“[A banker is] a man who will lend you money if you can prove to him that you don't need it.”
Quoted by Leonard Lyons in his column https://secure.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost_historical/doc/151726578.html, 15 October 1944
Chapter VI https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Things Become More Serious, Section IV, p 115
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)
“[A banker is] a man who will lend you money if you can prove to him that you don't need it.”
Quoted by Leonard Lyons in his column https://secure.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost_historical/doc/151726578.html, 15 October 1944
My Lady's Lamentation, The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. II, edited by William Ernst Browning (1910); reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“To paraphrase Clemenceau, money is much too serious a matter to be left to the Central Bankers.”
Source: (1962), Ch. 3 The Control of Money, p. 50-51
“In the epoch of imperialism, the bankers became the aristocrats of the capitalist world”
Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 253
“A banker's charter written by bankers.”
The view of Joe Higgins on the Keane report on mortgage arrears The Irish Times http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/1020/1224306124490.html
According to R. Ken Rasmussen in The Quotable Mark Twain (1998), this is most probably not Twain's.
Misattributed
"Bankers Are Just Like Anybody Else, Except Richer"
I'm a Stranger Here Myself (1938)
Context: Most bankers dwell in marble halls,
Which they get to dwell in because they encourage deposits and discourage withdrawals,
And particularly because they all observe one rule which woe betides the banker who fails to heed it,
Which is you must never lend any money to anybody unless they don't need it.
May 10, 2011
The Opie and Anthony Radio show
Speech to the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool (30 September 1968), quoted in The Times (1 October 1968), p. 6
1960s