Good bankers, like good tea, can only be
appreciated when they are in hot water.
-- Jaffar
Hussein
Banking establishments are more
dangerous than standing armies.
-- Thomas
Jefferson
1743-1826, Third President of the USA
I sincerely believe that banking
establishments are more dangerous than
standing armies, and that the principle
of spending money to be paid by
posterity, under the name of funding, is
but swindling futurity on a large scale.
-- Thomas
Jefferson
1743-1826, Third President of the USA
It is no accident that banks resemble
temples, preferably Greek, and that the
supplicants who come to perform the
rites of deposit and withdrawal
instinctively lower their voices into
the registers of awe. Even the most
junior tellers acquire within weeks of
their employment the officiousness of
hierophants tending an eternal flame. I
don't know how they become so quickly
inducted into the presiding mysteries,
or who instructs them in the finely
articulated inflections of contempt for
the laity, but somehow they learn to
think of themselves as suppliers of the
monetarized DNA that is the breath of
life.
-- Lewis
H. Lapham
1935-,
American Essayist, Editor