatest political evils. It undermines the virtues necessary for the support of the social system, and encourages propensities destructive to its happiness. It wars against industry, frugality and economy, and it fosters evil spirits of extravagance and speculation. Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effectual than that which deludes them with paper money."
- Congressman Daniel Webster, 1846

"The Federal Reserve banks are 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, Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, 1934

"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 of our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will."
- Congressman Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, 1934

"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."
- Senator Barry Goldwater, former Republican Party candidate for President

"From now on, depressions will be scientifically created."
- Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., 1913, in reference to the Federal Reserve Act

"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 (itself)."
- Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr.

"It (Black Thursday, 1929) was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrance...The International Bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all."
- Congressman Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency

"The depression was the calculated 'shearing' of the public by the World Money Powers, triggered by the planned sudden shortage of supply of call money in the New York money market...The One World Government leaders and their ever close bankers have now acquired full control of the money and credit machinery of the U.S. via the creation of the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank."
- Curtis Dall, Franklin D. Roosevelt's son-in-law, as quoted from his book, "My Exploited Father-in-Law", 1970

"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, Nobel Prize winning economist, in an NPR interview in January 1996

"The one who cannot see that on Earth a big endeavor is taking place, an important plan, on which realization we are allowed to collaborate as faithful servants, certainly has to be blind."
- Winston Churchill

"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."
- Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister of Britain, 1876

"It is useless to deny, because it is impossible to conceal, that a great part of Europe - the whole of Italy and France and a great portion of Germany, to say nothing of other countries - is covered with a network of these secret societies, just as the superficies of the earth is now being covered with railroads."
- Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister of Britain, 1876

"There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself."
- Senator Daniel K. Inouye, at the joint House and Senate Iran-Contra affair hearings, 1987

"Today the path of total dictatorship in the United States can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by the Congress, the President, or the people. Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system, another body representing another form of government - a bureaucratic elite."
- Senator William Jenner, 1954

"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 Patterson, Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency

"I have never seen more senators express discontent with their jobs...I think the major cause is that, deep down in our hearts, we have been accomplices to doing something terrible and unforgivable to this wonderful country. Deep down in our hearts, we know that we have bankrupted America and that we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy...We have defrauded our country to get ourselves elected."
- Senator John Danforth, reported in the Arizona Republic of April 21, 1992

"The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements, arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank...sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in any country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards [lucrative 'consulting' gigs] in the business world...The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups."
- Carroll Quigley, Professor of History at Georgetown University (deceased) in his book "Tragedy and Hope: A History of The World in Our Time", 1966; Highly esteemed by his former student, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton

"There does exist and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for 20 years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret record."
- Carroll Quigley, Professor of History at Georgetown University (deceased)

"Their secret is that they have annexed from governments, monarchies, and republics the power to create the world's money on debt-terms requiring tribute both in principal and interest."
- Carroll Quigley, Professor of History at Georgetown University (deceased)

"In a small Swiss city [Basel] sits an international organization so obscure and secretive [that few people know about it]...Control of the institution, the Bank for International Settlements, lies with some of the world's most powerful and least visible men; the heads of 32 central banks, officials able to shift billions of dollars and alter the course of economies at the stroke of a pen."
- Keith Bradsher of the New York Times, August 5, 1995

"The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is eager to enter into close relationship with the Bank for International Settlements...The conclusion is impossible to escape that the State and Treasury Departments are willing to pool the banking systems of Europe and America, setting up a world financial power independent of and above the Government of the United States."
- Congressman Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, quoted from the New York Times, June 1930

"Ever since the Civil War, Congress has allowed the bankers to control financial legislation. The membership of the Finance Committee in the Senate [now the Banking and Currency Committee] and the Committee on Banking and Currency in the House have been made up chiefly of bankers, their agents, and their attorneys...In this way the committees have been able to control legislation in the interests of the few."
- Congressman Charles A. Lindberg, Sr.

"The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is "The Establishment". Not only does it have influence and power in key decision-making positions at the highest levels of government to apply pressure from above, but it also announces and uses individuals and groups to bring pressure from below, to justify the high level decisions for converting the U.S. from a sovereign Constitutional Republic into a servile member state of a one-world dictatorship."
- Former Congressman John Rarick, 1971

"The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is the American Branch of a society which originated in England [The Royal Institute of International Affairs]...and believes national boundaries should be obliterated and one-world rule established."
- Carroll Quigley, Professor of History at Georgetown University (deceased)

"The Trilateral Commission is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateral Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power - political, monetary, intellectual, and ecclesiastical. All this is to be done in the interest of creating a more peaceful, more productive world community. What the Trilateralists truly intend is the creation of a worldwide economic power superior to the political governments of the nation-states involved. They believe the abundant materialism they propose to create will overwhelm existing differences. As managers and creators of the system they will rule the future."
- Senator Barry Goldwater, former Republican Party candidate for President, in his book "With No Apologies", 1964

"The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining supercapitalism and communism under the same tent, all under their control...Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent."
- Congressman Larry P. McDonald, 1976, killed in the Korean Airlines 747 (Flight KAL007) that was shot down by the Soviets in 1983

"The interests behind the Bush Administration, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, The Trilateral Commission - founded by Zbigniew Brzezinski for David Rockefeller - and the Bilderberger Group, have prepared for and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship within the next five years. They are not fighting against terrorists. They are fighting against citizens."
- Dr. Johannes B. Koeppl, Ph.D., 2001, former German Defense Ministry official and advisor to former NATO Secretary General Manfred Werner

"The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by (obsolete) traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities."
- Zbigniew Brzezinski

"In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press...They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers."
- Congressman Oscar Callaway, 1917

"These International Bankers and Rockefeller Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of public office officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government."
- Theodore Roosevelt

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it will never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassels for rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
- John Swinton, former Chief of Staff of the New York Times, called by his peers "The Dean of his profession", was asked in 1953 to give a toast before the New York Press Club

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."
- David Rockefeller, Baden-Baden, Germany, 1991

"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nation will accept the New World Order."
- David Rockefeller, probably just a tad over-enthusiastic, pre-September 11, 2001

"By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, more sure way 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 in which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."
- John Maynard Keynes

"The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled."
- John Kenneth Galbraith, in his book "Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went", 1975

"Mr. Greenspan needs to make his decision independent of what I think. I learned a pretty good lesson during the transition, and that is I commented out loud about one of the actions he took [whoah!]. That's the last time I'm going to comment about the actions Mr. Greenspan takes. He's an independent voice, and needs to be an independent voice."
- [Notional] President George W. Bush, speaking in regards to the Federal Reserve Board Chairman, 2001

"To modern minds, it seemed bizarre to think of the Federal Reserve as a religious institution. Yet the conspiracy theorists, in their own demented way, were on to something real and significant. The Fed does in fact function in the realm of religion. Its mysterious powers of money creation, inherited from priestly forebears, shielded a complex bundle of social and psychological meanings. With its own form of secret incantation, the Federal Reserve presided over awesome social ritual, transactions so powerful and frightening they seemed to lie beyond common understanding. Above all, money was a function of faith. It required implicit and universal social consent that was indeed mysterious. To create money and use it, each one must believe, and everyone must believe. Only then did worthless pieces of paper take on value."
- William Grieder, former Assistant Managing Editor of The Washington Post, in his book "Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country", 1987

"Banking establishments are...moral and religious institutions [usury is holy?]...What has been (the young tradesman's) anxiety to stand well in the estimation of his banker?...Has not the frown of his banker been of more influence with him than the jeers and discouragements of his friends? Has he not trembled to be supposed guilty of deceit or the slightest misstatement, lest it should give rise to suspicion, and his accommodation be in consequence restricted or discontinued?...And has not that friendly advice been of more value to him than that of priest?"
- G.M. Bell, a Scottish bank director

"Those who swallow down usury cannot arise except as one whom Satan has prostrated by his touch does rise. That is because they say, trading is only like usury; and Allah has allowed trading and forbidden usury. To whomsoever then the admonition has come from his Lord, then he desists, he shall have what is already passed, and his affairs is in the hands of Allah; and whoever returns to it - these are the inmates of the fire; they shall abide in it..."
- The Qur'an, Surah Al-Baqarah

"And they come to Jerusalem: and Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers...And the scribes and chief priests...sought how they might destroy him: for they feared him, because all the people was astonished at his doctrine. - Mark 11:15-18"
- The Bible

"If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury. - Exodus 22:25. Take no usury of him, or increase: but fear God...thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury. - Leviticus 25:36-37. Unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury: That the Lord thy God bless thee. - Deuteronomy 23:20"
- The Bible

"There must be no lending at interest because it will be quite in order for the borrower to refuse absolutely to return both interest and principal."
- Aristotle

"The trade of the petty usurer is hated with most reason: it makes a profit from currency itself, instead of making it from the process which currency was meant to serve."
- Plato

"It comes as news to most people to learn that practically all important ethical teachers - Moses, Aristotle, Jesus, Mohammed, and Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance - have denounced lending at interest as usury and as morally wrong."
- Lawrence Dennis, Saturday Review of Literature 661, June 24, 1933

"It is almost amusing that some Federal Reserve currency is marked with the words "In God We Trust". Nothing could be further from the truth. To trust in God is to continue to diligently and honestly work for your rewards and to live your life accepting that fate could someday take away all of your accumulated fortune and leave you having to start over again from nothing - if God saw fit to do this to you for some reason. In total contrast to this principle, banks operate entirely under the unnatural concept of trying to hedge against God, not trust Him, and they entertain the notion that a pile of money must have the infinite capacity to grow, through processes of usury where no useful work whatsoever is involved, so that the filthy rich who sit on these piles can feel safer about their future and avoid the risks that everyone else must endure every day. Financial titans are vile cowards, not heroes - the only way they can stay rich is to make sure everyone else stays poor. Banking institutions are a social pathology and the Devil's embassies on Earth."
- [Anonymous]

"Lucre [Money] is the false Quintessence of this illusory world that we live in; It can be converted into 'anything' and 'anything' can be converted into it."
- MIB Dissident, The Sovereign Temple Bank of Royal Imperial Commerce

"The most sinister and anti-social feature about bank-deposit money is that it has no existence. The banks owe the public for a total amount of money which does not exist. In buying and selling, implemented by cheque transactions, there is a mere change in the party to whom the money is owed by the banks. As the one depositor's account is debited, the other is credited and the banks can go on owing for it all the time. 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 get ever 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, Nobel Prize winner (Chemistry), 1921

"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, also. The difference between the bond and the bill is the bond lets money brokers collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%, whereas the currency pays nobody but those who contribute directly in some useful way. It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30 million in bonds and not $30 million in currency. Both are promises to pay, but one promise fattens the usurers and the other helps the people."
- Thomas Edison, The New York Times, December 6, 1921

"Economic warfare spans political warfare and military warfare and supersedes both, which are merely tools in the hands of those who are the masters of economic systems. The public is systematically misled, almost hypnotically, to believe that no such hidden masters of economic systems actually exist, or could even possibly exist, and that all of the economic strife in the world today is strictly the result of unplanned human incompetence when, in fact, very deliberate economic warfare is being carried out. Populations struggle to find purely political or military solutions to their economic problems, or they are manipulated and duped into giving yet more economic control over to their masters, in the name of their own prosperity, because they do not fully understand the real principles of economics and banking and remain perpetual hostages to their own economic illiteracy. The myth of their non-existence is what protects the hierarchies of the international money cults of the world and allows them to continue their constant rivalries against one another, and to maintain their existence at the dire cost of their subject populations."
- [Anonymous]

"Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign "aid" organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. I should know; I was an EHM."
- John Perkins, former NSA Operative and Chief Economist at Charles T. Main Associates, in his book "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man"

"I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half-a-dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street...In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."
- Major General Smedley D. Butler, U.S. Marine Corps; General Butler was twice awarded the Medal of Honor (1914, 1917); General Douglas MacArthur described Butler as "one of the really great generals in American history."

"We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population...Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity...To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives...We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."
- George Kennan, Director of State Department Policy Planning (Truman Administration), 1948

"For globalization to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is. The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas, the designer of the F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technology is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."
- Thomas Friedman, New York Times, March 28, 1999

"Fascism should rightly be called corporatism as it is a merge of state and corporate power."
- Benito Mussolini

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group or any controlling private power."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

"A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives."
- James Madison

"Information is the currency of democracy."
- Thomas Jefferson

"I may be alone with my thoughts, on my island located on my inland sea. Previously, I would be helpless to influence my national government. With the internet, although physically isolated, I can associate with millions across my country and across the globe. No longer am I one person, and no government can afford to ignore me. I have become a power bloc, in both theory and in fact. Even if I ignore today the ability I now have to associate with others, no government can afford to ignore the possibility that someday I may, for some reason, choose to exercise this ability to associate. The individual, isolated or not, has become important."
- Andrew Grosso, Attorney, Chairman of the ACM Committee on Law and Computer Technology

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."
- Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861

"When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect [provide for] their Safety and Happiness..."
- Declaration of Independence of the American Colonies, 1776

"America is at that awkward stage; it’s too late to work within the system, but [still?] too early to shoot the bastards."
- Claire Wolfe

"A Government that makes peaceful revolution impossible, makes armed revolution inevitable."
- John F. Kennedy

"The high office of President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom, and before I leave office I must inform the citizen of his plight."
- John F. Kennedy, speaking at Columbia University, 10 days before his assassination

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"
- Benjamin Franklin

"When the government fears the people, you have liberty; when the people fear the government, you have tyranny."
- Thomas Jefferson

"It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."
- Judge Robert H. Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court Justice

"Liberty has never come from government! Liberty has come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance!"
- Woodrow Wilson, 1912

"Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
- Thomas Paine

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety [and they will very quickly lose both]."
- Benjamin Franklin

"Trade liberty for safety or money and you'll end up with neither. Liberty, like a grain of salt, easily dissolves. The power of questioning - not simply believing - has no friends. Yet liberty depends on it."
- Thomas Jefferson

"...And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure, when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice can not sleep forever..."
- Thomas Jefferson, in "Commerce between Master and Slave", 1782

"If you aren't ready to die for it, put the word "freedom" out of your vocabulary."
- Malcolm X

"You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once."
- Robert A. Heinlein

"The perverse deceptiveness characteristic of the individuals who control the Federal Reserve Bank is readily apparent to those who know the necessary historical truths. The fact that they adorn their notes with the symbols of the Freemasons and pictures of our national heroes (to help carry on the charade that the Fed is a government institution), who were actually diametrically [totally] opposed to the Fed's existence and its type of 'money', is a mockery that is outright diabolical, and must be the insider's 'joke' of all time. Unfortunately, the consequences of this colossal con to the American people, and the entire world, are all too deadly serious. The Federal Reserve Bank is not federal, has no reserves, and is not even really a bank."
- [Anonymous]

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

"Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes the nation's laws. Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation. Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of parliament and of democracy is idle and futile."
- William Lyon Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, 1935

"All the ingredients for ending poverty of a person always comes neatly packaged with the person himself. A human being is born in this world fully equipped not only to take care of himself (which all other life-forms can do too), but also to contribute in enlarging the well-being of the world as a whole. Poverty is not created by the poor people. So we shouldn't give them an accusing look. They are the victims. Poverty has been created by the economic and social system that we have designed for the world. It is the institutions that we have built, and feel so proud of, which created poverty. It is the concepts we developed to understand the reality around us, made us see things wrongly! It is the failure at the top - rather than lack of capability at the bottom - which is the root cause of poverty. Concepts, institutions, and analytical frame conditions which created poverty, cannot end poverty. If we can intelligently re-work the frame conditions, poverty will be gone, never to come back again...Try to imagine how the economists would have built their theory if they had started out with an axiom that all men and women are created equal, that each of them is endowed with unlimited creativity, and each of them is a potential entrepreneur. In some important ways our designing of the theoretical framework of economics or the misrepresentation of it is responsible for perpetuating poverty."
- Professor Muhammad Yunus, Creator of Grameen Bank in Commonwealth Lecture, 2003

"While they prate of 'economic laws', men and women are starving [to death]. We must lay hold of the fact that 'economic laws' are not made by nature. They are made by human beings."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

"It [World Bank] has condemned people to death...They don't care if people live or die."
- Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors (Clinton Administration), shared the Nobel Prize in Economics (2001)

"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is The People vs. The Banks."
- Lord Acton, Historian and Lord Chief Justice of England, 1875

"Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal - that there is no human relation between master and slave."
- Leo Tolstoy

"The greatest enemy of mankind is his ignorance of the inherent money power in all of us. When the realization of this comes to man, he will like Samson, push down the walls of his prison."
- E.C. Riegel

"Nothing is more dangerous to the power of the elite than the public discovery and understanding of the private control of the money supply."
- Anthony Sutton, in his book "The Federal Reserve Conspiracy"

"Those who believe that history is only made by the men on the stage and determined by the most evident economic, social, political, and cultural factors, do not see and do not seek any other explanation; and yet this is exactly what every force operating in secret desires."
- Julius Evola

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
- Frederic Bastiat, in his book "Economic Sophisms"

"A lie repeated a thousand times becomes a truth."
- Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Hitler's Chief of Propaganda

"The perfect slave is the slave who thinks that he is free."
- [Unknown]

"The truth is always revolutionary."
- Antonio Gramsci

"The Empire never ended."
- Philip K. Dick

...

For more information on alternative economic systems, banking system transformation and tax rebellion visit:

 http://www.themoneymasters.com
 http://www.indybay.org/uploads/moneymasters1.wmv
 http://www.indybay.org/uploads/moneymasters2.wmv
 http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Heroes/JosephStiglitz.html
 http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=78&row=1
 http://www.sentienttimes.com/05/feb_mar05/confessions.html
 http://www.economichitman.com
 http://www.economichitman.com/pix/authormessage.pdf
 http://www.futurenet.org
 http://www.futurenet.org/2money/korten.html
 http://www.futurenet.org/2money/lietaer.html
 http://www.monetary.org
 http://www.monetaryreform.org
 http://www.ied.info
 http://www.geo.coop
 http://www.zmag.org/parecon/indexnew.htm
 http://www.parecon.org/thissite.htm
 http://www.wdm.org.uk
 http://www.localcurrency.org
 http://www.faireconomy.org
 http://www.corporations.org
 http://www.unisys.com/financial/insights/insights__compendium/WPaper_BLietaerbergdahl.pdf
 http://www.democracynature.org/dn/vol1/fotopoulos_athens.htm
 http://www.transaction.net/money/book/
 http://www.transaction.net
 http://www.accessfoundation.org
 http://www.truecosteconomics.org
 http://www.neweconomics.org
 http://www.communitycurrency.org
 http://www.libertydollar.org
 http://www.elibertydollar.org
 http://www.norfed.org
 http://www.nesara.org
 http://www.perfecteconomy.com
 http://www.federal-reserve.net
 http://www.grameen-info.org
 http://www.tradejusticeusa.org
 http://www.fairtradefederation.com
 http://www.tradejusticemovement.org
 http://www.makepovertyhistory.org
 http://www.maketradefair.com
 http://www.fairtrade.org.uk
 http://www.worldproutassembly.org
 http://www.snipurl.com/e7wu
 http://www.theclassactionsuit.com
 http://www.openmoney.org
 http://www.hourmoney.org
 http://wildfire.communitycurrency.net
 http://www.thetransitioner.org
 http://www.paycircle.org
 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ijccr/
 http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~roehrigw/suhr/nngengl.html
 http://www.solari.com
 http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/ecos/
 http://venezia-gondola.jxta.org
 http://www.centersds.com/thebook.htm
 http://www.reinventingmoney.com
 http://www.chelseagreen.com/money/
 http://www.mises.org/money.asp
 http://www.apfn.org/apfn/reserve.htm
 http://www.ex.ac.uk/~RDavies/arian/local.html
 http://www.ex.ac.uk/~RDavies/arian/llyfr.html
 http://www.ex.ac.uk/~RDavies/arian/barter.html
 http://www.moneyfiles.org
 http://www.truthinmoney.com
 http://www.monetary-reform.on.ca
 http://www.fame.org
 http://www.futuremoney.de
 http://www.geog.le.ac.uk/ijccr/
 http://www.ithacahours.org
 http://www.calgarydollars.ca
 http://vanparecon.resist.ca
 http://www.newciv.org/ncn/moneyteam.html
 http://www.henrygeorge.org
 http://www.schumachersociety.org/frameset_local_currencies.html
 http://www.gmlets.u-net.com
 http://ccdev.lets.net
 http://www.lets.net
 http://www.prosperityuk.com
 http://www.credits.info
 http://www.timedollar.org
 http://www.bioneers.org
 http://www.ced.ns.ca
 http://www.web.net/~comfront/alts4americas/eng/eng.html
 http://www.coopnetupdate.org
 http://www.cooplife.com
 http://www.coop.org
 http://www.wisc.edu/uwcc/
 http://www.moneyfacts.freeyellow.com
 http://www.freedomlaw.org
 http://www.givemeliberty.org
 http://www.bostonteapartyii.org
 http://www.freedomabovefortune.com
 http://www.soren.org/gov/money.html
 http://www.mind-trek.com/reports/eco-rape/
 http://www.mega.nu/ampp/gary_allen_rocker/index.html
 http://whistleblowers.freehosting.net/federal_reserve.htm
 http://www.john-f-kennedy.net/executiveorder11110.htm
 http://www.gata.org
 http://www.bankgate.co.za
 http://www.rightsandwrong.com.au
 http://www.supremelaw.org/sls/31answers.htm
 http://www.justiceplus.org
 http://www.taxableincome.net
 http://www.taxgate.com
 http://www.golddealer.com/caseforowning.html
 http://www.e-gold.com
 http://www.e-dinar.com
 http://www.osgold.com
 http://www.e-bullion.com
 http://www.goldmoney.com
 http://www.aeroplan.com
 http://www.points.com
 http://www.rewardsnetwork.com
 http://www.barternews.com
 http://www.irta.com
 http://www.tradeten.com
 http://www.itex.com
 http://www.iisd.ca/pcdf
 http://www.whatmatters.nu
 http://www.kamron.com/economics/economics.htm
 http://www.ic.org/market/money/
 http://www.thevenusproject.com
 http://www.progress.org/geonomy/
 http://www.gemoz.com
 http://www.greenprices.com
 http://www.margritkennedy.de
 http://www.systemfehler.de/en/index.htm
 http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/cc/NMfHC/toc.html
 http://www.xat.org/xat/alternative.html
 http://www.rprogress.org
 http://www.recs.org
 http://www.maxexchange.com/ybj/chapter_1.htm
 http://www.mobilepaymentforum.org
 http://www.mobeyforum.org
 http://www.dollarcollapse.com
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