Graeber Debt Quotes

#1. When the blood of thousands of Americans is shed, the impact lingers. For a generation after the Civil War, the Republican injunction to 'vote as you shot' kept the party dominant for decades; from 1868 to 1912, only one Democrat - Grover Cleveland - won the White House.

Jeff Greenfield

#2. If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt - above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.

David Graeber

#3. What is debt anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.

David Graeber

#4. What is not yet done is only what we have not yet attempted to do.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#5. The real origins of money are to be found in crime and recompense, war and slavery, honor, debt, and redemption. That,

David Graeber

#6. As it turns out, we don't "all" have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.

David Graeber

#7. There is in every truth a wise saying, and in every contradiction, two wise sayings.

Robert Breault

#8. We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt.

David Graeber

#9. Debt is the most effective way to take a relation of violent subordination and make the victims feel that it's their fault.

David Graeber

#10. polite with dignity, affable without formality, distant without haughtiness, grave without austerity,

Ron Chernow

#11. A debt ... is just an exchange that has not been brought to completion.

David Graeber

#12. Ageing must be like wearing a heavy, itchy suit.

Tom Cardamone

#13. Who is it needs such flawless shafts as fate? What archer of his arrows is so choice, or hits the white so surely?

James Russell Lowell