Dave Ramsey

Debt is normal. Be weird.

A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it.

Before borrowing money from a friend, decide which you need most.

If I owe you a pound, I have a problem; but if I owe you a million, the problem is yours.

Debt, we’ve learned, is the match that lights the fire of every crisis. Every crisis has its own set of villains – pick your favorite: bankers, regulators, central bankers, politicians, overzealous consumers, credit rating agencies – but all require one similar ingredient to create a true crisis: too much leverage.

You should always live within your income, even if you have to borrow to do so.

A small debt produces a debtor; a large one, an enemy.

It is very iniquitous to make me pay debts, you have no idea, of the pain it gives one.

Student loans have been helpful to many. But they offer neither incentive nor assistance to those students who, by reason of family or other obligations, are unable or unwilling to go deeper into debt. … It is, moreover, only prudent economic and social policy for the public to share part of the costs of the long period of higher education for those whose development is essential to our national economic and social well-being. All of us share in the benefits – all should share in the costs.

I go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse.

One of the greatest disservices you can do a man is to lend him money that he can’t pay back.

Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience; you will find it a calamity.

It shows nobility to be willing to increase your debt to a man to whom you already owe much.

We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.

People are living longer than ever before, a phenomenon undoubtedly made necessary by the 30-year mortgage.

Debt rolls a man over and over, binding him hand and foot, and letting him hang upon the fatal mesh until the long-legged interest devours him.