I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

The numeric system was invented to help man to put order in the chaos of the world.

What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man was that age which came to an end in August 1914.

It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens.

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency. . . 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 can diagnose.

A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him. It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances, and to confess a conventional respectability, which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men.