Coinage Quotes

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself. (Ursula K. Le Guin)

We all understand that the debasement of a nation's coinage is very pernicious and must prove disastrous to its commerce. How much more dangerous is the debasement of the spiritual coinage!

Virchand Gandhi

The easiest way to buy silver was to take a paper dollar to the bank and ask for change. So much coinage was disappearing from circulation that the government was forced to remove silver from U.S. coinage beginning in 1965.

Michael Maloney

Animals are not just herbivores or carnivores. They are, in the nice coinage of the psychologist George Miller, informavores.

Daniel Dennett

The attentive reader may have noticed that the core period of Jasper's Axial age-the lifetimes of Pythagoras, Confucius, and the Buddha-corresponds almost exactly to the period in which coinage was invented.

David Graeber

Gold is required in large quantities only in a society which produces a very large economic surplus and can afford to transform part of that surplus into gold for prestige purposes (as in India) or into coinage and money to promote capitalism.

Walter Rodney

Kripke tries to sober us up by denying that meaning determines reference. Rather, we name things by confronting them and baptising them, not by creating them out of a list of qualities. Names are not, pace Russell, shorthand for such lists. They are not abbreviations for descriptions, but (in Kripke's coinage) ‘rigid designators' – that is, they would name the same things in any possible world, including worlds in which their bearers did not have the properties we, in this world, use to identify them.

Richard Rorty

I am of the opinion that the main and final cause why the prince pretends to the power of altering the coinage is the profit or gain which he can get from it.

Nicole Oresme

For example, throughout the long contest, extending over several decades, on the free [silver] coinage question, the existence of this motto on the coins was a constant source of jest and ridicule; and this was unavoidable. Everyone must remember the innumerable cartoons and articles based on phrases like 'In God we trust for the other eight cents'; 'In God we trust for the short weight'; 'In god we trust for the thirty-seven cents we do not pay'; and so forth and so forth. Surely I am well within bounds when I say that a use of the phrase which invites constant levity of this type is most undesirable.

Theodore Roosevelt

As regards to its use on the coinage we have actual experience by which to go. In all my life I have never heard any human being speak reverently of this motto on the coins or show any sign of having appealed to any high emotion in him. But I have literally hundreds of times heard it used as an occasion of, and incitement to, the sneering ridicule which it is above all things undesirable that so beautiful and exalted a phrase should excite.

Theodore Roosevelt

When the question of the new coinage came up we looked into the law and found there was no warrant therein for putting 'In God We Trust' on the coins. As the custom, although without legal warrant, had grown up, however, I might have felt at liberty to keep the inscription had I had approved of its being on the coinage. But as I did not approve of it, I did not direct that it should again be put on. Of course the matter of the law is absolutely in the hands of Congress, and any direction of Congress in the matter will be immediately obeyed. At present, as I have said, there is no warrant in law for the inscription. (Theodore Roosevelt)

Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.

William Butler Yeats

The official designs of the Government, especially its designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage, may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors of national taste.

William Butler Yeats

"We're still the Black Company. We still don't leave our own behind.” Which was never strictly true but you do have to serve an ideal the best you can, lest it become debased. A law as ancient as coinage itself says bad money will drive out good. The same is true of principles, ethics and rules of conduct. If you always do the easier thing, then you cannot possible remain steadfast when it becomes necessary to take a difficult stand. You must do what you know to be right. And you do know. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you do know and you are just making excuses because the right thing is so hard, or just inconvenient.

Glen Cook

The success story of the word postmodernism demands to be written, no doubt in best-seller format; such lexical neoevents, in which the coinage of a neologism has all the reality impact of a corporate merger, are among the novelties of media society which require not merely study but the establishment of a whole new media-lexicological subdiscipline.

Fredric Jameson

I also turn down what's probably a good amount of coinage to be made out of playing dads, an incredible number of obnoxious dad.

Bill Pullman

What is the effect of unlimited coinage of silver in this country? and I invite your attention to this particularly, because it is a question of vital importance.

Richard Parks Bland

This is the very coinage of your brain.

William Shakespeare

A genuine taradiddle of the gross and palpable kind never fails for want of vouchers. Hundreds know it to be true-hundreds more were all but eye-witnesses of the fact related-some actually were; all can attest it on their personal responsibility. Upon that point everybody has a reputation for veracity to stake-though the same stake had been forfeited fifty times; and everybody can contribute to the original story an unquestionable incident of his own coinage "to make assurance doubly sure." So it goes round, until the first projector hardly recognizes his own lie; and ends by believing ten times more absurdity than he had palmed upon others.

Samuel Laman Blanchard

The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country. A calm and dispassionate recognition of the rights of the accused against the State, and even of convicted criminals against the State, a constant heart-searching by all charged with the duty of punishment, a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate in the world of industry all those who have paid their dues in the hard coinage of punishment, tireless efforts towards the discovery of curative and regenerating processes, and an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every man-these are the symbols which in the treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it.

Winston Churchill