Quotes about borrowing (333 quotes, page 4)

“Almost everywhere the White missionary has penetrated, primitive people have borrowed from his bible those elements in which they saw a portrayal of their own plight”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
Context: There are strong parallels between the hope for salvation of the Jews and the hopes of the Indians who followed native prophets, between the early Christian martyrs and the Indian revolts against United States authority, between the Hebrew and the [native American] Indian prophets.... the Jews and early Christians have served as models for oppressed peoples from primitive cultures... Almost everywhere the White missionary has penetrated, primitive people have borrowed from his bible those elements in which they saw a portrayal of their own plight... They regard the arrest and execution of a native on charges of being a rebel against White authority in the same terms as the trials undergone by the Hebrew prophets or the passion of Jesus.

People

“The room for maneuver, to live on borrowed money or time, does not exist any more.”

Manmohan Singh (1932) 13th Prime Minister of India

On the 1991 Indian economic crisis, as quoted in "Budget 1991-92 Speech of Shri Manmohan Singh Minister of Finance" http://indiabudget.nic.in/bspeech/bs199192.pdf, Government of India (24 July 1991)
1991-2000
Context: There is no time to lose. Neither the Government nor the economy can live beyond its means year after year. The room for maneuver, to live on borrowed money or time, does not exist any more. Any further postponement of macroeconomic adjustment, long overdue, would mean that the balance of payments situation, now exceedingly difficult, would become unmanageable and inflation, already high, would exceed limits of tolerance.

Money , Time

“And in none of these ways are moral philosophers better than other philosophers or professors in other fields. Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably borrowed mostly by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen or just never returned than books in other areas of philosophy.”

Jonathan Haidt book The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind (2012)

Books , Way

“Borrow trouble for yourself, if that's your nature, but don't lend it to your neighbours. ”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Nature

“Most new books are forgotten within a year, especially by those who borrow them.”

Эван Эзар

Books

“You haven't any right to expect your friends to be larger than yourself, larger than life. Just take them as they are, cut down to average size, and be glad you have them. To drink with, laugh with, borrow money from, lend money to, stay away from their special girls as you want them to stay away from yours, and above all, never break your word to, once it's been given. And that is all the obligation you have, all you have the right to expect.”

Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968) American author and screenwriter

Money , Life , Drink , Girl

“As Germany was formerly managed it was a millstone about our necks; as managed now, it is a millstone about the neck of France. When I came in, I found the subsidy to Prussia dictated by Hanover, not by Great Britain. I insisted that national defence and America must stand first, nor would I agree to the German war until every other service had been provided for. I acceded to the plan of a Ministry that wanted vigour and borrowed their majority to carry on their own plan. But I carried it on in my own way, and, though that may have been the wrong way, I offer myself confitentem reum, if I have not thereby annihilated French power in the East and West Indies.”

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–1778) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons (9 December 1761), quoted in Basil Williams, The Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Volume II (London: Longmans, 1914), p. 132
1760s

Way , War

“Clearly, the power of the lender to command interest has nothing to do with the use to which the loan is put. Whether the borrower uses it to build a factory or acquire a dwelling house, whether he spends it on tools of his trade or gambling on horses, will make no difference… The coupling of interest with capital has been an unfortunate error prolific in its progeny of falsehoods. It arises from confusing the power to exact payment for loans with the use to which some of the loans are put… It gives to the idea of a loan a quality it should not possess, a suggestion of productiveness and of social benefit, obscuring the indebtedness and dependence which the loan so plainly advertises.”

Leon MacLaren (1910–1994) British philosopher

Leon MacLaren, Nature of Society and Other Essays, p169

Housing , Dependency , Making love , Horse

“The problem is easy to state: developing countries borrow too much—or are lent too much—and in ways that force them to bear most or all of the risk of subsequent increases in interest rates, fluctuations in the exchange rate, or decreases in income. Given this, it is not surprising that they often cannot repay what is owed.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz book Making Globalization Work

§8
Making globalization work (2006)

Way , Problem , Country

“All persons exist to society by some shining trait of beauty or utility, which they have. We borrow the proportions of the man from that one fine feature, and finish the portrait symmetrically; which is false; for the rest of his body is small or deformed. I observe a person who makes a good public appearance, and conclude thence the perfection of his private character, on which this is based; but he has no private character. He is a graceful cloak or lay-figure for holidays. All our poets, heroes, and saints, fail utterly in some one or in many parts to satisfy our idea, fail to draw our spontaneous interest, and so leave us without any hope of realization but in our own future. Our exaggeration of all fine characters arises from the fact, that we identify each in turn with the soul. But there are no such men as we fable; no Jesus, nor Pericles, nor Caesar, nor Angelo, nor Washington, such as we have made. We consecrate a great deal of nonsense, because it was allowed by great men. There is none without his foible. I verily believe if an angel should come to chant the chorus of the moral law, he would eat too much gingerbread, or take liberties with private letters, or do some precious atrocity.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Nominalist and Realist

Soul , Drawing , Law , Personality

“In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel with them, that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

Minute on Education http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html (1835)
Minute on Indian Education (1835)

Country , Personality , People , Knowledge

“We are over-governed, over-spent, over-taxed, over-borrowed and over-manned.”

Keith Joseph (1918–1994) British barrister and politician

Stockton Lecture ("Monetarism Is Not Enough") 1976
1970s

“The Druids taught the people of Britain and Gaul concerning the immortality of the soul. They believed in transmigration and apparently in reincarnation. They borrowed in one life, promising to pay back in the next. They believed in a purgatorial type of hell where they would be purged of their sins, afterward passing on to the happiness of unity with the gods. The Druids taught that all men would be saved, but that some must return to earth many times to learn the lessons of human life and to overcome the inherent evil of their own natures.”

Manly P. Hall (1901–1990) Canadian writer and mystic

The Secret Teachings of All Ages,The Druidic Mysteries of Britain & Gaul, p. 46, https://ia800809.us.archive.org/15/items/Thesecretteachingsofallages2/The%20Secret%20Teachings%20Of%20All%20Ages%20-%20Manly%20P.%20Hall.pdf
The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928)

God , Soul , Time , Hell

“For too long, perhaps ever since the war, we postponed facing up to fundamental choices and fundamental changes in our society and in our economy. This is what I mean when I say we have been living on borrowed time. For too long this country – all of us, yes this Conference too – has been ready to settle for borrowing money abroad to maintain our standards of life, instead of grappling with the fundamental problems of British industry. Governments of both parties have failed to ignite the fires of industrial growth in the ways that countries with very different political and economic philosophies have done.”

James Callaghan (1912–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; 1976-1979

Speech to the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool (28 September 1976), quoted in James Callaghan, Time and Chance (Collins, 1987), p. 425
Prime Minister

Money , Time , Country , War

“You know, as I do, that we face two deep-seated problems, inflation and unemployment. Both of them are still too high. … I have to emphasize to you that if we fail to bring down inflation, we shall never succeed in overcoming unemployment. We cannot have a prosperous industry in this country if we are unable to sell our goods overseas. No one owes Britain a living, and may I say to you quite bluntly that despite the measures of the last 12 months, we are still not earning the standard of living we are enjoying. We are only keeping up our standards by borrowing, and this cannot go on indefinitely. There is no soft option. I do not promise you any real easement for some time to come. There can be no lasting improvement in your own living standards until we can achieve it without going deeper and deeper into debt as a nation.”

James Callaghan (1912–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; 1976-1979

First television broadcast as Prime Minister (5 April 1976), quoted in The Times (6 April 1976), pp. 1–2
Prime Minister

Problem , Time , Country

“As a nation we have two tasks; the one is to provide goods and services for our home needs, the other is to pay for the food and raw materials which we must get from abroad. Before the war we were rich; we owned money and railways and so forth abroad. The income from these helped to pay for our imports; but we sold these in order to help to win the war. We have therefore borrowed large sums from Canada and the United States to tide us over while we build up again, but when this money runs out we must pay for what we want from our own resources. To do this we must devote a far larger part than ever before of the wealth we produce to pay for imports.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast (18 March 1947), quoted in The Times (19 March 1947), p. 4
Prime Minister

Money , Home , Food , War

“Few men have had their elasticity so thoroughly put to the proof as Caesar-- the sole creative genius produced by Rome, and the last produced by the ancient world, which accordingly moved on in the path that he marked out for it until its sun went down. Sprung from one of the oldest noble families of Latium--which traced back its lineage to the heroes of the Iliad and the kings of Rome, and in fact to the Venus-Aphrodite common to both nations--he spent the years of his boyhood and early manhood as the genteel youth of that epoch were wont to spend them. He had tasted the sweetness as well as the bitterness of the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed, had practised literature and made verses in his idle hours, had prosecuted love-intrigues of every sort, and got himself initiated into all the mysteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles pertaining to the toilette-wisdom of the day, as well as into the still more mysterious art of always borrowing and never paying. But the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even these dissipated and flighty courses; Caesar retained both his bodily vigour and his elasticity of mind and of heart unimpaired. In fencing and in riding he was a match for any of his soldiers, and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria; the incredible rapidity of his journeys, which usually for the sake of gaining time were performed by night--a thorough contrast to the procession-like slowness with which Pompeius moved from one place to another-- was the astonishment of his contemporaries and not the least among the causes of his success. The mind was like the body. His remarkable power of intuition revealed itself in the precision and practicability of all his arrangements, even where he gave orders without having seen with his own eyes. His memory was matchless, and it was easy for him to carry on several occupations simultaneously with equal self-possession. Although a gentleman, a man of genius, and a monarch, he had still a heart. So long as he lived, he cherished the purest veneration for his worthy mother Aurelia (his father having died early); to his wives and above all to his daughter Julia he devoted an honourable affection, which was not without reflex influence even on political affairs. With the ablest and most excellent men of his time, of high and of humbler rank, he maintained noble relations of mutual fidelity, with each after his kind. As he himself never abandoned any of his partisans after the pusillanimous and unfeeling manner of Pompeius, but adhered to his friends--and that not merely from calculation--through good and bad times without wavering, several of these, such as Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Matius, gave, even after his death, noble testimonies of their attachment to him.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol.4. Part 2.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Daughters , Self-confidence , Literature , Fashion

“To sum it up in a word: Marx was close to Hegel in his insistence on rejecting every philosophy of the Origin and of the Subject, whether rationalist, empiricist or transcendental; in his critique of the cogito, of the sensualist-empiricist subject and of the transcendental subject, thus in his critique of the idea of a theory of knowledge. Marx was close to Hegel in his critique of the legal subject and of the social contract, in his critique of the moral subject, in short of every philosophical ideology of the Subject, which whatever the variation involved gave classical bourgeois philosophy the means of guaranteeing its ideas, practices and goals by not simply reproducing but philosophically elaborating the notions of the dominant legal ideology. And if you consider the grouping of these critical themes, you have to admit that Marx was close to Hegel just in respect to those features which Hegel had openly borrowed from Spinoza, because all this can be found in the Ethics and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

These deep-rooted affinities are normally passed over in pious silence; they nevertheless constitute, from Epicurus to Spinoza and Hegel, the premises of Marx's materialism. They are hardly ever mentioned, for the simple reason that Marx himself did not mention them, and so the whole of the Marx-Hegel relationship is made to hang on the dialectic, because this Marx did talk about!

Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (1976), "Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?"
A - F, Louis Althusser

Knowledge , Idea

“Artists are entrepreneurs. They are willing to stake everything for the chance to go it alone and make the work they feel compelled to create. They will beg and borrow to pay the rent on their studio, to buy the necessary materials, and to feed themselves during the long months of endeavor.”

Will Gompertz (1965) British journalist

Think Like an Artist (2015)

Chance , Making love , Feeling

“The U.S. economy crashes when it becomes too top heavy because the economy depends on consumer spending to keep it going... For a time, the middle class and poor can keep the economy going nonetheless by borrowing. But, as in 1929 and 2008, debt bubbles eventually burst. We're getting dangerously close. By the first quarter of this year, household debt was at an all-time high of $13.2 trillion.”

Robert B. Reich (1946) American political economist

Time , Dependency

“The problem of policies aimed to return the economy to what it was before the virus hit is this: Global capitalism, by 2019, was itself a major cause of the collapse in 2020. Capitalism's scars from the crashes of 2000 and 2008-2009 had not healed. Years of low interest rates had enabled corporations and governments to "solve" all their problems by borrowing limitlessly at almost zero interest rate cost. All the new money pumped into economies by central banks had indeed caused the feared inflation, but chiefly in stock markets whose prices consequently spiraled dangerously far away from underlying economic values and realities. Inequalities of income and wealth reached historic highs. In short, capitalism had built up vulnerabilities to another crash that any number of possible triggers could unleash. The trigger this time was not the dot.com meltdown of 2000 or the sub-prime meltdown of 2008/9; it was a virus. And of course, mainstream ideology requires focusing on the trigger, not the vulnerability. Thus mainstream policies aim to reestablish pre-virus capitalism. Even if they succeed, that will return us to a capitalist system whose accumulated vulnerabilities will soon again collapse from yet another trigger.”

Richard D. Wolff (1942) American economist

COVID-19 and the Failures of Capitalism (2020)

Money , Time , Wealth , Problem

“The desperate policies of panic-driven governments involve throwing huge amounts of money at the economies collapsed in response to the coronavirus threat. Monetary authorities create money and lend it at extremely low interest rates to the major corporations and especially big banks "to get them through the crisis." Government treasuries borrow vast sums to get the collapsed economy back into what they imagine is "the normal, pre-virus economy."”

Richard D. Wolff (1942) American economist

Capitalism's leaders are rushing into policy failures because of their ideological blinders.
COVID-19 and the Failures of Capitalism (2020)

Money , Imagination

“Well, you know, the irony is, it’s one of the bizarre ways an economy works. There was no incentive to take all that money and go in and produce things that might have driven up prices and so on, because the people in America can’t afford to buy it. Our wages have been stagnant. The debts have been so big that people are afraid to borrow the way they once did, even though they still do, but not at the growing scale as before. So, all that extra money kind of went into the stock market to make itself make quick money by buying shares, hoping that they would go up. And if all the rich people who get it into their hands do that kind of thing, you see the stock market go up, but the underlying economy doesn’t go anywhere. And again, after a while, that’s not a sustainable arrangement.”

Richard D. Wolff (1942) American economist

On why hasn’t inflation increased dramatically in the U.S despite the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low.
We Need a More Humane Economic System—Not One That Only Benefits the Rich (December 26, 2018)

Money , Hope , People , Way

“Capitalism has three innate characteristics that drive us towards destruction… firstly, that it generates and relies upon perpetual growth... (Second:)…the idea that our right to own natural wealth equates to the amount of money that we’ve got in the bank or we can borrow. So, you can take as much natural wealth away from other people as you like.... The third characteristic is the one that really ensures that people go along with capitalism, the idea that everyone can pursue — and can expect to find — private luxury.”

George Monbiot (1963) English writer and political activist

Quoted by Lee Camp, Pandemic is Not Just a Crisis, It’s Also a Gift, Consortium News https://consortiumnews.com/2020/04/23/lee-camp-pandemic-is-not-just-a-crisis-its-also-a-gift/, (23 April 2020)

Money , Wealth , People , Nature

“Poetry shows up where language shows up – a mysterious supplement, to borrow or deform an old Derrida epithet, that we cannot do without, and that just might be the basis of the material world as we know it. Well, if not language as such, then sound…”

Ariana Reines (1982) American writer

On poetry in “INTERVIEW WITH ARIANA REINES” http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-ariana-reines/ in The White Review (July 2019)

World

“I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow, and I have borrowed a lot since I read it to you first.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Speech to the National Press Club http://books.google.com/books?id=8gLmAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA439 (20 March 1914)
1910s

Reading

“A lot of journalists give me a hard time about how I look, but I've never met a journalist I'd rather look like. And it's not just a performance thing. I don't drive around the countryside in full makeup because it would scare the animals, but I've been wearing makeup since I was a teenager, after I saw Bowie wearing it on Top of the Pops. I immediately borrowed someone's older sister's makeup and put it on. I loved how odd it made me look, and the fact that it upset people. You put on eyeliner and people start screaming at you. How strange, and how marvellous.”

Robert Smith (musician) (1959) English singer, songwriter and musician

Quoted in Grant Smithies, "Close encounter with Robert Smith" https://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/features/profiles/earlier-profiles-26519/51564/The-Cures-Robert-Smith, Sunday Star-Times (July 29, 2007)

Animals , Time , Sister , Love

“One of the effects, among others, of modern science has been that of mortally wounding religion by posing in concrete terms problems which esoterism alone can resolve and which remain unresolved because esoterism is not heeded and is heeded less now than ever. Faced by these new problems, religion is disarmed, and it borrows clumsily and gropingly the arguments of the enemy, and this obliges it to falsify its own perspective imperceptibly and disavow itself more and more; its doctrine is certainly not affected, but false opinions borrowed from its repudiators corrode it insidiously "from within", as witnessed by modernist exegesis, the demagogic leveling of the liturgy, Teilhardian Darwinism or the "sacred art" of surrealist and "abstract" persuasion.”

Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher

[2006, Light on the Ancient Worlds, World Wisdom, 27, 978-0-941532-72-3]
Miscellaneous, Religion

Falseness , Problem , Science , Religion

“When we accept the temporary nature of everything in our lives, we can feel gratitude for the good fortune of getting to borrow them for a time.”

Jay Shetty (1987) internet personality

Jay Shetty, Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind for Peace and Purpose Every Day

Time , Gratitude , Nature , Feeling

“Thinking outside of the box is the art of accomplishing things without even borrowing anything from one's memory. Living in the present moment.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Memory , Box , Art , Thinking

“The borrowing requirement was 'terrifying.'”

Denis Healey (1917–2015) British Labour Party politician and Life peer

Source: Remarks to Barbara Castle (9 April 1975), quoted in Barbara Castle, The Castle Diaries, 1974–76 (1980), p. 359
Context: He just had to cut back public expenditure. The Social Contract wasn't working. Inflation was getting out of control.

“A work of art wastes away and becomes lustreless in surroundings where it has a price but not a value. It radiates only when surrounded by love. It is bound to wilt in a world where the rich have no time and the cultivated no money. But it never harmonizes with borrowed greatness.”

Ernst Jünger book The Glass Bees

The Glass Bees (1957)

Money , World , Time , Art

“Acquaintance, n. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to. A degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich or famous”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Friendship , Personality

Quotes about borrowing page 4

Quotes about borrowing
page 4