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Memorable and not so memorable quotations:

"Any serious attempt to withdraw the stimulus at this point will trigger a deflationary depression and a continuation of the current policies will put us firmly on the road to hyperinflation"
- John Embry

"The value of most currencies, including ours, is going to decline in purchasing power. I still believe, over a 10-year period, I would much rather own stocks than cash."
- Warren Buffett

“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”
- Ludwig von Mises

"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."
- Cicero - 55 BC

“History does not repeat itself exactly, but behavior does.”
- Bob Farrell 

"We cannot expect the Americans to jump from capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of socialism until they suddenly awake to find they have communism."
- Nikita Khrushchev

"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."    
 -  Frederic Bastiat

"The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off"
 - Gloria Steinem

"Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look there."
- Marcus Aurelius

“I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.”
– Sir Isaac Newton, after losing a fortune in the South Sea bubble

Those who have knowledge, don't predict. Those who predict, don't have knowledge.
 - Lao Tzu

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
- Santayana

"They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man’s goods from thieves, but honesty has no defence against superior cunning; and, since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or has no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage"

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."
- H.L. Mencken

"The best thing about owning a house is that you can't get daily quotes on your home."
- Richard Russell

"A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs -- jolted by every pebble in the road."
-- Henry Ward Beecher

God plays dice. But cheats.
- Einstein

"These prison walls are funny.
First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em.
Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them.
That's institutionalized."
- Red, The Shawshank Redemption

"Diversification is an admission of not knowing what to do, and an effort to strike an average."
- Gerald Loeb, The Battle for Investment Survival, 1935

"Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is.
You can't buy what is popular and do well..."
- Warren Buffett

"You can issue stocks every day, but you can’t crank out a zinc mine every day"
- Jim Rogers

"The years teach much which the days never knew"
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A fine is a tax for doing something wrong. A tax is a fine for doing something right."
- Author Unknown

"Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery."
- Calvin Coolidge

"The politicians say "we" can't afford a tax cut. Maybe we can't afford the politicians."
- Steve Forbes

"Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut save you thirty cents?"
- Peg Bracken

"The avoidance of taxes is the only pursuit that still carries any reward."
- J M Keynes

"The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets."
– Will Rogers

"There is no art which one government sooner learns from another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people."
- Adam Smith

“Energy and persistence conquer all things.”
– Benjamin Franklin, printer, statesman

"There can be no other criterion, no other standard than gold. Yes, gold which never changes, which can be shaped into ingots, bars, coins, which has no nationality and which is eternally and universally accepted as the unalterable fiduciary value par excellence."

- Charles De Gaulle

" I hate quotations"
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The surest way to ruin a man who doesn’t know how to handle money is to give him some.”
- George Bernard Shaw

"Technology has taken manure spreading to the next level"
- Jens Hansen

"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right... and a desire, to know."
- John Adams --176

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were when they gave up..."  
- Thomas Edison

"When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong -- or absolutely right..." 
- Albert Guinon 1863-1923

"The most important disease is the one you have."  
- Deborah Z. Altschuler
 

"Its not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." 
- Henry David Thoreau 
 

"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." 
- Mark Twain

"Good judgment comes from experience, and experience - well, that comes from poor judgment."
- AA Milne

"Markets can remain irrational far longer than you or I can
remain solvent."
- John Maynard Keynes

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert,
 in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."
 - Milton Friedman

"You can only make BIG money when you take a big
position during a bull market and then ride it into the third
or speculative phase of that market."
- Richard Russell

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest."
- Albert Einstein

“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.”
Frank Lloyd Wright

“He lied like a finance minister on the eve of
devaluation." ... Warren E. Buffett

"You are a den of vipers. I intend to rout you out and by the Eternal God I will rout you out. If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning."
--Andrew Jackson, 1828 (to a group of investment bankers trying to persuade him to renew their bank charter).

President Andrew Jackson closed down the Second National Bank, which was somewhat comparable to the Federal Reserve of today.

The situation is really bad - today Chirac announced that the French are pulling out of France.
Jay Leno

“…there are several measures that the Fed (or any central bank) can take to reduce the risk of falling into deflation. … the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost."
Ben Bernanke, successor to Fed. Chairman Alan Greenspan: November, 2002 at the National Economists Club, Washington, D.C.

“Paper money eventually goes down to its intrinsic value – zero.”
Voltaire (1729)

Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" until you can find a rock
Will Rogers

"I don't even know what street Canada is on"
Al Capone

"You should give your kids enough money to do anything but not enough money to do nothing."
Warren Buffett

" The only perfect hedge is in the Imperial palace in Tokyo"
Anthony Fell

"Gold and only gold is real money"
J. P. Morgan

"You know what the fellow said: In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
-Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man

Definition of golf: "A game devised by the devil, played with implements ill -equipped do the job."
- Winston Churchill

"Figures don’t lie, but often liars figure"
 - Anonymous.

"There are three kinds of liars: liars, damned liars, and statisticians"
- Mark Twain

"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public"

- Winston Churchill

"There's no such thing as impossible. It just takes a little longer to accomplish the impossible."
- Clarence Sheahan

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws."
- Mayer Amschel Rothschild

"I love your Christ, but I hate your Christians. They are so unlike him."
- Mahatma Ghandi

"Fundamental analysis tells you how rational investors should behave, while...Technical analysis tells you how actual investors do behave."
- Ron Meisels

"Why look for conspiracy when stupidity can explain so much."
- Goethe

"I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts."
- Orson Welles

“For myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period. Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythical dimension on ordinary industrial and social action today. We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes.”
- Marshall McLuhan

"Books ... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development."
- Dorothy L. Sayers (The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, 1928)

"Gold has worked down from Alexander's time ... When something holds good for two thousand years I do not believe it can be so because of prejudice or mistaken theory."
- Bernard M. Baruch

"Maybe I don't understand the market, but I prefer not to have the same kind of continued exposure I've had up until now. In some ways I think the music has stopped only most people are still dancing."
- George Soros, May 2000

"The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, critic, and philosopher (1772-1834)

" The longer I operated on Wall Street the more distrustful I became of tips and inside information of every kind. Given time, I believe that inside information can break the Bank of England."
- Bernard Baruch

"Experts are people who know tomorrow why yesterday's prediction didn't turn out today".
- Bill Jiler

" How could I have been so far off base? All my life I've known better than to depend on the experts.
- John F. Kennnedy (After the Bay of Pigs)

"Crowds are influenced mainly by images produced by the judicious employment of words and formulas."
- Gustave Le Bon

" The gift of reason and critical reflection is one of man's outstanding peculiarities, and even where it exists it proves to be wavering and inconstant.... Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree."
- Carl Jung

"It is important to begin early to reckon with the fact that the mind is an arena, a sort of tumbling-ground, for the struggles of antagonistic impulses; or, to express it in non-dynamic terms, that the mind is made up of contradictions and pairs of opposites. Evidence of one particular tendency does not in the least preclude its opposite; there is room for both of them. The material questions are: how do these opposites stand to one another and what effects proceed from one of them and what from the other?"
- Sigmund Freud

"There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world."
- J. M. Keynes

"Trit trot to market to buy a penny doll; Trit trot back again, the market's sold them all.
- Mother Goose

"Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got."
- Janis Joplin

"If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try."
- W.H. Auden

I shall be an autocrat: that's my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that's his.
-Empress Catherine The Great 1729-1796

Life is tough. Three out of three people die, so shut up and deal.
- Ring Lardner

Money is what people without talent use to keep score.
- Jeremy C. Epworth

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
-Anais Nin

Going to church does not make you a Christian any more than going to the garage makes you a car.
-Lawrence J. Peter

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
- Aldous Huxley

We should keep in mind the insightful words of Former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Marinner Echles who said that it was the Fed's duty "to take away the punch bowl just when the party is getting good".

" I never comment about the stock market anymore, but I will tell you that I pulled [my own investments] out of it completely last January (1998)"
- Peter Drucker

One can relish the varied idiocy of human action during a panic to the full, for while it is a time of great tragedy, nothing is being lost but money.
- John Kenneth Galbraith, on the Crash of 1929

"80% of the world's population has just been impoverished".
- Marc Faber

"If the stock market turns bearish, Clinton's popularity will melt like a cake of ice in the Pheonix sun".
- Richard Russell

"You have a choice of trusting the natural stability of gold or the honesty and intelligence of members of the government and with all due respect to these gentleman, I advise you as long as the capitalist system lasts, vote for gold".
- George Bernard Shaw

Salomon Smith Barney announced this past week August 15 that it was paying $25 million in cash and stock to attract an analyst which prompted a reference in Barron's to a quote by Gerald Loeb regarding securities analysts:
"In a bull market you don't need'em; in a bear market, you don't want'em".
- Gerald Loeb

"Buy and hold" have replaced "I love you" as the three most popular words in the English language.
- Jim Grant

"Free markets, if left completely to their own devices, can windup terribly unfree".
- Ron Chernow - author of 'Titans'

"Quand on est dans la merde jusqu'au cou, il ne reste qu'a chanter".
- Samuel Beckett
Compliments of H. Boulton

We should keep in mind the insightful words of Former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Marinner Echles who said that it was the Fed's duty "to take away the punch bowl just when the party is getting good".

Dorothy Parker once said that two things confused her: the theory of the zipper and the exact function of Bernard Baruch.

"My Mother had a slender, small body, but a large heart - a heart so large that everybody's grief and everbody's joy found welcome in it, and hospitable accommodation.
- Mark Twain

"Beauty is impossible to define but its right perfection elicits love".
- Mark Helprin

"As they say on the Zambeze: If the raft she flip, stay away from still water. That's where the Motha crocodile waits".
- Susan Rayner

"Don't think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm".
- Malayan Proverb

"All kings is mostly rapscallions".
- Mark Twain

"The first casualty when war comes is truth".
- Hiram Johnson

"Wit is the epitaph of an emotion".
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"All I know is just what I read in the papers and that's an alibi for my ignorance"
- Will Rogers

Definition of a cynic:
"A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing".
- Oscar Wilde

Exerpt from Jacquie McNish's column in The Globe and Mail, Tuesday, February 10, 1998 John Cleghorn and Matthew Barrett have pitched their proposed merger of the Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of Montreal with some very unbankerly language. The chairmen said they want to stop "dicking around on the beach" and "bulk up" with a merger to "kick ass" in the global market.

Persistence:
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "Press On" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race".
- Calvin Coolidge

"There is no sphere of human thought in which it is easier to show superficial cleverness and the appearance of superior wisdom than in discussing questions of currency and exchange."
- Winston Churchill

Wall Street:
"This stock market thing was a great game, but, after all, everybody just can't live on gambling. Somebody has to do some work."
- Will Rogers