"Paper money will always return to its intrinsic value - nothing."
French philosopher Voltaire after Frances ill-fated seduction by fiat currency in the 1700's.

"We will not have any more crashes again in our time".
John Maynard Keynes, 1927.

"There is nothing in the situation to be disturbed about."
US Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, Feb 1930

"All safe deposit boxes in banks or financial institutions have been sealed... and may only be opened in the presence of an agent of the I.R.S."
- President F.D. Roosevelt, Gold Confiscation Act, 1933

"The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead".
- John Maynard Keynes, A Tract in Monetary Reforms, 1923

"In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic"
John Maynard Keynes, Monetary Reform (1924)

"The price of gold is pretty well determined by us...But the major impact on the price of gold is the opportunity cost of holding the US dollar...We can hold the price of gold very easily; all we have to do is to cause the opportunity cost in terms of interest rates and US Treasury bills to make it unprofitable to own gold."
former Federal Reserve governor Wayne Angell, 1993.

"The difference between manipulation and intervention is communication" -
Todd Harrison, 2006 Minyanville Conference, Ojai California.

"Under a gold standard, the amount of credit that an economy can support is determined by the economy's tangible assets, since every credit instrument is ultimately a claim on some tangible asset. But government bonds are not backed by tangible wealth, only by the government's promise to pay out of future tax revenues, and cannot easily be absorbed by the financial markets. A large volume of new government bonds can be sold to the public only at progressively higher interest rates. Thus, government deficit spending under a gold standard is severely limited. The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. They have created paper reserves in the form of government bonds which-through a complex series of steps-the banks accept in place of tangible assets and treat as if they were an actual deposit, i.e., as the equivalent of what was formerly a deposit of gold. The holder of a government bond or of a bank deposit created by paper reserves believes that he has a valid claim on a real asset. But the fact is that there are now more claims outstanding than real assets. The law of supply and demand is not to be conned. As the supply of money (of claims) increases relative to the supply of tangible assets in the economy, prices must eventually rise. Thus the earnings saved by the productive members of the society lose value in terms of goods. When the economy's books are finally balanced, one finds that this loss in value represents the goods purchased by the government for welfare or other purposes with the money proceeds of the government bonds financed by bank credit expansion. In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. "
Alan Greenspan, 1966, from his essential essay Gold and Economic Freedom.