William Lyon Mackenzie King Quotes

We believe that you know how pernicious the vice of usury is …. We command you all by this apostolic writing not to permit those who are known as usurers to clear themselves by any subterfuge or trick when they are charged with the crime.

I was absolutely astonished and could not believe my eyes at the outrageous interest rates that people in need have to pay to get loans.

I have ever been the enemy of banks. My zeal against these institutions was so warm … that I was derided as a maniac by the tribe of bank mongers who filch from the public their swindling and barren gains.

There were absolutely circumstances where Sallie Mae was working hand-in-hand with for-profit schools and other schools in offering and putting students into risky expensive subprime loans.

The old-fashioned idea is that responsibility falls upon those who borrow and lend. Money was not borrowed by campesinos, assembly plant workers, or slum-dwellers. The mass of the population gained little from borrowing, indeed often suffered grievously from its effects.

For many, the loan modification process has been a giant sham.

Too often, borrowers who need quick cash end up trapped in loans they can't afford.

Profiting from student loans is usury, and we just can't continue to allow it.

Man was lost if he went to a usurer, for the interest ran faster than a tiger upon him.

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.

For too long, Americans have fallen victim to financial abuses at the hands of predatory lenders that operate in the shadows.

The build-up of personal and collective debt in America and Europe should have sent warning signals to anyone familiar with the biblical institutions of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, created specifically because of the danger of people being trapped by debt.

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

Debt, we've learned, is the match that lights the fire of every crisis. Every crisis has its own set of villains - pick your favorite: bankers, regulators, central bankers, politicians, overzealous consumers, credit rating agencies - but all require one similar ingredient to create a true crisis: too much leverage.

If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.

For too long, tricks and traps in mortgages, credit cards, and other financial transactions have stripped wealth from working families.

The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis - and, of course, in capitalism we're not supposed to be concerned with the moral stuff, but let's mention it anyway - shows a culture that is slowly giving in to a futuristic nightmare ideology of computerized greed and unchecked financial violence.

We developed microfinance to fight loan sharks - I was telling people don't go to loan sharks - not trying to take advantage and make money for myself. I would be a junior loan shark if I did... It is not a panacea.

Can't make your payments? No problem. The interest charges keep on coming. In fact, banks prefer it that way. More money for them. The government guarantees it.

Why don't we call on the credit card companies to be accountable? They need to be held accountable for their predatory lending practices.

Those who devour interest will not stand except as stands one whom Satan has driven mad by his touch

The bastards broke the People's back with their usury.... Let them die; the People will survive.

It’s going to put people into indentured servitude to the credit card companies.

Wishing to close up the abyss of usury, which devours souls and swallows up property …. expel all such notorious usurers from their territories within three months, never to admit any such for the future. Nobody is to let houses to them for usury, nor grant them houses under any other title. Those indeed who act otherwise, if they are ecclesiastical persons, patriarchs, archbishops or bishops, are to know that they incur automatic suspension; lesser individual persons, excommunication, colleges or other communities, interdict. If they remain obdurate throughout a month, their territories shall lie henceforth under ecclesiastical interdict as long as the usurers remain there

The trade of the petty usurer is hated with most reason: it makes a profit from currency itself, instead of making it from the process which currency was meant to serve. Their common characteristic is obviously their sordid avarice.