Weekend Words: Currency
China weakened its currency, the renminbi, several days in a row this week, raising fears that the country’s massive economy may be in deep trouble.
China weakened its currency, the renminbi, several days in a row this week, raising fears that the country’s massive economy may be in deep trouble.
He who tampers with the currency robs labor of its bread.
—Daniel Webster
Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
—John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of Peace
The first panacea for a misguided nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
—Ernest Hemingway
The mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges which they have succeeded in obtaining in the different States, and which are employed altogether for their benefit; and unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control over your dearest interests has passed into the hands of these corporations.
—Andrew Jackson, “Farewell Address”
This is what I call debasing the moral currency: lowering the value of every inspiring fact and tradition so that it will command less and less of the spiritual products, the generous motives which sustain the charm and elevation of our social existence — the something besides bread by which man saves his soul alive.
—George Eliot, “Debasing the Moral Currency”
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
—John Updike
All I know is that while I’m asleep, I’m never afraid, and I have no hopes, no struggles, no glories — and bless the man who invented sleep, a cloak over all human thought, food that drives away hunger, water that banishes thirst, fire that heats up cold, chill that moderates passion, and, finally, universal currency with which all things can be bought, weight and balance that brings the shepherd and the king, the fool and the wise, to the same level. There’s only one bad thing about sleep, as far as I’ve ever heard, and that is that it resembles death, since there’s very little difference between a sleeping man and a corpse.
—Cervantes, Don Quixote
All currency is neurotic currency.
—Norman O. Brown
Small change, small wonders — these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Finance is the art of passing currency from hand to hand until it finally disappears.
—Robert W. Sarnoff
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.
—Philip Seymour Hoffman
The art of creation lies in the gift of perceiving the particular and generalizing it, thus creating the particular again. It is therefore a powerful transforming force and a generator of creative solutions in relation to a given problem. It is the currency of human exchanges, which enables the sharing of states of the soul and conscience, and the discovery of new fields of experience.
—Yehudi Menuhin
