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"By a wave, apparently, of the bank's magic wand the farmer and his men [the borrowers] have been enabled to live for six months at the expense of the rest of the community: the bank has give them a claim on the community's real income of food and clothing and tools and cinema shows. And for rendering this service to the farmer the bank charges him something called 'interest'. Our first impulse surely is to cry out on the whole proceeding as a piece of fraudulent legerdemain."
(Dennis H. Robertson, Money, 1922: p.71)
"Money is not, properly speaking, one of the subjects of commerce, but only the instrument which men have agreed upon to facilitate exchange of one commodity for another. It is none of the wheels of trade: It is the oil which renders the motion of the wheels more smooth and easy. If we consider any one kingdom by itself, it is evident that the greater or less plenty of money is of no consequence."
(David Hume, "Of Money", 1752, reprinted in Essays: Moral, political and literary, 1754,p.281)
"There cannot, in short, be intrinsically a more insignificant thing, in the economy of society, than money; except in the character of the contrivance for sparing time and labour....The introduction of money does not interfere with the operation of any of the Laws of Value laid down in the preceding chapters...The relation of commodities to one another remain unaltered by money: the only relation introduced is to money itself; how much or how little money they will exchange for; in other words, how the Exchange Value of money itself is determined."
(John Staurt Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848: p.333)
"The quantity theory of money thus rests, ultimately, upon the fundamental peculiarity which money alone of all human goods possesses - the fact that it has no power to satisfy human wants except a power to purchase things which do have such power."
(Irving Fisher, Purchasing Power of Money, 1911: p.32)
"[Monsieur Locke] a bien senti que l'abondance de l'argent encherit toute chose, mais il n'a pas recherche comment cela se fait. La grande difficulte de cette recherche consiste a savoir par quelle voie et dans quelle proportions l'augmentation de l'argent hausse le prix des choses"
(Richard. Cantillon, Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en General, 1755: p.160)
"A general rise in prices is therefore only conceivable on the supposition that the general demand has for some reason become, or is expected to become, greater than supply. This may seem paradoxical, because we have accustomed ourselves, with J.B. Say, to regard goods themselves as reciprocally constituting and limiting the demand for each other. And indeed ultimately they do so; here, however, we are concerned with precisely what occurs, in the first place, with the middle link...Any theory of money worthy of the name must be able to show how and why the monetary or pecuniary demand for goods exceeds or falls short of the supply of goods in given conditions"
(Knut Wicksell, Lectures on Political Economy, 1906: p.159-60)
"It is self-contradictory to discuss a process which admittedly could not take place without money, and at the same time to assume that money is absent or has no effect."
(Friedrich A. von Hayek, Pure Theory of Capital, 1941: p.31)
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