James Madison

A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

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

Good times are when people make debts to pay in bad times.

There are some debts that can’t be paid with money.

Who goeth a borrowing. Goeth a sorrowing.

Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound.

Christmas begins about the first of December with an office party and ends when you finally realize what you spent, around April fifteenth of the next year.

Debt is the secret foe of thrift, as vice and idleness are its open foes. The debt-habit is the twin brother of poverty.

Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.

Tis against some mens principle to pay interest, and seems against others interest to pay the principle.

Some people use one half their ingenuity to get into debt, and the other half to avoid paying it.

A decent society wouldn’t push millions of student into debt. It would recognize that higher education isn’t mainly a personal investment. It is a public good.

A debt is still unpaid, even if forgotten.

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.

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

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.