Quotes about Currency Issuance

Thomas Jefferson

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

This frequent Jefferson quotation almost certainly was never written or uttered by him but was probably created by later opponents of private banks. It has never been verified from any studies of Jefferson’s prolific writings. Further the word ‘inflation” came into use in the 1860s and ‘deflation’ seems to have first been used in the 1920s. However, some ascribe it to a letter Jefferson wrote to Treasury Secretary, Albert Gallatin in 1802.

Thomas A. Edison

If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution pays nobody but those who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People.

Wright Patman

The dollar represents a one dollar debt to the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve Banks create money out of thin air to buy Government Bonds from the U.S. Treasury...and has created out of nothing a ... debt which the American people are obliged to pay with interest.

Alexander James Dallas

Whether the issuance of paper currency proceed from the national Treasury or from a national Bank, the acceptance of the paper in a course of payments and receipts must be forever optional with the citizens.

At the time there was no national paper money. Individual banks printed their own and paper money was not accepted or heavily discounted most Americans. Most opposed a tender law that required paper money to be accepted in commerce.

Thomas A. Edison

It is the people who constitute the basis of Government credit. Why then cannot the people have benefit of their own gilt-edge credit by receiving non-interest bearing currency-instead of bankers receiving the benefit of the people's credit in interest-bearing bonds. If the United States Government will adopt this policy of increasing its national wealth without contributing to the interest collector-for the whole national debt is made up on interest charges-then you will see an era of progress and prosperity in this country such as could never have come otherwise.

English Privy Council

The crown has the sole right to issue money.

Norman Tebbit

The mark of a single currency is not only that all other currencies must be extinguished but that the capacity of other institutions to issue currencies must also be extinguished...In the case of the United Kingdom, that would involve Parliament binding its successors in a way that it has hitherto regarded as unconstitutional.

Currency Issuance Quotes