Seneca the Younger Quotes

A small debt produces a debtor; a large one, an enemy.

We have to make debt evil.

Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound: great debts are like cannon; of loud noise, but little danger.

Borrowed money, even when owing to a nation by another nation, should be repaid. They hired the money, didn't they? Let them pay it.

Those who say we can continue to indefinitely borrow from our children and grandchildren and generations to come in fact are eroding our ability to do what we ought to do in education, in health care and in other things.

Debt is the prolific mother of folly and of crime; it taints the course of life in all its dreams.

Once in debt, interest is your companion every minute of the day and night; you cannot shun it or slip away from it; you cannot dismiss it; it yields neither to entreaties, demands, or orders; and whenever you get in its way or cross its course or fail to meet its demands, it crushes you.

Home life ceases to be free and beautiful as soon as it is founded on borrowing and debt.

I'm always workin', man. I gotta pay the light bills.

No kidding. That's really true. You're paying your own bills through this. It's not a pleasant experience.

Let us all be happy and live within our means, even if we have to borrow the money to do it with.

The best way for the Government to maintain its credit is to pay as it goes—not by resorting to loans, but by keeping out of debt.

Nineteen years is the term beyond which neither the representatives of a nation nor even the whole nation itself assembled can validly extend a debt ... one generation is to another as one independent nation to another.

There are no uncontrollable outlays except for debt interest. Outlays are what they are due to legislation.

As an individual who undertakes to live by borrowing, soon finds his original means devoured by interest, and next no one left to borrow from—so it must be with a government.

International debts are like bills submitted to pay for the damage done on a wild party by one's grandfather. The payment seems to the debtor like pure loss, and when it is paid by one nation to another it seems the tribute by the conquered to the conqueror.

With inflation, debts and bills fly to the sky

We have trouble, my friends, in the country, because we have too much money owing, the greatest indebtedness that has every been given to civilization … Two hundred and seventy-two thousand millions of dollars of debts are owed by the various people of this country today. Why, my friends, that cannot be paid. It is not possible for that kind of debt to be paid.

A public debt is a public curse and in a representative government greater than any other.

We can’t afford the promises we have already made much less pile more on top of them.

Whenever you borrow money, the people you borrow it from have leverage over you.

If a national debt in considered a national blessing, then we can get on by borrowing. But as I believe it is a natural curse, my vow shall be to pay the national debt, to prevent a moneyed aristocracy from growing up around our administration that must bend to its views, and ultimately destroy the liberty of our country.

Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.

There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.

Between debt and taxes Americans had usually chosen debt.