“With only twenty millions of coin, and three or four hundred millions of circulating paper, public and private, nothing is necessary but a general panic, produced either by failures, invasions, or any other cause, and the whole visionary fabric vanishes into air, and shows that paper is poverty, that it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself.”
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington, 1788
“People criticize owning bullion because there’s no yield. But there’s a reason everything else needs a yield, to compensate you for things like obsolescence risk, business-cycle risk and management risk, all of the things that gold does not have.
We’re not gold bugs, but there’s a reason humanity has tended to use gold as an alternative to man-made currency – it’s the only virtually infinite-duration asset in the world.”
Matthew McLennan, First Eagle Funds
“But when you recall that one of the first moves by Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler was to outlaw individual ownership of gold, you begin to sense that there may be some connection between money, redeemable in gold, and the rare prize known as human liberty.”
Congressman Howard Buffett (Warren’s father)
“A vast empire is foundering on the hands of this incapable management. And by empire is meant the political machinery which holds together the English-speaking people of the world… the political empire under which they are nominally assembled is perishing. The political machine known as the British Empire is running down. In the hands of its management it is losing momentum every day.”
Jack London, The People of the Abyss
Are you sure the middle quit was not the China man