Quotes & Sayings About Fiat

It is obviously no secret that I earn a lot of money. But it is also no secret that I give most of it away. I don't live a luxurious life. I drive a small second-hand Fiat. I don't have to worry about money, which is itself a privilege. But I never had any anxiety that I would lose my identity. — Henning Mankell

I believe that religious witness should not mobilize public authority to impose a view where a decision is inherently private in nature or where people are deeply divided about whether it is ... Americans are plainly and persistently divided about abortion and the fiat of government cannot settle the issue as a matter of conscience or of conduct. — Edward Kennedy

The cry: Audacity! is a Fiat lux. It is necessary, for the sake of the forward march of the human race, that there should be proud lessons of courage permanently on the heights. Daring deeds dazzle history and are one of man's great sources of light. The dawn dares when it rises. To attempt, to brave, to persist, to persevere, to be faithful to one's self, to grasp fate bodily, to astound catastrophe by the small amount of fear that it occasions us, now to affront unjust power, again to insult drunken victory, to hold one's position, to stand one's ground; that is the example which nations need, that is the light which electrifies them. The same formidable lightning proceeds from the torch of Prometheus to Cambronne's short pipe. — Victor Hugo

I would drive to gigs in my tiny little Fiat. I would shoot up and down the M1 to play at various places. — David Bowie

The Pacts and Covenants, by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation. — Thomas Hobbes

All businesses, including gasoline stations and restaurants, should close ever Sunday ... by force of legislative fiat through the duly elected officials of the people. — Harold Lindsell

The problem with fiat money is that it rewards the minority that can handle money, but fools the generation that has worked and saved money. — Adam Smith

The collapse of an inflation policy carried to its extreme
as in the United States in 1781 and in France in 1796
does not destroy the monetary system, but only the credit money or fiat money of the State that has overestimated the effectiveness of its own policy. The collapse emancipates commerce from etatism and establishes metallic money again. — Ludwig Von Mises

The great merit of gold is precisely that it is scarce; that its quantity is limited by nature; that it is costly to discover, to mine, and to process; and that it cannot be created by political fiat or caprice. — Henry Hazlitt

When science has sent forth her fiat - it is only to hear and obey. — Jules Verne

If I buy a Fiat Uno, I'll read that, for a man like me, a Ferrari was more suitable. If instead I buy a Ferrari, they'll write that I should have kept my feet on the ground and bought a Fiat. If I smile, I'm not serious. If I don't smile, I'm a rich sulker that doesn't enjoy having the most beautiful job in the world. — Mario Balotelli

A Fiat Panda, it's the best car in the world. — Luca Cordero Di Montezemolo

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. — Toni Morrison

Fiat-money! Let the State 'create' money, and make the poor rich, and free them from the bonds of the capitalists! How foolish to forego the opportunity of making everybody rich, and consequently happy, that the State's right to create money gives it! How wrong to forego it simply because this would run counter to the interests of the rich! How wicked of the economists to assert that it is not within the power of the State to create wealth by means of the printing press!- You statesmen want to build railways, and complain of the low state of the exchequer? Well, then, do not beg loans from the capitalists and anxiously calculate whether your railways will bring in enough to enable you to pay interest and amortization on your debt. Create money, and help yourselves. — Ludwig Von Mises

When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die ... No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion. — Arthur Miller

Regulatory fiat cannot create a market at a technologically interdependent interface. And by the same token, regulation and so-called monopoly power rarely prevail at modular interfaces between stages of value-added technology. — Clayton Christensen

When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone. — John McPhee

I'm inspired every day by the great captains of industry and enlightened entrepreneurs like my great-great-grandfather and founder of Fiat, Giovanni Agnelli, who personally knew all his workers and gave so much to this country, or Adriano Olivetti, unique and innovative in every way. — Lapo Elkann

The perfect world, by Adam trod,
Was the first temple
built by God
His fiat laid the corner stone,
And heaved its pillars, one by one. — Nathaniel Parker Willis

The factory farm has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat. — Jonathan Safran Foer

To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a monetary union, putting out a fiat currency, composed of independent states. — Milton Friedman

Ciao, bello!' The coal-eyed beauty who had kissed Jason through the Fiat's window appeared through the crowd, her pretty red mouth smiling. Utterly ignoring Storm, she perched herself on the table next to Jason.

'Ciao, bella,' he smiled.

'Vuoi ballare?'

'She wants me to dance,' he explained to Storm, peering round the girl's adolescent bottom.

'I know,' she replied shortly. 'I've got a degree in Italian. — Madeleine Ker

At the age of 20 I bought a used Fiat 127. This was the only one I could afford! — Carlos Ghosn

When we talk about democracy, if the people's stomach is empty, democracy is also empty. Democracy can not be installed by fiat; it must be achieved by the people themselves. — Y. C. James Yen

You bought a Ferrari but you drive it like a Fiat. — Zlatan Ibrahimovic

What are the temples which Roman robbers have reared, - what are the towers in which feudal oppression has fortified itself...to the deep forests which the eye of God has alone pervaded, and where Nature, in her unviolated sanctuary, has for ages laid her fruits and flowers on His altar! What is the echo of roofs...or or aisles that pealed the anthems of painted pomp, to the silence that has reigned in these dim groves since the first fiat of Creation was spoken. — Charles Fenno Hoffman

Thus, the use of fiat money is more justifiable in financing a depression than in financing a war. — Carroll Quigley

My first-ever car, my parents bought me a red Fiat Uno. I was 17 and just so happy to have a car, so I was very fortunate that my parents were in a position to get me one - it was a secondhand car, but I was just so happy to have it. — Victoria Beckham

Prayer is a law of the universe. As God has ordained that certain physical laws should govern the law of this universe, so He has ordained the spiritual law. Books simply will not stay put on the table without the operation of gravity - although God could cause them, by divine fiat, to stay. Certain things simply will not happen without the operation of prayer, although God could cause them, by divine fiat, to happen. The Bible is full o examples of people doing what they could do and asking God to do what they couldn't do. In other words, the pattern given to us is both to work and pray. — Elisabeth Elliot

Here's the dirty little secret: Fiat currency is designed to lose value. Its very purpose is to confiscate your wealth and transfer it to the government. Each time the government prints a new dollar and spends it, the government gets the full purchasing power of that dollar. — Michael Maloney

May Mary, who in the freedom of her 'Fiat' and her presence at the foot of the cross, offered to the world, Jesus, the Liberator, help us to find him in the Sacrament of the altar — Pope John Paul II

Apart from medieval China, which invented both paper and printing centuries before the West, the world had never seen government paper money until the colonial government of Massachusetts emitted a fiat paper issue in 1690. — Murray Rothbard

Italy's assets are her style, her beauty, her creativity, her passion, her energy, her technology; and these will be core brand values of all our cars. Fiat as a company has a long way to go and a steep road ahead. — Lapo Elkann

Religions are vague, of course. This means that they are easy to follow -you can interpret their prescriptions as you like. but it also means that it is easy to slip up -there is always some injunction you are violating. But Islam has no religious establishment - no popes, no bishops - that can declare by fiat which is the correct interpretation. As a result, the decision to oppose the state on the grounds that is insufficiently Islamic belongs to anyone who wishes to exercise it. — Fareed Zakaria

The late Mr. David Hume, in his posthumous works, places the powers of generation much above those of our boasted reason; and adds, that reason can only make a machine, as a clock or a ship, but the power of generation makes the maker of the machine; ... he concludes, that the world itself might have been generated, rather than created ; that is, it might have been gradually produced from very small beginnings, increasing by the activity of its inherent principles, rather than by a sudden evolution of the whole by the Almighty fiat. — Erasmus Darwin

From October 2003, I uncovered the following quote, which fully expressed the climate of fear of the time ---

"Any democratic government, whether threatened by real or perceived enemies, can succumb to Fascism if its people permit the slow or precipitate undoing, by executive or legislative fiat, of their civil liberties. — Irwin Hood Hoover

To be a fully functioning moral agent, one cannot passively accept moral principles handed down by fiat. Moral principles require moral reasoning. — Michael Shermer

The Cinquecento was an engine of motivation at Fiat. It refurbished the image of the entire company. It's a symbol for the company, but it's more than that. It's a global Italian symbol, as Mini is a global British symbol and the Beetle is a global German symbol. — Lapo Elkann

We are not bound by commandments but by loyalties, and we have more loyalties than can be covered by fiat. We have to weigh their conflicting values for ourselves, on this occasion and on that, once in this favor and once in that, in the natural day to day of our conduct. In a complex and many-sided culture, we have to develop our ethic in our own actions, now within one group and now within another. Perhaps this group or that may have a book of rules for its members, but there can be no book to balance for any one of us, once for all, the loyalties that bind him to a dozen groups. — Jacob Bronowski

I want to make it clear what I am not saying. I am not saying that fiat money, once established on the ruins of gold, cannot then continue indefinitely on its own. — Murray Rothbard

It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking. — Ron Paul

I mostly drive around in a Fiat 500 TwinAir, and that's a pretty small car! — Richard Hammond

Fiat justitia et ruant coeli. Let justice be done, though the heavens may fall. See Ferdinand I 320:1. — William Watson

Our soul, like Mary's body, is to receive God Himself if only we, like her, believe, consent and receive; if only we speak her truly magic word fiat, "let it be." It is the creative word, the word God used to create the universe. — Peter Kreeft

In the North, neither greenbacks, taxes, nor war bonds were enough to finance the war. So a national banking system was created to convert government bonds into fiat money, and the people lost over half of their monetary assets to the hidden tax of inflation. In the South, printing presses accomplished the same effect, and the monetary loss was total. — G. Edward Griffin

When a country has substituted credit money or fiat money for metallic money, because the legal equating of the over-issued paper and the metallic money sets in motion the mechanism described by Gresham's Law, it is often asserted that the balance of payments determines the rate of exchange. But this also is a quite inadequate explanation. The rate of exchange is determined by the purchasing power possessed by a unit of each kind of money. — Ludwig Von Mises

If it's not accepted that big government, fiat money, ignoring liberty, central economic planning, welfarism, and warfarism caused our crisis, we can expect a continuous and dangerous march toward corporatism and even fascism with even more loss of our liberties, — Ron Paul

Racist, sexist, and homophobic thoughts cannot, alas, be abolished by fiat but only by the time-honored methods of persuasion, education and exposure to the other guy's-or excuse me, woman's-point of view. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Dixitque Deus: fiat lux. Et facta est lux. Translated by himself into his personal Bombay "Wulgate": And God said, Cheap Italian motor car, beauty soap of the film star. And there was Lux. Please, Daddy, why did God want a small Fiat and a bar of soap, and also please, why did he get the soap only? Why couldn't he make the car? And why not a better car, Daddy? He could've asked for a Jesus Chrysler, no? — Salman Rushdie

In its heyday, the car was an expression of technical flair and design genius: the original Mini, the Beetle, the 2CV, and the Fiat 500 were all, in their various ways, inspired incarnations of functionality. — Martin Jacques

Fiat justitia, ruat caelum. (Let justice be done, though the heavens may fall.) — Anonymous

As long as we issue fiat currency, I see no alternative to a legal tender law. — Alan Greenspan

Many hold that by floating the dollar, Nixon converted the U.S. currency into pure "fiat money" - mere pieces of paper, intrinsically worthless, that were treated as money only because the United States government insisted that they should be. — David Graeber

Our fiat currency is under increasing stress with our large and growing trade deficits. We have a federal deficit that is calculated in the trillions when we take into account the net present value of the future Social Security and Medicaid obligations we are creating today. — George Noory

Fiat has a lot going for it in terms of design, technology and efficiency. — Peter Schmidt

Ophelia moaned as I patted her cheeks in the approved "vague assistance to woman who has fainted" manner.

"Perdy?" she mumbled, her eyelashes fluttering.

"No, it's just me," I said, looking up when the door opened. "And Drake and Fiat, and Pal and Istvan, and I think that's Renaldo and another one of Fiat's bullies in the hall, although it's a little hard to see with everyone in the way. — Katie MacAlister

The history of fiat money is little more than a register of monetary follies and inflations. Our present age merely affords another entry in this dismal register. — Hans F. Sennholz

In the North, the sale of government bonds was the one measure for raising funds that seemed to work. Even that, however, with the lure of compounded interest to be paid in gold at a future date, failed to raise more than about half the needed amount. So the Union faced a real dilemma. The only options remaining were (1) terminate the war or (2) print fiat money. For Lincoln and the Republicans who controlled Congress, the choice was never seriously in doubt. — G. Edward Griffin

[St. Francis] looked upon creation with the eyes of one who could recognize in it the marvelous work of the hand of God. His solicitous care, not only towards men, but also towards animals is a faithful echo of the love with which God in the beginning pronounced his 'fiat' which brought them into existence. We too are called to a similar attitude. — Pope John Paul II

Creating a meritocracy requires equal participation by both the hippo, who could rule the day by fiat, and the brave smart creative, who risks getting trampled as she stands up for quality and merit. — Eric Schmidt

Armadillos that, in some cases, grew to be as large as Fiat 500s. — Elizabeth Kolbert

Only the naive inflationist's could believe that government could enrich mankind through fiat money. — Ludwig Von Mises

A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank. — Ron Paul

The earliest signs of living things, announcing as they do a high complexity of organization, entirely exclude the hypothesis of a transmutation from lower to higher grades of being. The first fiat of Creation which went forth, doubtlessly ensured the perfect adaptation of animals to the surrounding media; and thus, whilst the geologist recognizes a beginning, he can see in the innumerable facts of the eye of the earliest crustacean, the same evidences of Omniscience as in the completion of the vertebrate form. — Roderick Murchison

The core of the evolution controversy can thus be phrased in simple terms: Did mind create matter? Or did matter give rise to mind? According to a theistic worldview, mind is primary. It is the fundamental creative force in the universe (whether God created the world quickly by fiat or slowly by a gradual process). Darwin reversed things. According to his theory, matter is the primary creative force, and mind emerged only very late in evolutionary history.10 — Nancy Pearcey

War has generally had grave and fateful consequences for the American monetary and financial system. We have seen that the Revolutionary War occasioned a mass of depreciated fiat paper, worthless Continentals, a huge public debt, and the beginnings of central banking in the Bank of North America. — Murray Rothbard

Our markets have not achieved their great successes as a result of government fiat, but rather through efforts of competing interests working to meet the demands of investors and to fulfill the promises posed by advancing technology. — Arthur Levitt

Grandma kept turning around in the front seat of their old Fiat saying, "Look at you girls! On, Lena, you are a beauty!"
Lena seriously wished she would stop saying that, because it was irritating, and besides, how was cranky Effie supposed to feel? — Ann Brashares

The Creator did not speak man into existence as He did all else which He made, but He began with previously made material. So in the restoration process He did not speak the restoration into reality by fiat. Rather He began the process through a series of connected acts and events. And certainly no act of the Eternal Creator would ever be without purpose or reason. — Dr. J. Otis Yoder

In our seeking for the lost Child, our contemplation of Our Lady becomes active. The fiat was complete surrender. Advent was a folding upon the life growing in our darkness. Now the seeking is a going out from ourselves. It is a going out from our illusions, our limitations, our wishful thinking, our self-loving, and the self in our love. — Caryll Houselander

Weaving in and out of traffic, she tooted the horn, mounted the footpath when needed and drove as fast as her Fiat would allow. — Toni Pike

Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world. Fiat money in extremis is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted. — Alan Greenspan

Of all the cars I've owned, I'd like still to have the Ferrari, the Porsche, the Alfa, the Lancia, the MG-TCs and the Fiat 850, but mostly I miss my Mini Moke. — Denise McCluggage

Fiat has assembly plants in Brazil and Argentina. — Ratan Tata

If you reject the infinite, you are stuck with the finite, and the finite is parochial ... the best explanation of anything eventually involves universality, and therefore infinity. The reach of explanations cannot be limited by fiat. — David Deutsch

The national debt is totally unlike a family budget for about a gazillion reasons, not the least of which being that families cannot raise money by fiat or deflate the size of their debt unilaterally and that family members die instead of existing infinitely. — Matt Taibbi

LIGHT might well be good since it sprang from that fiat of goodness, "Let there be light." We who enjoy it, should be more grateful for it than we are, and see more of God in it and by it. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

There have been unions based on gold or silver, but not on fiat money - money tempted to inflate - put out by politically independent entities. — Milton Friedman

It will be well for him if at such times he listens only to his Master's word, for other and evil advisers come with their suggestions. Despair whispers, "Lie down and die; give it all up." But God would have us put on a cheerful courage, and even in our worst times, rejoice in his love and faithfulness. Cowardice says, "Retreat; go back to the worldling's way of action; you cannot play the Christian's part, it is too difficult. Relinquish your principles." But, however much Satan may urge this course upon you, you cannot follow it if you are a child of God. His divine fiat has bid thee go from strength to strength, and so thou shalt, and neither death nor hell shall turn thee from thy course. What, if for a while thou art called to stand still, yet this is but to renew thy strength for some greater advance in due time. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

My company Independent Ideas worked with Gucci on a special edition Fiat 500. — Lapo Elkann

Remember what we're looking at. Gold is a currency. It is still, by all evidence, a premier currency, that no fiat currency, including the dollar, can match. — Alan Greenspan

The Democratic Party is made up of trial lawyers, labor unions, government employees, big city political machines, the coercive utopians, the radical environmentalists, feminists, and others who want to restructure society with tax dollars and government fiat. — Grover Norquist

In this great fiat of the little girl Mary, the strength and foundation of our life of contemplation is grounded, for it means absolute trust in God, trust which will not set us free from suffering but will set us free from anxiety, hesitation, and above all from the fear of suffering. Trust which makes us willing to be what God wants us to be, however great or however little that may prove. Trust which accepts God as illimitable Love. — Caryll Houselander

I mean, what Fiat had it was not very big, it was something like forty or fifty million dollars, but it's enough to get revolving credit, to get starting away again, the buying of new machinery. — Gianni Agnelli

Absolute money (gold) makes limited-states and localized-wars (Pre-1913); Substitute money (fiat) makes Absolute States & Wars (Post-1913) — Orrin Woodward

There is a saying from Roman antiquity: Fiat justitia - ruat caelum. "Do justice, and let the skies fall." In every epoch, there have been those to argue that "greater" goods, such as tribal solidarity or social cohesion, take precedence over the demands of justice. It is supposed to be an axiom of "Western" civilisation that the individual, or the truth, may not be sacrificed to hypothetical benefits such as "order." But in point of fact, such immolations have been very common. To the extent that the ideal is at least paid lip service, this result is the outcome of individual struggles against the collective instinct for a quiet life. — Christopher Hitchens

As the "no" of Eve proves that the creature was made by love and is therefore free, so thy Fiat proves that the Creature was made for love as well. — Fulton J. Sheen

It is demonstrable from Geology that there was a period when no organic beings had existence: these organic beings must therefore have had a beginning subsequently to this period; and where is that beginning to be found, but in the will and fiat of an intelligent and all-wise Creator? — William Buckland

What was the power that induced strong soldiers to put off their jackets and shirts, and present their hands to be tied up, and tortured for hours, it might be, under the scourge, with an air of ready volition? The moral coercion of despair; the result of an unconscious calculation of chances that satisfies them that it is ultimately better to do all that, bad as it is, than try the alternative. These unconscious calculations are going on every day with each of us, and the results embody themselves in our lives; and no one knows that there has been a process and a balance struck, and that what they see, and very likely blame, is by the fiat of an invisible but quite irresistible power. — J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Every telecomm company is as big a corporate welfare bum as you could ask for. Try to imagine what it would cost at market rates to go around to every house in every town in every country and pay for the right to block traffic and dig up roads and erect poles and string wires and pierce every home with cabling. The regulatory fiat that allows these companies to get their networks up and running is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.
If phone companies want to operate in the "free market," then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we'll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let's hold an auction for the right to be the next big telecomm company, on one condition: in exchange for using the public's rights-of-way, you have to agree to connect us to the people we want to talk to, and vice-versa, as quickly and efficiently as you can. — Cory Doctorow

Because mechanism designers do not generally know which outcomes are optimal in advance, they have to proceed more indirectly than simply prescribing outcomes by fiat; in particular, the mechanisms designed must generate the information needed as they are executed. — Eric Maskin

Gold, unlike all other commodities, is a currency ... and the major thrust in the demand for gold is not for jewelry. It's not for anything other than an escape from what is perceived to be a fiat money system, paper money, that seems to be deteriorating. — Alan Greenspan

the monetarists would have met with greater success if they had broadened their definition of money even further. Their mistake was to fail to see that there is no distinction between fiat money and credit. They should have included all dollar-denominated credit instruments in their definition of money. Or, put differently, they should have replaced money with credit in the equation of exchange, because by the 1980s there was less and less difference between the two. Now there is essentially none. — Richard Duncan

In fact, it seems that present-day science, with one sweeping step back across millions of centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to that primordial 'Fiat lux' Let there be light uttered at the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, while the particles of the chemical elements split and formed into millions of galaxies ... Hence, creation took place in time, therefore, there is a Creator, God exists! — Pope Pius XII