Blood Bankers Quotes

Pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.

The most famous lenders in nature are vampire bats. These bats congregate in the thousands inside caves, and every night fly out to look for prey. When they find a sleeping bird or careless mammal, they make a small incision in its skin, and suck its blood. But not all vampire bats find a victim every night. In order to cope with the uncertainty of their life, the vampires loan blood to each other. A vampire that fails to find prey will come home and ask a more fortunate friend to regurgitate some stolen blood. Vampires remember very well to whom they loaned blood, so at a later date if the friend returns home hungry, he will approach his debtor, who will reciprocate the favour. However, unlike human bankers, vampires never charge interest.

The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the street. John D. Rockefeller

He was a longtime street thug who had just enough ruthlessness to rise to legitimate businesses and not quite enough intelligence to leave his dark life behind him. Aptly suited as a banker.

They became the directing power in the life insurance companies, and other corporate reservoirs of the people’s savings-the buyers of bonds and stocks. They became the directing power also in banks and trust companies-the depositaries of the quick capital of the country-the life blood of business, with which they and others carried on their operations. Thus four distinct functions, each essential to business, and each exercised, originally, by a distinct set of men, became united in the investment banker. It is to this union of business functions that the existence of the Money Trust is mainly due.[1]

This, you see, is the way of the world. There are people like me, and then there are people who consider me evil because, unlike them, I don't weep at sad movies or funerals or "Auld Lang Syne." But deep inside every bleating sentamentalist lurks the dark embryo of who I am: a cold-blooded opportunist. This is what turns good soldiers into executioners, neighbours into informers, bankers into thieves. Oh, they will probably deny it. They all think they are more human than I am, merely because they weep and I do not.

We know the faces of the ancient Greeks from classical paintings, we have seen Assyrians on the pediment of the palace at Susa. And so, when we actually meet Orientals belonging to a particular group, we feel that we are in the presence of creatures spirited before our eyes by necromancy. Our image of them so far has been a superficial one; now it has acquired depth, it has become three-dimensional, it moves. The young Greek banker’s daughter who is such a society favorite at present, seems like one of those dancers in a ballet, at once historical and aesthetic, who symbolize Hellenic art in flesh and blood; yet the theater setting makes these images seem banal;

I understood what you said. I don’t think you understood me. I’m going to bite whatever you stick into my mouth. You can put that razor into my brain, I guess, but you should know that a sudden serious brain injury causes the victim to simultaneously urinate, defecate . . . and bite down.” He looked up at Bogs smiling that little smile of his, old Ernie said, as if the three of them had been discussing stocks and bonds with him instead of throwing it to him just as hard as they could. Just as if he was wearing one of his three-piece bankers’ suits instead of kneeling on a dirty broom-closet floor with his pants around his ankles and blood trickling down the insides of his thighs.

A society whose experts would be priests, two thousand bankers and technicians ruling over a Europe of one hundred and twenty million inhabitants where private life would be absolutely identified with public life, where absolute obedience "of action, of thought, and of feeling" would be given to the high priest who would reign over everything, such was Comte's Utopia, which announces what might be called the horizontal religions of our times. It is true that it is Utopian because, convinced of the enlightening powers of science, Comte forgot to provide a police force. Others will be more practical; the religion of humanity will be effectively founded on the blood and suffering of humanity.

The failure of the Crusades intensified anti-Jewish persecutions in Europe. Banned from owning land or joining trading companies, forced to wear special clothing, Jews were often involved in moneylending, supposedly taboo for Christians. Kings borrowed money from them, and so protected them, but whenever society was strained, by recession or plague, they were attacked. In 1144, after a boy was murdered in Norwich, England, Jews were accused of killing Christian children to make Passover matzoh, unleashing the ‘blood libel’ which in various forms – but always featuring a conspiracy of Jews to harm non-Jews – reverberates down to the twenty-first century. It spread: in 1171, it hit Blois, France, where thirty-three Jews (seventeen women) were burned alive. In the failed state of England, where Henry III struggled to maintain royal power in the face of endemic noble revolt, both king and rebels borrowed from a wealthy banker, David of Oxford. After David’s death, his widow Licoricia of Winchester, the richest non-noble in England, lent to both sides, partly funding the building of Westminster Abbey. But her murder in 1277 showed the perils of being a prominent Jew. In 1290, Henry’s son Edward I expelled the Jews from England. Yet in 1264 Bolesław, duke of Poland, had granted the Statute of Kalisz which gave Jews the right to trade and worship freely and banned the blood libel, legislating against Christian conspiracy theories and denunciations: ‘Accusing Jews of drinking Christian blood is expressly prohibited,’ declared the Statute. ‘If, despite this, a Jew should be accused of murdering a Christian child, such charge must be sustained by testimony of three Christians and three Jews.’ Poland would be a Jewish sanctuary for many centuries.

suppose it’s not odd, then, that I have trouble reconciling my life to those of my friends, or at least to their lives as I perceive them to be. Charles and Camilla are orphans (how I longed to be an orphan when I was a child!) reared by grandmothers and great-aunts in a house in Virginia: a childhood I like to think about, with horses and rivers and sweet-gum trees. And Francis. His mother, when she had him, was only seventeen—a thin-blooded, capricious girl with red hair and a rich daddy, who ran off with the drummer for Vance Vane and his Musical Swains. She was home in three weeks, and the marriage was annulled in six; and, as Francis is fond of saying, the grandparents brought them up like brother and sister, him and his mother, brought them up in such a magnanimous style that even the gossips were impressed—English nannies and private schools, summers in Switzerland, winters in France. Consider even bluff old Bunny, if you would. Not a childhood of reefer coats and dancing lessons, any more than mine was. But an American childhood. Son of a Clemson football star turned banker. Four brothers, no sisters, in a big noisy house in the suburbs, with sailboats and tennis rackets and golden retrievers; summers on Cape Cod, boarding schools near Boston and tailgate picnics during football season; an upbringing vitally present in Bunny in every respect, from the way he shook your hand to the way he told a joke.

Hayek echoed Robbins’s description of the Common Room as a place where, despite sharp political differences, the ambiance was friendly, an atmosphere that suited his own tastes well (Hayek 1994, 81). Some examples of the kind of collegial repartee that was characteristic of the School was a “Mock Trial” of economists that Director Beveridge organized in June 1933 (reported in the Economist, June 17, 1933) or Beveridge’s address (titled “My Utopia”) before the School’s Cosmopolitan Club at the beginning of the Michaelmas term in 1934. In the latter Beveridge (1936) spoke of an “elaborate apparatus” that had been invented by “John Maynard von Hayek” which had apparently solved the problem of making money neutral: “So far as I can make out, it automatically changes the air and so affects the blood pressure of bankers and businessmen, as prices rise or fall in relation to productive efficiency” (135). There were also regular events to mark the end of term, all dutifully entered by Hayek into his appointment book: the Christmas party at the end of Michaelmas term and the Strawberry Tea at the end of summer term.

Martinis as cold as a banker's handclasp and dry as a deacon's cupboard.

A veteran of Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds who has grown cynical over the years explains how it works for Gulf investors. All the best deals and opportunities are seized upon by big American institutions with the help of New York City banks. The second-tier deals go to the Europeans. And the lemons are packaged up and rebranded for what derisive bankers call the “dumb money” in the Middle East. “They don’t care about us,” he says. “They only want our money.

I wander through the feria and greet my colleagues who are wandering as dreamily as I am. Dreamily× dreamily = a prison in literary heaven. Wandering. Wandering. The honor of poets: the chant we hear as a pallid judgment. I see young faces looking at the books on display and feeling for coins in the depths of pockets as dark as hope. 7 × 1 = 8, I say to myself as I glance out of the corner of my eye at the young readers and a formless image is superimposed on their remote little smiling faces as slowly as an iceberg. We all pass under the balcony where the letters A and E hang and their blood gushes down on us and stains us forever. But the balcony is pallid like us, and pallor never attacks pallor. At the same time, and I say this in my defense, the balcony wanders with us too. Elsewhere this is called mafia. I see an office, I see a computer running, I see a lonely hallway. Pallor× iceberg = a lonely hallway slowly peopled by our own fear, peopled with those who wander the feria of the hallway, looking not for any book but for some certainty to shore up the void of our certainties. Thus we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation. Herds. Hangmen. The scalpel slices the bodies. A and E × Feria del Libro = other bodies; light as air, incandescent, as if last night my publisher had fucked me up the ass. Dying can seem satisfactory as a response, Blanchot would say. 31 × 31 = 961 good reasons. Yesterday we sacrificed a young South American writer on the town altar. As his blood dripped over the bas-relief of our ambitions I thought about my books and oblivion, and that, at last, made sense. A writer, we've established, shouldn't look like a writer. He should look like a banker, a rich kid who grows up without a care in the world, a mathematics professor, a prison official. Dendriform. Thus, paradoxically, we wander. Our arborescence × the balcony's pallor = the hallway of our triumph. How can young people, readers by antonomasia, not realize that we're liars? All one has to do is look at us! Our imposture is blazoned on our faces! And yet they don't realize, and we can recite with total impunity: 8, 5, 9, 8, 4, 15, 7. And we can wander and greet each other (I, at least, greet everyone, the juries and the hangmen, the benefactors and the students), and we can praise the faggot for his unbridled heterosexuality and the impotent man for his virility and the cuckold for his spotless honor. And no one moans: there is no anguish. Only our nocturnal silence when we crawl on all fours toward the fires that someone has lit for us at a mysterious hour and with incomprehensible finality. We're guided by fate, though we've left nothing to chance. A writer must resemble a censor, our elders told us, and we've followed that marvelous thought to its penultimate consequence. A writer must resemble a newspaper columnist. A writer must resemble a dwarf and MUST survive. If we didn't have to read too, our work would be a point suspended in nothingness, a mandala pared down to a minimum of meaning, our silence, our certainty of standing with one foot dangling on the far side of death. Fantasies. Fantasies. In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats. Castrated cats wedded to cats with slit throats. Everything that begins as comedy ends as a cryptographic exercise.

I mean, wouldn’t it be grand, to have a legend that grew while you were alive to enjoy it? To sit in a tavern and hear all the people around you speak of what you’ve done, with no notion that you were among them as flesh and blood?” “I can sit in a tavern and be ignored anytime I please,” muttered Calo. “I want to see the Kingdom of the Marrows someday,” said Sabetha. “Game my way from city to city…on the arms of nobles, emptying their pockets as I go, charming them witless. I’d be like a force of nature. They’d come up with some elegant title for their shared affliction. ‘It was her… it was… it was the Rose.’” Sabetha rolled this off her tongue, obviously savoring it. “The Rose of the Marrows, they’ll say. ‘The Rose of the Marrows has been my ruin!’ And they’ll tear their hair out explaining everything to their wives and bankers, while I ride on to the next city.” “Are we all going to need stupid nicknames, then?” said Calo. “We could be…the Shrubs of the North.” “The Weeds of Vintila,” said Galdo. “And if you’re a rose,” said Calo, “Locke’s going to need something as well.” “He can be a tulip,” said Galdo. “Delicate little tulip.” “Nah, if she’s the rose, he can be her thorn,” Calo snapped his fingers. “The Thorn of Camorr! Now that’s got some shine to it!” “That’s the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard,” said Locke.

Garrett had been bed-bound for the last week with a cough.The doctor had prescribed rest and leeches. Garrett had consented to the first treatment but insisted that his bankers provided more than enough of the second.

I tried to feed nuance to audiences of politicians and donors, bankers and designers and housewives. Honesty left my listeners bored, or queasy. Eventually I learned to present my life as a neat moral package, wiped clean; as my clear-eyed lover pointed out, this was how fear of famine had been leveraged to pass climate legislation. It was the way of the world to make selflessness of selfishness, smooth pâtés from butchers’ discards. No one paid to see blood on the plate. I went along.

A friend introduced me to a banker who was being strangled by a mountain of medical bills because of a paraplegic son, and I was given to understand that if I took care of the banker, he would feel obligated to push through my credit application. Strangely, all the banker required, initially at least, was for me to purchase from him a $2,500 mink jacket he claimed to have won in a church raffle. I figured it was a small price to pay for a $2 million line of credit. I was wrong. That fur coat would haunt me for the next two years, leading to my arrest, three trials, and the destruction of my entire business structure. It would also forever brand me as a mobster—a distinction I had until then escaped.