Historical Debt Quotes

Dammit Governor, it was the Tennesseans who made Texas. They volunteered and gave their lives at the Alamo for Texas and now that Tennessee needs some help from Texas, your advisors are telling you to turn your back on the descendants of the heroes of the Alamo.

When I was a youngster growing up in South Dakota, we never referred to the national debt, it was always referred to as the war debt because it stemmed from World War I.

White people, you did not get a receipt for niggas, you can not return us!

These are some of the things for which we believe the American people owe no little gratitude to the Dutch; and these are the things for which today, speaking in the name of the American people, we venture to express their heartfelt thanks.

We have responsibilities for others, not just across space but across time. We have responsibilities to people who came before us. They left us a world of institutions, ideas or possibilities for which we, in turn, owe them something. One of the things we owe them is not to squander them.

The colored race saved to the noble women of New England and the middle States men on whom they lean today for security and safety. Many of my race, the representatives of these men on the field of battle, sleep in the countless graves of the South.

We have three hundred years of neglect to pay for.

As a student of history, I also know civilization's debt to Islam.

A great deal of capital, which appears to-day in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children.

Look, half the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were either in debt or bankrupt. The remaining half, most of them lost all their possessions. The only reason Monticello didn't get burned to the ground was that the British patrol missed the road.

France will never forget the men who agreed to make the supreme sacrifice to liberate our soil, our country, our continent from the yoke of Nazi barbarity. It will never forget what it owes America, our eternal friend. Our two peoples have stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the brotherhood of blood spilled.

No one sits in front of a drum set and thinks they invented it all out of whole cloth. The fact that the set is there means that you've got some dues to pay to Baby Dodds.

We cannot forget that America was built on Africa.

The German debt to the Jewish people can never end, not in this generation and not in any other.

The Annual Reports of the British Council of Foreign Bondholders still record the fact that the holders of the bonds of various Southern states, to the amount of sixty million dollars principal (interest at 6 percent for some fifty to eighty years), still are waiting to be repaid.

The U.K. and the U.S. could not have been built today without Africa's aid. It is all the resources that were taken from Africa, including human, that built these countries today! So when they try to give back, we shouldn't be on the defensive.

Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.

Everything that the West is today is predominantly because of Africa.

I have nothing against respecting people who lived before, but we have no responsibility toward them.

A long time ago, when Korea was having a hard time, the Philippines came to Korea and helped the Korean people. We're very thankful, as a country.

A Christian people who have for two hundred years kept a race in bondage, deprived of the advantages of civilization and religion, owe them a debt of gratitude which it would seem ungenerous to withhold.

Teach her story to future generations, and at least the moral debt owed to Jean McConville can be repaid. Jean McConville. Jean McConville. Jean McConville.

Will you, my countrymen, the descendants of these men, warmed by their blood, inheriting their language, and having the principles for which they struggled confided to your care, allow them to be violated in your hands?

To the Caucasian race is the world indebted for all the great and important discoveries, inventions, and improvements, that have been made in the arts and sciences.

Let's face it: without the French there would be no America...in other words, without them, there is no us.