Usurious Quotes & Sayings

Protecting people from their bad habits - in fact, defining which habits should be considered "bad" in the first place - is a prerogative lawmakers have eagerly seized. Prostitution, gambling, liquor sales on the Sabbath, pornography, usurious loans, sexual relations outside of marriage (or, if your tastes are unusual, within marriage), are all habits that various legislatures have regulated, outlawed, or tried to discourage with strict (and often ineffective) laws. When — Charles Duhigg

Today finds Scotland in an extraordinary muddle. First she was free in body, romantic, cultured, and uncivilised, till her government was taken over by a usurious Kirk, weilding power through superstition. The boor for a century, she was repopularised by Scott, adopted as a plaything by a foreign queen, suffered worse than any nation in the industrial upheaval, and finally left an abortive carcase rotting somewhere to the North of England. — George Scott-Moncrieff

If we don't face our fears, our fears will chase us forever. — Paulo Coelho

Sharecropping is the dirty little secret at the root of America's wealth - along with slavery itself. The immense profits generated by the industrious yet impoverished Black "sharecroppers" and "tenant farmers" financed Europe's and America's Industrial Revolution, including the building of their railroads, factories, mills, and their entire infrastructure. It is truthfully asserted that the major cities of America and the Western world were "built with bricks of cotton." Today the debt traps designed to ensnare the working poor and middle class in a lifelong cycle of debt - the high-cost installment loans that charge usurious interest rates of 100% or more, the "payday" loans that charge 400% interest, the extortionate credit card multi-charges, the subprime mortgages with ballooning interest rates, and the home equity loan swindles - are the bastard children of the sharecropping American South. It — Reclamation Project

Siblings that say they never fight are most definitely hiding something — Lemony Snicket

And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave star, bird, clock, will answer you: 'it is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will."" (He grins at his father provocatively.) — Eugene O'Neill

Usurious rates of return are deceitful sirens that sing but to lure the unwary upon the rocks of loss and remorse. — George S. Clason

There is no such thing as beauty, especially in the human face ... what we call the physiognomy. It's all a mathematical and imagined alignment of features. Like, if the nose doesn't stick out too much, the sides are in fashion, if the earlobes aren't too large, if the hair is long ... It's kind of a mirage of generalization. People think of certain faces as beautiful, but, truly, in the final measure, they are not. It's a mathematical equation of zero. "True beauty" comes, of course, of character. Not through how the eyebrows are shaped. So many women that I'm told are beautiful ... hell, it's like looking into a soup bowl. — Charles Bukowski

Poetic justice, with her lifted scale,
Where, in nice balance, truth with gold she weighs,
And solid pudding against empty praise.
Here she beholds the chaos dark and deep,
Where nameless somethings in their causes sleep,
Till genial Jacob, or a warm third day,
Call forth each mass, a poem, or a play:
How hints, like spawn, scarce quick in embryo lie,
How new-born nonsense first is taught to cry. — Alexander Pope

Seneca devoted much of his time to writing essays in praise of poverty, and in lending money at usurious rates. — Josh Billings

If we are going to create a financial system that works for all Americans, we have got to stop financial institutions from ripping off the American people by charging sky-high interest rates and outrageous fees.
In my view, it is unacceptable that Americans are paying a $4 or $5 fee each time they go to the ATM.
It is unacceptable that millions of Americans are paying credit card interest rates of 20 or 30 percent.
The Bible has a term for this practice. It's called usury. And in The Divine Comedy, Dante reserved a special place in the Seventh Circle of Hell for those who charged people usurious interest rates.
Today, we don't need the hellfire and the pitch forks, we don't need the rivers of boiling blood, but we do need a national usury law. — Bernie Sanders

A "London Mechanic's Wife" made a point that historians should take to heart: Shall the idiot-like, the stupid and usurious capitalists, tell us to look to our domestic affairs, and say, "these we understand best," we will retort on them, and tell them that thousands of us have scarce any domestic affairs to look after, when the want of employment on the one hand, or ill-requited toil on the other, have left our habitations almost destitute... — Hal Draper

Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home; because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be a usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

During the battle, Spartacus himself tried with frenzied
determination, the symbolism of which is obvious, to reach Crassus, who was commanding the Roman
legions. He wanted to perish, but in single combat with the man who symbolized, at that moment, every
Roman master; it was his dearest wish to die, but in absolute equality. He did not reach Crassus:
principles wage war at a distance and the Roman general kept himself apart. Spartacus died, as he wished,
but at the hands of mercenaries, slaves like himself, who killed their own freedom with his. In revenge for
the one crucified citizen, Crassus crucified thousands of slaves. The six thousand crosses which, after
such a just rebellion, staked out the road from Capua to Rome demonstrated to the servile crowd that
there is no equality in the world of power and that the masters calculate, at a usurious rate, the price of
their own blood. — Albert Camus

I love the joy of mountains Wandering free with no concerns Every day I find food for this old body There's leisure for thinking, nothing to do Often I carry an ancient book Sometimes I climb a rock pavilion To look down a thousand foot precipice Overhead are swirling clouds A cold moon chilly cold My body feels like a flying crane — Hanshan

And it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought. — Mark Haddon

The art of banking is always to balance the risk of a run with the reward of a profit. The tantalizing factor in the equation is that riskier borrowers pay higher interest rates. Ultimate safety - a strongbox full of currency - would avail the banker nothing. Maximum risk - a portfolio of loans to prospective bankrupts at usurious interest rates - would invite disaster. A good banker safely and profitably treads the middle ground. — James Grant

Have you ever met a war you didn't love? — William Kristol

Gomez is a by-the-book cop. He's the only character not to break bad. — Steven Michael Quezada

I don't want to die and leave a few sad songs and a hump in the ground as my only monument. I want to leave a world that is liberated from trash, pollution, racism, nation-states, nation-state wars and armies, from pomp, bigotry, parochialism, a thousand different brands of untruth and licentious, usurious economics. — George Jackson

Let patriotism have its high days and freedom its monuments, and let the triumphs of navigators and generals be annually observed; but surely, beyond all these, a season that stands for as much to the race as Easter does may well be remembered each year with songs and flowers and with every mark of gratitude and of loftiest jubilation. — George Horace Lorimer