Quotes on Riba
John Adams (Former US President lawyer, author, statesman and diplomat)
“Historically, usury was defined as any interest whatever on an unproductive loan. Our whole banking system I have ever abhorred, I continue to abhor, and I shall die abhorring.”
Aristotle (Greek philosopher)
“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.”
“Money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.”
Abraham Lincoln (Former US President)
“The money power preys on the nation in times of peace, and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes.”
“The government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of consumers. By adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity.”
Barbara Tuchman (American historian and Author)
“No economic activity was more irrepressible [in the 14th century] than the investment and lending at interest of money; it was the basis for the rise of the Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes-and it was based on the sin of usury.”
Ezra Pound (American poet and critic)
“USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.”
Maria Theresa (Ruler of the Eastern Europe)
“Henceforth no Jew, no matter under what name, will be allowed to remain here without my written permission. I know of no other troublesome pest within the state than this race, which impoverished the people by their fraud, usury and money-lending and commits all deeds which an honorable man despises. Subsequently they have to be removed and excluded from here as much as possible.”
Pope Clement VIII
“All the world suffers from the usury of the Jews, their monopolies and deceit. They have brought many unfortunate peoples into a state of poverty, especially farmers, working-class people, and the very poor.”
Martin Luther (German professor of theology, composer, priest and monk)
“But the Jews are so hardened that they listen to nothing; though overcome by testimonies they yield not an inch. It is a pernicious race, oppressing all men by their usury and rapine. If they give a prince or magistrate a thousand florins, they extort twenty thousand from the subjects in payment. We must ever keep on guard against them.”
George Stigler (US Economist and attained Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences)
“Why, when the economist gives advice to his society, is he so often coolly ignored? He never ceases to preach free trade, and protectionism is growing in the United States. He deplores the perverse effects of minimum wage laws, and the legal minimum is regularly raised each 3 or 5 years. He brands usury laws as a medieval superstition, but no state hurries to repeal its law.”
Samuel Johnson (A poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer)
“The synonym of usury is ruin.”
Julius Streicher (German Politician)
“We handed the most important belongings of our people — the railroads and the banks — to aliens who 2000 years ago had turned the temple into a house of usury. Back then there was a man who had the bravery to drive out these scoundrels with a whip! If today a national socialist is seen with such a temple-whip, he’s thrown into jail.”
Thomas Aquinas (Dominican friar, Catholic priest, and Doctor of the Church)
“The Jews should not be allowed to keep what they have obtained from others by usury; it were best that they were compelled to worked so that they could earn their living instead of doing nothing but becoming avaricious.”
Ezra Heywood (Philosopher, Human rights activists)
“The free-trade idea, logically applied, will abolish usury; and with usury will disappear the chief bone of contention between labor and capital. But, just at this point, free-traders go over to the enemy; and many writers on political economy, in flat contradiction of the essential principles of that science, have made elaborate arguments to prove self-government in finance, impossible! What shall we think of men who, having dethroned kings, demolished popes, destroyed slave oligarchies and assailed tariff monopoly, advise submission to the most oppressive and dishonest of despotisms, Usury?”
Hilaire Belloc (Anglo-French writer and historian)
“But though Usury is in itself immoral, and justly condemned by every ethical code, its chief and worst defect in the particular case we are now examining, the growth of Capitalism and its increasing proletariat, is the centralization of irresponsible control over the lives of men: the putting power over the proletariat into the hands of a few who can direct the loans of currency and credit without which that proletariat could not be fed and clothed and maintained in work.”
John Maynard Keynes (American Economist)
“For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.”
Henry Ford Found of Ford Motor Co.
“The one aim of these financiers is world control by creation of inextinguishable debts.”
Balki Bartokomous
“I’m in debt. I am a true American.”
Yiddish (Jewish) Proverb
“Interest on debts grow without rain.”