7 Quotes by Robert Rowland Smith

The debt we owe our parents can never be squared, and jolly good too, because doing so would threaten to nullify all relationship, all emotional commerce between the two generations. Being in debt, just like being in credit, means an active interest applies between the two parties and, once the debt is taken care of, the interest is bound to wane.

Let's remember you can still go shopping without buying, because where buying is a matter of need, shopping is a question of want.

Have we encroached upon an era in which the best we can hope for is not achieving proper sleep but remaining on standby?

No break in production is to be tolerated, for the world has been recast as a factory whose goal is output, whose made is efficiency, and in which "waking up", if it suggests having been asleep, is for wimps

Getting ready is that point in the day when the rivalry between the two needs is likely to peak, because we are making transition from being at home and pleasing ourselves (ego) to going out and having to conform to a series of norms an conventions (superego). We become less ego and more superego with each button we fasten

The psyche will do anything to avoid pain, and when faced with something traumatic, like having to pay, its instinct is to put it off - what Freud called 'Nachträglichkeit' or delayed effect. Credit card and psyche conspire to soften the blow of paying by staggering it over time.

Credit' comes from the Latin 'credere', 'to believe', for credit is the belief that the money you're borrowing will someday be returned, a belief that needs the future to function in.