Debt Quotes

“Once she was gone, I knelt next to Annabeth and felt her forehead. She was still burning up.
"You're cute when you're worried," she muttered. "Your eyebrows get all scrunched together."
"You are not going to die while I owe you a favor," I said. "Why did you take that knife?"
"You would've done the same for me."
It was true. I guess we both knew it. Still, I felt like somebody was poking my heart with a cold metal rod.”
― Rick Riordan, The Last Olympian

“I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.

{His teacher was the legendary philosopher Aristotle}”
― Alexander the Great

“I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.”
― Saki, The Unbearable Bassington

“If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.”
― John Maynard Keynes

“If Koboi defeats and presumably murders us both then you can consider the debt null and void.”
― Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl

“If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“[Credit is a system whereby] a person who can't pay, gets another person who can't pay, to guarantee that he can pay.”
― Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

“You must gain control over your money or the lack of it will forever control you.”
― Dave Ramsey

“The speed of your success is limited only by your dedication and what you're willing to sacrifice”
― Nathan W. Morris

“The gift was not large as money goes, and my need was not great, but the spirit of the gift is beyond price and leaves me blessed and in debt.”
― Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

“As it turns out, we don't "all" have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“In fact this is precisely the logic on which the Bank of England—the first successful modern central bank—was originally founded. In 1694, a consortium of English bankers made a loan of £1,200,000 to the king. In return they received a royal monopoly on the issuance of banknotes. What this meant in practice was they had the right to advance IOUs for a portion of the money the king now owed them to any inhabitant of the kingdom willing to borrow from them, or willing to deposit their own money in the bank—in effect, to circulate or "monetize" the newly created royal debt. This was a great deal for the bankers (they got to charge the king 8 percent annual interest for the original loan and simultaneously charge interest on the same money to the clients who borrowed it) , but it only worked as long as the original loan remained outstanding. To this day, this loan has never been paid back. It cannot be. If it ever were, the entire monetary system of Great Britain would cease to exist.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“A promise made is a debt unpaid”
― Robert W. Service, The Cremation of Sam McGee

“The ideas of debtor and creditor as to what constitutes a good time never coincide.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Love Among the Chickens

“What does jealousy indicate? Jealousy is love manifested in the physical world. If you are jealous you have a debt to pay; if someone is jealous of you, he has a debt to pay to you.”
― Peter Deunov

“Every time you borrow money, you're robbing your future self.”
― Nathan W. Morris

“Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt . they can’t afford the time to think. Tuition fee increases are a “disciplinary technique,” and, by the time students graduate, they are not only loaded with debt, but have also internalized the “disciplinarian culture.” This makes them efficient components of the consumer economy.”
― Noam Chomsky

“The criminalization of debt, then, was the criminalization of the very basis of human society. It cannot be overemphasized that in a small community, everyone normally was both a lender and borrower. One can only imagine the tensions and temptations that must have existed in a community—and communities, much though they are based on love, in fact because they are based on love, will always also be full of hatred, rivalry and passion—when it became clear that with sufficiently clever scheming, manipulation, and perhaps a bit of strategic bribery, they could arrange to have almost anyone they hated imprisoned or even hanged.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“The Sikh gave him the money. When Menon asked for his address so that he could repay the man, the Sikh said that Menon owed the debt to any stranger who came to him in need, as long as he lived. The help came from a stranger and was to be repaid to a stranger.”
― Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

“Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run...”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“It is no tragedy to do ungrateful people favors, but it is unbearable to be indebted to a scoundrel.”
― Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld

“A good name is still to be preferred over great riches. Especially it is to be preferred to the appearance of riches, aquired with nothing down and nothing to pay for 2 months.”
― Ezra Taft Benson

“Now a promise made is a debt unpaid,
and the trail has its own stern code.”
― Robert W. Service, The Cremation of Sam McGee

“Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“I looked into her eyes, and saw my own staring back, the same peculiar shade, pale grey, flecked with yellow, rimmed with black. Now I knew the nature of her debt. It had weighed on her conscience for fourteen years. I was looking into the eyes of mother and I knew that I would never see her again.”
― Celia Rees, Witch Child

“As Charles Darwin said,'The economy shown by Nature in her resources is striking,'' says the Spirit. 'All wealth comes from Nature. Without it, there wouldn't be any economics. The primary wealth is food, not money. Therefore anything that concerns the handling of the land also concerns me.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“She says, "Do you have any rubbers?" I say, I thought she was barren. "Sure, I'm sterile," she says, "but I've had unprotected sex with a million guys. I could have some terrible fatal disease." I say that would only be a problem if I wanted to live a lot longer. Fertility says, " That's how I feel about my giant credit card debt." So we have sex. If you could call it that.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“No credit--no debt. Credit leads a man into temptation. Cash down is the only thing that will deliver him from evil.”
― Solomon Northrup