When once a banker has entered the Board – whatever may have been the occasion – his grip proves tenacious and his influence usually supreme; for he controls the supply of new money.
There are better mothers than disaster. A native land is the best of all mothers. We American Jews have a native land we love. But it is even better to have a native land who loves us.
To be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists.
Ownership has been separated from control; and this separation has removed many of the checks which formerly operated to curb the misuse of wealth and power.
Repression breeds hate; hate menaces stable government.
History is not life, but since only life makes history, the union of the two is obvious.
There is a spark of idealism within every individual which can be fanned into flame and bring forth extraordinary results.
There is no such thing as an innocent purchaser of stocks.
The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions and ideas become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.
We shall have lost something vital and beyond price on the day when the state denies us the right to resort to force...
Anyone who critically analyzes a business learns this: that the success or failure of an enterprise depends usually upon one man.
No danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is an opportunity for full discussion. Only an emergency can justify repression.
I think all of our human Experience shows that no one with absolute power can be trusted to give it up even in part.
And it is also immaterial that the intrusion was in aid of law enforcement. Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
The power and the growth of power of our financial oligarchs comes from wielding the savings and quick capital of others.
The statement of Mr. Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Oklahoma Bank case, is significant: “We cannot say that the public interests to which we have adverted, and others, are not sufficient to warrant the State in taking the whole business of banking under its control. On the contrary we are of opinion that it may go on from regulation to prohibition except upon such conditions as it may prescribe.
But as the Pujo Committee finds “the so-called control of life insurance companies by policy-holders through mutualization is a farce” and “its only result is to keep in office a self-constituted, self-perpetuating management.
But sporadic evidence indicates how great are the possibilities of accumulation when one has the use of “other people’s money.
The investment banker is naturally on the lookout for good bargains in bonds and stocks. Like other merchants he wants to buy his merchandise cheap. But when he becomes director of a corporation, he occupies a position which prevents the transaction by which he acquires its corporate securities from being properly called a bargain. Can there be real bargaining where the same man is on both sides of a trade?
Such affiliations tend as a cover and conduit for secret arrangements and understandings in restriction of competition through the agency of the banking house thus situated.