David Ricardo Quotes

When not only gold but all commodities are available for the redemption of the paper currency, its volume is limited only by the value of all the wealth of the country, and it can never become insecure up to this limit.

In these times of uncertainty for paper-based currency, I feel more secure in holding gold.

It is particularly odd that economists who profess to be champions of a free-market economy, should go to such twists and turns to avoid facing the plain fact: that gold, that scarce and valuable market-produced metal, has always been, and will continue to be, by far the best money for human society.

The superiority of the gold standard consists in the fact that the value of gold develops independent of political actions.

Under the gold standard America had no major financial panics other than in 1873, 1884, 1890, 1893, 1907, 1930, 1931, 1932, and 1933.

The utility, or intrinsic value of gold as a commodity is now considerably less than in the past; its monetary status has become extraordinarily ambiguous; and its future is highly uncertain.

Never in history was there a method devised of such efficacy for setting each country's advantage at variance with its neighbours' as the international gold (or, formerly, silver) standard.

Most paper money initially existed as a substitute for gold. That's what gave it value. But right now what gives a currency value is other currency. Most countries hold reserves and the reserves are other currencies. If you are a backing up the euro with the dollar, what's backing up the dollar? I don't think it is going to go to a point where all you have is coins and bars of gold, but I do think that we are going to have to go back to a monetary system based in gold, not based on paper.

There is no intrinsic worth in money but what is alterable with the times, and whether a guinea goes for twenty pounds or for a shilling, it is the labor of the poor and not the high and low value that is set on gold or silver, which all the comforts of life must arise from.

They wonder much to hear that gold, which in itself is so useless a thing, should be everywhere so much esteemed, that even men for whom it was made, and by whom it has its value, should yet be thought of less value than it is.

Gold has intrinsic value. The problem with the dollar is it has no intrinsic value. And if the Federal Reserve is going to spend trillions of them to buy up all these bad mortgages and all other kinds of bad debt, the dollar is going to lose all of its value. Gold will store its value, and you'll always be able to buy more food with your gold.

By the experience of commercial nations in all ages it has been found that gold and silver afford the only safe foundation for a monetary system.

Our dollar is now altogether too greatly influenced by the accidents of international trade, by the internal policies of other nations and by political disturbance in other continents. Therefore the United States must take firmly in its own hands the control of the gold value of our dollar. This is necessary in order to prevent dollar disturbances from swinging us away from our ultimate goal.

Gold and silver afford the only safe foundation for a monetary system.

The reason why gold is so unpopular now and also why it was so popular in a bourgeois era is that it imposes restrictions upon governments or bureaucracies that are much more powerful than is parliamentary criticism.

The dollar used to be a gold standard currency. And the dollar is really good in the last century, I mean in the 19th century.

In 1971, the U.S. 'closed the gold window,' starting an era of global fiat money reference-pricing that has been unprecedented in history. Never before had the world operated on the basis of no country anywhere having a currency tied to something with intrinsic value like gold.

No gold-digging for me; I take diamonds! We may be off the gold standard someday.

Price statistics show clearly that instability in raw-material prices is a prime cause of instability of other prices.

You could own coins but you couldn't have bars of gold. We were on the gold standard. I think it was Nixon who took us off the gold standard.

It is a [disputed] question, whether the circulation of paper, rather than of specie [gold and silver coin], is a good or an evil I believe it to be one of those cases where mercantile clamor will bear down reason, until it is corrected by ruin.

In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.

Unlike the days of the gold standard, it is impossible for the Federal Reserve to go bankrupt; it holds the legal monopoly of counterfeiting (of creating money out of thin air) in the entire country.

The time will come that gold will hold no comparison in value to a bushel of wheat.

We have made it possible, without gold and without foreign exchange, to maintain the value of the German mark. Behind the German mark stands the German capacity for work, while some foreign countries, suffocated by gold, have been compelled to devalue their currencies.