Exactly:
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.
—Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1802)
Before studying real economics and monetary policy (and central banking/federal reserve) I had never heard this quote. Now I’ve heard it dozens of times from multiple sources. I love it and I wish more people were exposed to these kinds of quotes.
“The colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction. The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the international bankers was the PRIME reason for the Revolutionary War.” —Benjamin Franklin
“Give me control of a nation’s currency and I care not who makes the laws “
- Baron Rothschild
One of the writers of the Federal Reserve Act.