Payback Quotes

“The trickle-down theory of economics has it that it's good for rich people to get even richer because some of their wealth will trickle own, through their no doubt lavish spending, upon those who stand below them on the economic ladder. Notice that the metaphor is not that of a gushing waterfall but of a leaking tap: even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals" pg. 102.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“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

“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

“Another friend of mine used to maintain that airplanes stayed up in the air only because people believed—against reason—that they could fly: without that collective delusion sustaining them, they would instantly plummet to earth.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“In Heaven, there are no debts - all have been paid, one way or another - but in Hell there's nothing but debts, and a great deal of payment is exacted, though you can't ever get all paid up. You have to pay, and pay, and keep on paying. So Hell is like an infernal maxed-out credit card that multiplies the charges endlessly.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“Money isn't the only thing that must flow and circulate in order to have good value: good turns and gifts must flow and circulate . . . for any social system to remain in balance.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“Debt . . . . that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“Within each of these categories, the principle was the same: rarity and beauty increased value.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“She was an infallible prophetess, and these powers came from her ability to look into the patterns of the universe.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“WITHOUT MEMORY, there is no debt. Put another way: without story, there is no debt.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“Since we had religion in the classroom, my Sunday-school caper was an add-on. As usual, I was propelled by curiosity: wouldn’t I find out more about religious knowledge in a Sunday school than I could in an ordinary school? Not likely, as it turned out the most interesting parts of the Bible, those dealing with sex, rape, child sacrifice, mutilations, massacres, the gathering up in baskets of the lopped-off heads of your enemy’s kids, and the cutting up of concubines’ bodies and sending them around as invitations-to-a-war were studiously avoided, though I did spend a lot of time colouring in angels and sheep and robes, and singing hymns about letting my little candle shine in my own small, dark corner.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“Scrooge is about to say that rich people deserve to be rich because of their superior genes and moral fibre, but he catches the Spirit frowning at him and refrains.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“Modern research backs up Dickens and Rackham, apparently rich people are not made happier simply by having a lot of wealth, but they are made happier when they give some of their wealth away. I read about this phenomenon in a newspaper, so it must be true.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“IN MY PART of the world we have a ritual interchange that goes like this:
First person: “Lovely weather we’re having.”
Second person: “We’ll pay for it later.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“As the old joke goes, Christianity, great religion, just never been tried.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“WHICH OF COURSE has a bearing on stories about revenge, where Shadows run rampant. Who knows why Character A feels such an extreme loathing toward Character B? The Shadow knows, and until Character A knows too, and acknowledges the Shadow as a creature of his own making, he won’t be free of it.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“In narratives involving irrational and obsessive hatred, especially of some person or group one doesn’t really know very well, “such hatred” say the Jungians, is the mark of a person who has not come to terms with his or her own Shadow. The Shadow is our dark side, the repository of everything in us we’re ashamed of and would rather not acknowledge, and also of those qualities we profess to despise but would in fact like to possess. If we haven’t acknowledged those things about ourselves, we’re likely to project them onto somebody else or some other group, and to develop an irrational hatred toward that person or group. In fiction, the Shadow often appears as an actual double or twin or replicant, as in Poe’s story “William Wilson” or Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“There’s also an experiment in which two monkeys were able to obtain a coveted food item by pulling together on a rope, neither one being able to accomplish this task solo. But the food was then available to only one of them. If this one refused to share, the second monkey would in future retaliate by refusing to pull on the rope. He preferred to punish the selfish monkey rather than take a chance at getting some food himself.
You know the feeling. Everyone knows it. Could it be that the revenge module is very ancient and thus deeply embedded in us? Some cultures encourage its expression more than others do, but it seems to be omnipresent. Simply telling people they ought not to feel vengeful because it isn’t nice will not usually work.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“Lest you think that this pattern has occurred only in connection with Jewish moneylenders and the Knights Templar, let me remind you of Idi Amin’s expulsion of the East Indians from Uganda in 1972, the East Indians were highly represented in the banking business and of the treatment of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam in the 1970s, including their expulsion. Whenever you have an out-group to whom an in-group owes a lot of money, “Kill the Creditors” remains an available though morally repugnant way of cancelling your debts. Note: you need not resort to murder as such. If you make people run away very fast, they’ll leave all their stuff behind, and then you can grab it. And burn the debt records: that goes without saying.
You’ll notice I got through this part without mentioning the Nazis. The point being that I didn’t have to. For they have not been alone.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“However, if the moneylenders are not some other country but are situated within your own kingdom, and you’ve borrowed what you feel is too much money from them, you can play a very dirty trick. This dirty trick has indeed been played, and quite often. It’s called “Kill the Creditors.” (Please don’t try this at your local bank.)
Consider, for instance, the sad fate of the Knights Templar. They were a religious order of fighting knights who’d amassed a great store of capital through gifts given to them by the pious, as well as through various treasures they’d acquired during the Crusades, and they acted as Europe’s major moneylenders to kings as well as to others for more than two centuries. It was unlawful for Christians to charge for the use of money, but it wasn’t unlawful for them to charge “rent” for the use of land, so the Templars charged so-called “rent” for the use of money, which you paid at the same time you got the loan, rather than after you’d used it. But you still had to pay the principal amount back at the stipulated time. This could be a problem for those who’d borrowed the money, as it still is today.
In 1307, Philip the Fourth of France found he owed a cumbersome lot of money to the Templars. With the aid of the Pope and of torture, he accused them falsely of heretical and sacrilegious activities and had them rounded up and burned at the stake. As if by magic, his debts disappeared. (So did the vast wealth of the Templars, which has never been adequately accounted for since.)”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“Nevertheless, you can float many a hefty tax scheme on the back of a righteous-sounding and energizing war. Wars focus the attention; people don’t want to feel or even appear disloyal at such times. Scare them with the thought that they themselves may be looted and pillaged by bands of slavering, subhuman barbarians who will roast and eat their children and ravish and eviscerate their women, don’t laugh, it’s happened, and they’ll fork over with remarkable docility, if not eagerness. Just to remind you: the income tax was begun in Great Britain in 1799, to finance the Napoleonic Wars. In the United States, it began in 1862, to support the Civil War. In Canada, in 1917, incomes were first taxed as a temporary measure to finance the First World War. And taxes are like zebra mussels: once they’ve been introduced, they’re very hard to get rid of. The wars the income taxes were meant to pay for have come and gone, but the income taxes themselves persist. Oh well, it’s better than a tax on windows, or beards, or bachelors, all of which have also had their day.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“That was nothing but fair. I never wanted anything but what was fair". Some debts can't be discharged by money payments, and this is one of them.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“Moral: beware of free lunches, because there aren’t any: there’s always a trick.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“The new world of money, in his eyes, is the City of Destruction, and the most important thing you can do is to make your way out of it as fast as possible.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“Scrooge has some interesting literary ancestors. Pact-makers with the Devil didn’t start out as misers, quite the reverse. Christopher Marlowe’s late-sixteenth-century Doctor Faustus sells his body and soul to Mephistopheles with a loan document signed in blood, collection due in twenty-four years, but he doesn’t do it cheaply. He has a magnificent wish list, which contains just about everything you can read about today in luxury magazines for gentlemen. Faust wants to travel; he wants to be very, very rich; he wants knowledge; he wants power; he wants to get back at his enemies; and he wants sex with a facsimile of Helen of Troy. Helen of Troy isn’t called that in the luxury men’s magazines, she has other names, but it’s the same sort of thing: a woman so beautiful she doesn’t exist, or, worse, may be a demon in disguise. Very hot though, as they say.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“He'll make a very good first husband.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“Scientists tell us that rats, if deprived of toys and fellow rats, will give themselves painful electric shocks rather than endure prolonged boredom. Even this electric shock self-torture can provide some pleasure, it seems: the anticipation of torment is exciting in itself, and then there’s the thrill that accompanies risky behaviour. But more importantly, rats will do almost anything to create events for themselves in an otherwise eventless time-space. So will people: we not only like our plots, we need our plots, and to some extent we are our plots. A story-of-my-life without a story is not a life.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“This concept, that there is an underlying balancing principle in the universe, according to which we should act, appears to have been almost universal. In Chinese culture, it’s the Tao or Way, in Indian culture it’s the wheel of karmic justice. If not in this world, then in the next, and if not now, then in the future, the TIT FOR TAT cosmic law of reciprocity would see to it that you’d be returned good for good and evil for evil.”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

“Interesting that is was the heart, even so long ago, that was thought to absorb the effects of your good and bad deeds, like Dorian Gray's scoundrelly picture. It's not the heart that remembers your moral pluses and minuses really - it's the brain. But we can't be convinced of that. No one ever sends his valentine a picture of a brain with an arrow through it; nor, in the case of romantic failure, do we say, "He broke my brain." Maybe that's because, although the brain's in the control tower, it's the heart we can feel responding to our emotions - as in, Be still my beating heart. (Not brain.)”
― Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth