A person who can't pay gets another person who can't pay to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs to guarantee that he has two natural legs. It don't make either of them able to do a walking-match. Charles Dickens

For almost seventy years the life insurance industry has been a smug sacred cow feeding the public a steady line of sacred bull. Ralph Nader

Down went the owners- greedy men whom hope of gain allured: Oh, dry the starting tear, for they were heavily insured. W. S. Gilbert

I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left. Voltaire

Men sooner forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony. Machiavelli

The way to be immortal (I mean not to die at all) is to have me for your heir. I recommend you to put me in your will and you will see that (as long as I live at least) you will never even catch cold. Lord Byron

I have always thought that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes, and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he first forms a good plan, and, cutting off all amusements or other employments that would divert his attention, make the execution of that same plan his sole study and business. Benjamin Franklin

Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. John Maynard Keynes

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary. Thomas Paine

In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries. Ezra Pound

The objects of a financier are, then, to secure an ample revenue; to impose it with judgment and equality; to employ it economically; and, when necessity obliges him to make use of credit, to secure its foundations in that instance, and for ever, by the clearness and candor of his proceedings, the exactness of his calculations, and the solidity of his funds. Edmund Burke

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce? Ralph Waldo Emerson

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February. Mark Twain

A free-enterprise economy depends only on markets, and according to the most advanced mathematical macroeconomic theory, markets depend only on moods: specifically, the mood of the men in the pinstripes, also known as the Boys on the Street. When the Boys are in a good mood, the market thrives; when they get scared or sullen, it is time for each one of us to look into the retail apple business. Barbara Ehrenreich

The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. John Maynard Keynes

The wish to acquire more is admittedly a very natural and common thing; and when men succeed in this they are always praised rather than condemned. But when they lack the ability to do so and yet want to acquire more at all costs, they deserve condemnation for their mistakes. Machiavelli

A government, which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always depend on the support of Paul. George Bernard Shaw

Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt. William Cobbett

All money nowadays seems to be produced with a natural homing instinct for the Treasury. Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh

Do not discourage your children from hoarding, if they have a taste to it; whoever lays up his penny rather than part with it for a cake, at least is not the slave of gross appetite; and shows besides a preference always to be esteemed, of the future to the present moment. Samuel Johnson

You don't need to pray to God any more when there are storms in the sky, but you do have to be insured. Bertolt Brecht

Buy when others are despondently selling and sell when others are greedily buying. Sir John Templeton