Weekend Words: Bank
"The male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks." —Valerie Solanis
This week, things went quickly from bad to worse for Greece, which closed its banks and stock exchange on Monday and missed its payment to the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday. And today, the Greeks go to the polls for a referendum that could decide whether or not they stay in the eurozone.
A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove you don’t need it.
—Bob Hope
The male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks.
—Valerie Solanis
A family portrait not too stake to record
Of a pleasant old buffer, nephew to a lord,
Who believed that the bank was mightier than the sword,
And that an umbrella might pacify barbarians abroad:
Just like an old liberal
Between the wars.
—William Plomer, “Father and Son”
If the big banks expect to buy influence when they give money to favored think tanks, then the public has a right to know. If the big banks don’t expect to buy influence and are merely making charitable contributions, then their shareholders have a right to know. Either way, there’s no excuse for keeping these payments secret.
—Elizabeth Warren
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers’ declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial…
—W. H. Auden, “The Night Mail”
It is a rather pleasant experience to be alone in a bank at night.
—Willie Sutton, bank robber
He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s acts, even the terrible became banal.
―Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow citizens.
―John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment
What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?
―Bertolt Brecht, The Three-Penny Opera
