Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quotes

The burden of the national debt consists not in its being so many millions, or so many hundred millions, but in the quantity of taxes collected every year to pay the interest. If this quantity continue the same, the burden of the national debt is the same to all intents and purposes, be the capital more or less.

We are a debtor nation, and we owe now $19 trillion and it's going to go up very fast by the way from this point.

Everyone in our society has had to make a contribution towards dealing with the debts.

What is a permanent loan but a mortgage upon the wealth and industry of the country? It is the only form of indebtedness, as experience has shown, by which heavy and durable encumbrance can be laid upon the community.

When the country's indebtedness is so colossal and where the budget deficit is so huge, there is a moral obligation on people to pay their fair and reasonable dues.

Someone has to pick up the tab when people get out of repaying their own debts.

Students graduating with high debt encounter difficulties in qualifying for home and automobile loans.

The evergreen story of people in debt becomes even sexier in an economic downturn, when debts inevitably get harder to pay.

We have mountain of debt that isn't going away and all the problems are here to stay, and anybody who tells you that is a good thing ought to get out of the business of helping the government down the road.

The call for debt cancellation is welcome, but debt does not just go away.

We are a debtor nation, our airports are third world, our highways are falling apart. Our roads, our bridges, everything, we're like third world.

A public debt is a public curse.

OWE, v. To have (and to hold) a debt. The word formerly signified not indebtedness, but possession; it meant "own," and in the minds of debtors there is still a good deal of confusion between assets and liabilities.

If you put Canada into $1.5 trillion in debt and interest rates go up just 200 basis points, you cannot provide the services to 36 million people that were guaranteed to them in the social contract they have with Canada. That's a very, very scary prospect. You can't burden this economy with that much debt. The risk you take on is insurmountable. You have to assume for the next 50 years that rates don't go up? That's insane. That's irresponsible. That's stupid.

You really struggle to be a successful empire if you are also the world's biggest debtor.

What is debt anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.

Home I would go But that my doors are hateful to my eyes, Fill'd and damm'd up with gaping creditors, Watchful as fowlers when their game will spring.

The Lord forbid that I should be out of debt, as if indeed I could not be trusted.

Our country has tremendous problems. We're a debtor nation.

I go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse and in a republican government more than in any other.

There are respectable individuals, who from a just aversion to an accumulation of Public debt, are unwilling to concede to it any kind of utility, who can discern no good to alleviate the ill with which they suppose it pregnant; who cannot be persuaded that it ought in any sense to be viewed as an increase of capital lest it should be inferred, that the more debt the more capital, the greater the burthens the greater the blessings of the community.

I regard the inflation acts as wrong in all ways. Personally I am one of the noble army of debtors, and can stand it if others can. But it is a wretched business.

Lying rides upon debt's back.

DEBT, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slave-driver. As, pent in an aquarium, the troutlet Swims round and round his tank to find an outlet, Pressing his nose against the glass that holds him, Nor ever sees the prison that enfolds him; So the poor debtor, seeing naught around him, Yet feels the narrow limits that impound him, Grieves at his debt and studies to evade it, And finds at last he might as well have paid it.

It is the debtor that is ruined by hard times.