Debt Free Quotes

You cannot take away freedom to protect it, you cannot destroy the free market to save it, and you cannot uphold freedom of speech by silencing those with whom you disagree. To take rights away to defend them or to spend your way out of debt defies common sense.

Daughter! Get you an honest Man for a Husband, and keep him honest. No matter whether he is rich, provided he be independent. Regard the Honour and moral Character of the Man more than all other Circumstances. Think of no other Greatness but that of the soul, no other Riches but those of the Heart. An honest, Sensible humane Man, above all the Littlenesses of Vanity, and Extravagances of Imagination, labouring to do good rather than be rich, to be usefull rather than make a show, living in a modest Simplicity clearly within his Means and free from Debts or Obligations, is really the most respectable Man in Society, makes himself and all about him the most happy.

For nothing is safe, and nothing is free. Debt follows all men, no matter their plea. When the Shepherd returns, a new day shall ring. Death to the Rowans.” His gray eyes focused, homing in on Elm. “Long live the King.

...God's grace and forgiveness, while free to the recipient, are always costly for the giver.... From the earliest parts of the Bible, it was understood that God could not forgive without sacrifice. No one who is seriously wronged can "just forgive" the perpetrator.... But when you forgive, that means you absorb the loss and the debt. You bear it yourself. All forgiveness, then, is costly.

Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.

Many more people could ride out the storm-tossed waves in their economic lives if they had their year's supply of food…and were debt-free. Today we find that many have followed this counsel in reverse: they have at least a year's supply of debt and are food-free.

The root of anger is the perception that something has been taken. Something is owed you, and now a debt to debtor relationship has been established.

I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves.

Pieter would be pleased with the rest of the coins, the debt now settled. I would not have cost him anything. A maid came free.

You need to control your wife.” “Haven’t you figured it out?” Edward said quietly. “I married her to unleash her on the world, not to keep her under wraps.” James blinked, as if trying to understand that. “I married her because she made me believe in her,” Edward said. “Because I wished her beyond your power, not under mine. You have no idea of the debt I owe her. For her I’d do the unthinkable.” He glanced back at Free. “If she asked me to do it,” he told James, “I’d even forgive you.

Peace can exist only in the present moment. It is rid iculous to say "Wait until I finish this, then I will be free to live in peace." What is "this"? A di­ploma, a job, a house, the payment of a debt? If yo u th ink that way, peace will never come. There is always another "this" that will follow the present one. If you are not living in peace at this moment, you will never be able to. If you truly want to be at peace, you must be at peace right now. Otherwise, there is only "the hope of peace some day.

I only want you", she groaned. "Only you. Promise me that I can keep you. Promise me." My heart...shit, my heart. It unlocked. The padlock fell free. Her words were a key. Her forgiveness, and love and strength and everything that made her pure stole me from my life of pain. She changed me. Right there. Right then. I became hers. Irreversibly.

An unrenewed mind is a mind that lacks the knowledge of God’s Word. A lack of knowledge about the Word keeps us from maturing spiritually.

They came in the night,” we said, “the black and red horde. They burned down my castle, put my kin to the sword. The usurper was crowned, though my blood had not dried. But he did not account for the turn of the tide. For nothing is safe, and nothing is free. Debt follows all men, no matter their plea. When the Shepherd returns, a new day shall ring. Death to the Rowans… “Long live the King.

We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return; prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only, as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.

If you are debt free and got $10 in your pocket, you are already wealthier than 25% of Americans.

A PERSON WHO CANNOT FORGIVE HAS FORGOTTEN HOW GREAT A DEBT GOD HAS FORGIVEN THEM.

… what I’m saying is that if we and all the other species on earth are the only life forms in the universe and if there are no gods and let’s face it apart from a few tired scrolls written 300 years after the death of Jesus and his disciples there is no actual proof of a God or gods then we, the humans, who are meant to be at the height of the evolutionary tree, are in fact at the bottom because no other species on this planet is enslaved to the economy. Every other species is born free and lives free. We humans are born into economic slavery and life crippling debt.

Look again at those people around you. For most, debt is simply a part of life. But it doesn’t have to be for you. You weren’t born to be a slave.

To free a man from error is not to deprive him of anything but to give him something: for the knowledge that a thing is false is a piece of truth. No error is harmless: sooner or later it will bring misfortune to him who harbours it. Therefore deceive no one, but rather confess ignorance of what you do not know, and leave each man to devise his own articles of faith for himself.

I hated being lied to. I hated even more believing those lies until the truth decided to come for me. Turned out, I was never an individual; I was a possession to trade. I was never unique; someone had lived my life many times before, never free, never whole. My life was never mine. My destiny was already written. My story began the night he came for me.

We construct walls when we are hurt to safeguard our hearts and prevent any future wounds. We become selective, denying entry to all we fear will hurt us. We filter out anyone we think owes us something. We withhold access until these people have paid their debts in full. We open our lives only to those we believe are on our side.

Why do we need money beyond a point? If we are free of ill health, enmity, and debt, is that not enough? Too much money only leads to less peace.

Debt is the slavery of the free

We're not as free and independent as we thought. Street-level work that disrupts the infrastructure (the sewer system below or the electrical grid above) brings our shared dependence into view. People may inhabit very different worlds even in the same city, according to their wealth or poverty. Yet we all live in the same physical reality, ultimately, and owe a common debt to the world.

For to be overmindful of your debt is to doubt his generosity who has the free-hearted earth for mother, and God for father.

Here’s the simple formula: Spend less than you earn—invest the surplus—avoid debt

Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so- called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing. They tell us that the government can spend and spend without taxing at all; that it can continue to pile up debt without ever paying it off, because "we owe it to ourselves.

We smiled, and when we stood, the world around us faded, time and space, Prince and King, child and spirit. All that remained was magic - black as ink. Powerful, vengeful, and full of fury. Our voice dripped oil, Hauth fixed in our gaze. We stalked him, pinning him in the corner of the room. "They came in the night," we said, "the black and red horde. They burned down my castle, put my kin to the sword. The usurper was crowned, though my blood had not dried. But he did not account for the turn of the tide. For nothing is safe, and nothing is free. Debt follows all men, no matter their plea. When the Shepherd returns, a new day shall ring. Death to the Rowans... "Long live the King.

If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man—then you are ready for a walk.

To be "in Christ" is to place one's trust in Him for salvation from sin. To be "in Christ" is to trust His goodness, not our own; to trust that His sacrificial death on the cross paid the complete debt of death we owe for our sin; to trust that His resurrection gives us eternal life instead of relying upon our own ability to please God. To be "in Christ" is to claim, by faith, the free gift of salvation. To be "in Christ" is to enjoy a completely restored relationship with our Father in heaven by virtue of His Son's righteous standing.

Love only serves and does not calculate. Love gives without expectation, while hate carries an endless tally of debts. Hate controls everything it touches, but love sets everything it touches free.

You can have everything you want. All you need is a plan. And how do we spell plan? B-U-D-G-E-T!

Acts have consequences, Dixon, they must. These Louts believe all's right now,-- that they are free to get on with Lives that to them are no doubt important,-- with no Glimmer at all of the Debt they have taken on. That is what I smell'd,-- Lethe-Water. One of the things the newly-born forget, is how terrible its Taste, and Smell. In Time, these People are able to forget ev'rything. Be willing but to wait a little, and ye may gull them again and again, however ye wish,-- even unto their own Dissolution. In America, as I apprehend, Time is the true River that runs 'round Hell.

You don’t mock my mother. You don’t speak of her in anything but the most reverent of tones. I don’t care if you are Death, I will open a can of Cajun whup-ass all over you, boy.” – Nick “Normally, I’d be hanging you the can opener and daring you to go for it. Be glad I owe a debt that precludes me from killing you right now. But don’t push it. While you have a predetermined death, your own free will decisions can override that. Put that in the bank and think about it before you try to make a withdrawal.” – Death

Every relationship seems simple at its start. Two people listening to each other, two shells meeting each other, making one world between them. There are no others in the perfect unity of that instant, no other people or things or interests. It is free of ties or claims, unburdened by responsibilities, by worry about the future or debts to the past. And then how swiftly, how inevitably the perfect unity is invaded; the relationship changes; it becomes complicated, encumbered by its contact with the world.

The idea of autonomy denies that we are born into a world that existed prior to us. It posits an essential aloneness; an autonomous being is free in the sense that a being severed from all others is free. To regard oneself this way is to betray the natural debts we owe to the world, and commit the moral error of ingratitude. For in fact we are basically dependent beings: one upon another, and each on a world that is of our making.

God reminds us again and again that things between He and us are forever fixed. They are the rendezvous points where God declares to us concretely that the debt has been paid, the ledger put away, and that everything we need, in Christ we already possess. This re-convincing produces humility, because we realize that our needs are fulfilled. We don’t have to worry about ourselves anymore. This in turn frees us to stop looking out for what we think we need and liberates us to love our neighbor by looking out for what they need.

How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation?

Everything we will ever need for life and eternity has already been placed within our spirits.

God desires that we position ourselves to hear His voice so we can receive the Word that will change our lives forever.

Faith is a practical expression of the confidence we have in God and His Word, while trust is a practical expression of our commitment to God and His Word.

Better to look broke and debt-free than to look good and in deep debt.

Education is the way out of the poverty trap. It shouldn't be the poverty trap itself and make those trying to better themselves incur massive student debt.

If you have debt, you're not a free person. You're explicitly owned by your debt and implicitly owned by the creditor.

the most important key to building wealth is becoming and remaining debt-free.

There is tremendous satisfaction in working your tail off to hit a goal, then winning. It is worth the work.

But if I was a miracle, then that came with certain obligations and privileges. Privileges I would call on in order to end them an who’d killed me. Obligations I meant to uphold now I was free. I’d returned from the dead. And I’d bring the wrath of hell toward my enemies.

Needle&Thread: Kite...how did everything change? My heart beats for you, my soul craves yours. During the Second Debt we shared everything. We were free. I hate this distance now. Talk to me. Tell me what you’re thinking. You give me nothing, but I see everything. Trust me. Come to me tonight. Let me show you I’m yours forever. This doesn’t have to be complicated. I love you. Love is simple, kind. Love is forgiveness. Can we forgive each other before it’s too late? Tears ran silently over my cheeks as I pressed send.

Don’t Burn This Book may not usher in world peace, balance the national debt, or improve your sex life, but while those are worthy pursuits, that wasn’t my goal. Instead, I want to champion the values that keep people safe, sane, and free.

Forgiveness also frees you from the unbearable weight of holding on to an offense. It has been said that holding on to unforgiveness is like drinking poison while hoping the other person dies. When we refuse to forgive others, we give them a level of control over us. Some of us are being controlled by a person who is no longer alive as a direct result of our unwillingness to forgive. We hold the debt close to us like a cherished possession, not realizing that we are in fact the one being possessed. Let it go, friend.

Number 198 was wonderful too. Blake had watched a good-looking and ridiculously pretentious guy hit on Livia. The fancy man dropped expensive name after name as he showed her all his accessories. When he finally pulled out his wallet to show her a “highly desirable luxury credit card” Livia had rolled her eyes in Blake’s direction with smile number 198. He’d had to swallow a snicker when he heard her tell the fancy man she was debt free and didn’t even have credit cards. Blake knew that was a lie because he’d seen her pay for tickets with a card at the train station. That made number 198 a secret joke between just the two of them.

Debts are a heavy burden. Throw them off, and you walk free.

When an offense occurs, a debt is owed. You have heard it said, “He’ll pay for this.” So forgiveness is like the cancellation of a debt.

By making the Word our final authority and making a quality decision to place our faith in God at all costs, we experience His best in every situation.

A sure indication of a lack of trust is frustration. In other words, whenever a situation robs us of our peace, we are not trusting God.

A goal without a deadline is just a dream.

How often, in our Christian lives, do we settle for a "snack"--something quick--instead of feasting on all we have in Jesus? Are we looking into the Word, considering all we have been given, gazing at the cross in gratefulness? Jesus didn't just set us free from bondage-- He gave us an inheritance. He didn't simply pay our debt-- He gave us His bank account of righteousness. He didn't merely release us from Satan's grip--He asked us to be His bride. He takes us from dungeon to palace. Ashes to beauty. Rejected to cherished. Starving to feasting.

Saving for a down payment or cash purchase of a home should occur after becoming debt-free in Step Two and after finishing the emergency fund in Step Three. That makes saving for a down payment Baby Step Three (b). You should save for the home if you have the itch before moving on to the next step. Many people are worried about getting a home, but please let it be a blessing rather than a curse. It will be a curse if you buy something while you are still broke. There are all sorts of folks who are eager to “work with you” so you can make it happen sooner, but the definition of “Creative Financing” is “Too Broke to Buy a House.

If your goal is financial independence, it is also to hold as little debt as possible. This means you’ll seek the least house to meet your needs rather than the most house you can technically afford.

When you look into the mirror of the Word, you will see your true identity. It reveals your spiritual reality and shows you who you are at the core—within your spirit—so that you can make any necessary adjustments.

Resentment attacks our vital forces and does us much harm. When someone has made us suffer, our tendency is to keep the memory of the wrong alive in our minds, like a “bill” we will produce in due time to demand settlement. Those accumulated bills end up poisoning our lives. It is wiser to cancel every debt, as the Gospel invites us to. In return, we will be forgiven everything, and our hearts will be set free, whereas nurturing resentment toward others closes us to the positive things they could contribute to us.

Anxiety suits the status quo very well. Anxious people make good consumers and good workers. Governments and big business, therefore, love terrorism – they adore it, it’s good for business. Anxiety will drive us back into our comfort blankets of credit-card shopping and bad food, so the system deliberately produces anxiety while simultaneously promising to take it away.

Years ago, I dated a lovely young woman who was a few thousand dollars in debt. She was completely stressed out about this. Every month, more interest would be added to her debts. To deal with her stress, she would go every Tuesday night to a meditation and yoga class. This was her one free night, and she said it seemed to be helping her. She would breathe in, imagining that she was finding ways to deal with her debts. She would breathe out, telling herself that her money problems would one day be behind her. It went on like this, Tuesday after Tuesday. Finally, one day I looked through her finances with her. I figured out that if she spent four or five months working a part-time job on Tuesday nights, she could actually pay off all the money she owed. I told her I had nothing against yoga or meditation. But I did think its always best to try to treat the disease first. Her symptoms were stress and anxiety. Her disease was the money she owed. "Why don't you get a job on Tuesday nights and skip yoga for a while?" I suggested. This was something of a revelation to her. And she took my advice. She became a Tuesday-night waitress and soon enough paid off her debts. After that, she could go back to yoga and really breathe easier.

A country of free men is not free if they are owned by somebody else.

If you intend to achieve financial freedom, you are going to have to think differently. It starts by recognizing that debt should not be considered normal. It should be recognized as the vicious, pernicious destroyer of wealth-building potential it truly is. It has no place in your financial life.

Let us pause and reflect upon the many blessings we as Americans have received from our Constitution and the debt of gratitude we owe those heroic signers. As we do so, we might also recognize that freedom is not free. Sacrifice has been required to protect and to preserve the very freedoms we cherish.

Victims don’t want to be proactive about changing—they want to be proactive about making sure that the person who hurt them pays. And so we spend our energy telling our sad stories rather than taking responsibility for our behavior. Thus we open the door of our hearts and welcome in the Trojan horse of bitterness. And it stands there, a monument, a constant reminder of a debt someone has yet to pay. Somebody owes us.

Dressing up forgiveness to look comfortable does nothing more than save face. Forgiveness is a one-sided gift to the abuser and a self-inflicted punishment for the victim. Standing up for oneself by forcing repayment of debt makes a person whole and sets them free. Payback fully satisfies Newton’s Third Law of Motion.

Now, even to me, it seemed ridiculous to concede that I had accumulated substantial debt and a few degrees so that I might contractually labor for the sake of having two free days a week in which to cook a meal in a kitchen I could not actually afford to own, for a small crowd of people my age who spent their lives do- ing the same

Here are a few key guidelines to consider: Spend less than you earn—invest the surplus—avoid debt. Do simply this and you’ll wind up rich. Not just in money. Carrying debt is as appealing as being covered with leeches and has much the same effect. Take out your sharpest knife and start scraping the little bloodsuckers off. If your lifestyle matches—or god forbid exceeds—your income, you are no more than a gilded slave. Avoid fiscally irresponsible people. Never marry one or otherwise give him or her access to your money. Avoid investment advisors. Too many have only their own interests at heart. By the time you know enough to pick a good one, you know enough to handle your finances yourself. It’s your money and no one will care for it better than you. You own the things you own and they in turn own you. Money can buy many things, but nothing more valuable than your freedom. Life choices are not always about the money, but you should always be clear about the financial impact of the choices you make.

The tenement house is the enemy of modesty, the enemy of virtue, the enemy of patriotism. Home is where the virtues grow. I would like to see the law so that every home, to a small amount, should be free not only from sale for debts, but should be absolutely free from taxation, so that every man could have a home. Then we will have a nation of patriots.

Three things saved us: Our unwavering 50% savings rate. Avoiding debt. We’ve never even had a car payment. Finally embracing the indexing lessons Jack Bogle—the founder of The Vanguard Group and the inventor of index funds—perfected 40 years ago.

Casey meant it when she said, 'Forgive us for our debts as we forgive our debtors,' because they were for her the hardest words to live by, and by saying them, she hoped they'd become possible. Like Ted, Casey would never discuss her ambivalent views on religion. She was honest enough to admit that her privacy cloaked a fear: the fear of being found out as a hypocrite" (Free Food For Millionaires, p.100-101.)

We are but faint-hearted crusaders...our expeditions are but tours...half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walks, perchance, in the spirit of stirring adventure, never to return, --prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms...if you have paid your debts and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

Come all ye conservatives and liberals who want to conserve the good things and be free, come away from the merchants of big answers, whose hands are metalled with power; from the union of anywhere and everywhere by the purchase of everything from everybody at the lowest price and the sale of anything to anybody at the highest price; from the union of work and debt, work and despair; from the wage-slavery of the helplessly well-employed. From the union of self-gratification and self-annihilation, secede into care for one another and for the good gifts of Heaven and Earth.

Principles of Liberty 1. The only reliable basis for sound government and just human relations is Natural Law. 2. A free people cannot survive under a republican constitution unless they remain virtuous and morally strong. 3. The most promising method of securing a virtuous and morally strong people is to elect virtuous leaders. 4. Without religion the government of a free people cannot be maintained. 5. All things were created by God, therefore upon him all mankind are equally dependent, and to Him they are equally responsible. 6. All men are created equal. 7. The proper role of government is to protect equal rights, not provide equal things. 8. Men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. 9. To protect man's rights, God has revealed certain principles of divine law. 10. The God-given right to govern is vested in the sovereign authority of the whole people. 11. The majority of the people may alter or abolish a government which has become tyrannical. 12. The United States of America shall be a republic. 13. A constitution should be structured to permanently protect the people from the human frailties of their rulers. 14. Life and Liberty are secure only so long as the Igor of property is secure. 15. The highest level of securitiy occurs when there is a free market economy and a minimum of government regulations. 16. The government should be separated into three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. 17. A system of checks and balances should be adopted to prevent the abuse of power. 18. The unalienable rights of the people are most likely to be preserved if the principles of government are set forth in a written constitution. 19. Only limited and carefully defined powers should be delegated to the government, all others being retained by the people. 20. Efficiency and dispatch require government to operate according to the will of the majority, but constitutional provisions must be made to protect the rights of the minority. 21. Strong human government is the keystone to preserving human freedom. 22. A free people should be governed by law and not by the whims of men. 23. A free society cannot survive a republic without a broad program of general education. 24. A free people will not survive unless they stay strong. 25. "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none." 26. The core unit which determines the strength of any society is the family; therefore, the government should foster and protect its integrity. 27. The burden of debt is as destructive to freedom as subjugation by conquest. 28. The United States has a manifest destiny to be an example and a blessing to the entire human race.

Somehow, the telling of all this rinsed my mind clean and left me able to think clearly once more. By gathering and sorting my own feelings so, I was finally able to fashion a scale on which I could weigh my father’s nature and find a balance between my disgust for him and an understanding of him; my guilt in the matter of his death against the debt he owed me for the manner of my life. At the finish of it, I felt free of him, and I was able to think calmly once more. Elinor

Some people owe everything they have to the bank accounts of their parents. I owe the state. Put simply, the state educated me, fixed my leg when it was broken, and gave me a grant that enabled me to go to university. It fixed my teeth (a bit) and found housing for my veteran father in his dotage. When my youngest brother was run over by a truck it saved his life and in particular his crushed right hand, a procedure that took half a year, and which would, on the open market—so a doctor told me at the time—have cost a million pounds. Those were the big things, but there were also plenty of little ones: my subsidized sports centre and my doctor’s office, my school music lessons paid for with pennies, my university fees. My NHS glasses aged 9. My NHS baby aged 33. And my local library. To steal another writer’s title: England made me. It has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I understand it to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable, debt. ....The charming tale of benign state intervention described above is now relegated to the land of fairy tales: not just naïve but actually fantastic. Having one’s own history so suddenly and abruptly made unreal is an experience of a whole generation of British people, who must now wander around like so many ancient mariners boring foreigners about how they went to university for free and could once find a National Health dentist on their high street.

When you left me I was lost. I didn’t know what to do, who I was or what I was going to do. Time froze for me. I woke up every morning with you in my head. That feeling of being lost, not knowing who I was, was terrible. It was so bad that I spent everyday numbing my pain with drugs and alcohol until I passed out. Not because I enjoyed it but because it was the only way I could sleep. When I look back, you had every reason to leave me. I was no good for you. We rotted at my place, didn’t do anything, treated you bad, picked everything over you. I had no motivation to do begin work, debt stacked up higher and higher. Until finally, welcome to rock bottom. Heck im surprised you stayed as long as you did. But when you left and I realized what I did to cause this, I thought to my self that when I look back at this I want to know I tried to get her back. I couldn’t let you go without a fight, I wanted to know that I tried to get you back. And I tried. After I saw you with another person my heart broke in pieces and like pieces of glass it felt stuck in my throat. You told me its what you wanted to do from the beginning and I didn’t want to believe it. But after that I gave up on you and decided to pick up whatever pieces I had left and move on. At least I tried, that’s what I told my self. If I could go back and do it all over again, would I do it differently? Of course, but that’s not reality. I focused on what was. In a way im glad things happened this way. It opened my eyes to a different world, it made me who iam today. It gave me the best motivation possible, to prove to you and my self that I could be better. I used you everyday to get to that extra mile. Waking up every morning at awkward times thinking about you and not being able to fall back asleep. I used that to motivate me to start work everyday at 6am. And now I sit here with my successful career, my new girl friend, debt free and a fat bank account in less then a year and I have no one else to thank but MY SELF! To everyone that has made a mistake, im here to tell you that it always gets worse before its gets better!

Peace can exist only in the present moment. It is ridiculous to say “Wait until I finish this, then I will be free to live in peace.” What is “this”? A diploma, a job, a house, the payment of a debt? If you think that way, peace will never come. There is always another “this” that will follow the present one. If you are not living in peace at this moment, you will never be able to. If you truly want to be at peace, you must be at peace right now. Otherwise, there is only “the hope of peace some day.” —Thich Nhat Hanh, The Sun My Heart

How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation? He tried, but his English in-laws just looked at him strangely. They understood that someone else had just lost a great deal of money and Ben had just made a great deal of money, but never got much past that. "I can't really talk to them about it," he says. "They're English.

Probably nothing is more true of sinners today than that they think they are free. They see Christianity as some kind of bondage. It is all about rights: “No one is going to infringe on my rights. I can be what I want to be. I’m free to be myself.” You hear that inane statement again and again. Such people are not free. The Bible defines them as prisoners. Sin has indebted them to God, and it’s a debt they cannot pay. They are in bondage, and they are awaiting eternal death. According to Hebrews 2:15, Satan wields the power of death and holds captive “those who through fear of death [are] all their lifetime subject to bondage.” They are the children of wrath; Ephesians 2:2 calls them “sons of disobedience” who are under the power of, and in bondage to, their own sin. The divine sentence on them is incarceration for eternity in hell, where they will never die. The real Sovereign over them, the real Judge who has imprisoned them, called them guilty, and sentenced them to death, is God Himself. It is God who destroys both soul and body in hell. The sinner is a prisoner of Satan and sin, but more than that, he’s a prisoner of God, the eternal Executioner, who is holding him accountable and has him awaiting a horrific, unending death.

Possessions Live in peace and be free. When possessions own your heart, You are enslaved to money and to corporations. Your time is owned by the moneylenders And they will not let you spend it freely. They will tell you what to buy, but not What it will truly cost you. You will be held ransom. What is your heart worth? What about your time? What holds your heart, holds your attention. What holds your attention, holds your time. What holds your time, holds your life. And if it's possessions that holds these things, It will demand it all.

She isn’t just any woman. She’s different.” “So every man has said since time immemorial.” “Yes, that’s true. I’ve met plenty of women, Mr. Sutton. From a young age, I have had mistresses whose beauty and skills would astound you. Skills they taught to a young man, because I was ever so rich. I also got to know them—courtesans are living, breathing women, you might be surprised to learn. With dreams and ambitions, some longing for a better life, one in which they won’t have to rely on wealthy men’s sons for survival. I became quite good friends with some of the ladies and am still. And then I met Violet.” Mr. Sutton was listening but striving to look uninterested. “Another courtesan?” “She’s neither one thing nor the other. Which is why I say she’s different. She’s not from the upper-class families whose mothers throw their daughters at me with alarming ruthlessness. She’s not a courtesan, selling her body and skills in exchange for diamonds and riches. She’s not a street girl from the gutter, selling her body to survive. She’s not a middle-class daughter, striving to live spotlessly and not shame her parents. Violet faces the world on her own terms, making a living the best she can with the skills she has. And everywhere, everyone has tried to stop her. They’ve used her body to pay their debts. They’ve used her cleverness to bring them clients. They’ve used her skills at understanding people to make them money. Everyone in her entire life has used her in every capacity she has, and yet, she still stands tall and faces the world. They’ve beaten her down at every turn, and still she rises. This is a woman of indomitable spirit. And I want to set her free.

The goodness of God fills all the gaps of the universe, without discrimination or preference. God is the gratuity of absolutely everything. The space in between everything is not space at all but Spirit. God is the “goodness glue” that holds the dark and light of things together, the free energy that carries all death across the Great Divide and transmutes it into Life. When we say that Christ “paid the debt once and for all,” it simply means that God's job is to make up for all deficiencies in the universe. What else would God do? Basically, grace is God's first name, and probably last too. Grace is what God does to keep all things he has made in love and alive—forever. Grace is God's official job description. Grace is not something God gives; grace is who God is. If we are to believe the primary witnesses, an unexplainable goodness is at work in the universe.

A year earlier, no company had been accorded more faith than Enron; by late November, none was trusted less. And so, a gasping gurgle, a desperate SOS: Enron, the emblem of free markets, the champion of deregulation, reached into its depleted treasury and forked over $100,000 to each of the major political parties' campaign war chests. Then, it shuttered its online trading unit - its erstwhile gem. On November 28, Standard & Poor's downgraded Enron to junk-bond level - which triggered provisions in Enron's debt requiring it to immediately repay billions of its obligations. This it could not do. Its stock was seventy cents and falling, and, now, no gatekeepers and no credit remained. Accordingly, in the first week of December, Enron, the archetype of shareholder value, availed itself of the time-honored protection for those who have lost their credit: bankruptcy.

The split has widened because the right has moved right, not because the left has moved left. Republican presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford all supported the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1960, the GOP platform embraced "free collective bargaining" between management and labor. REpublicans boasted of "extending the minimum wage to several million more workers" and "strengthening the unemployment insurance system and extension of its benefits." Under Dwight Eisenhower, top earners were taxed at 91 percent; in 2015, it was 40 percent. Planned Parenthood has come under serious attack from nearly all Republican presidential candidates running in 2016. Yet a founder of the organization was Peggy Goldwater, wife of the 1968 conservative Republican candidate for president Barry Goldwater. General Eisenhower called for massive invenstment in infrastructure, and now nearly all congressional Republicans see such a thing as frightening government overreach. Ronald Reagan raised the national debt and favored gun control, and now the Republican state legislature of Texas authorizes citizens to "open carry" loaded guns into churches and banks. Conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or liberal today.

Look thee, 'tis so! Thou singly honest man, Here, take: the gods out of my misery Have sent thee treasure. Go, live rich and happy; But thus condition'd: thou shalt build from men; Hate all, curse all, show charity to none, But let the famish'd flesh slide from the bone, Ere thou relieve the beggar; give to dogs What thou deny'st to men; let prisons swallow 'em, Debts wither 'em to nothing; be men like blasted woods, And may diseases lick up their false bloods! And so farewell and thrive. FLAVIUS O, let me stay, And comfort you, my master. TIMON If thou hatest curses, Stay not; fly, whilst thou art blest and free: Ne'er see thou man, and let me ne'er see thee.

Ideally, a fair and equitable society would regulate debt in line with the ability to be paid without pushing economies into depression. But when shrinking markets deepen fiscal deficits, creditors demand that governments balance their budgets by selling public monopolies. Once the land, water and mineral rights are privatized, along with transportation, communications, lotteries and other monopolies, the next aim is to block governments from regulating their prices or taxing financial and rentier wealth. The neo-rentier objective is threefold: to reduce economies to debt dependency, to transfer public utilities into creditor hands, and then to create a rent-extracting tollbooth economy. The financial objective is to block governments from writing down debts when bankers and bondholders over-lend. Taken together, these policies create a one-sided freedom for rentiers to create a travesty of the classical “Adam Smith” view of free markets. It is a freedom to reduce the indebted majority to a state of deepening dependency, and to gain wealth by stripping public assets built up over the centuries.

[A] people needs to understand what freedom is. We Americans are fortunate that the Founders and their generation possessed that understanding. They knew that freedom, per se, is not enough. They knew that freedom must be limited to be preserved. This paradox is difficult for many students to grasp. Young people generally think freedom means authority figures leaving them alone so they can "do their own thing." That's part of what it means to be free, but true freedom involves much, much more. As understood by our Founders and by the best minds of the young republic, true freedom is always conditioned by morality. John Adams wrote, "I would define liberty as a power to do as we would be done by." In other words, freedom is not the power to do what one can, but what one ought. Duty always accompanies liberty. Tocqueville similarly observed, "No free communities ever existed without morals." The best minds concur: there must be borders: freedom must be limited to be preserved. What kinds of limits are we talking about? * The moral limits of right and wrong, which we did not invent but owe largely to our Judeo-Christian heritage. * Intellectual limits imposed by sound reasoning. Again, we did not invent these but are in debt largely to Greco-Roman civilization, from the pre-Socratic philosophers forward. * Political limits such as the rule of law, inalienable rights, and representative institutions, which we inherited primarily from the British. * Legal limits of the natural and common law, which we also owe to our Western heritage. * Certain social limits, which are extremely important to the survival of freedom. These are the habits of our hearts--good manners, kindness, decency, and willingness to put others first, among other things--which are learned in our homes and places of worship, at school and in team sports, and in other social settings. All these limits complement each other and make a good society possible. But they cannot be taken for granted. It takes intellectual and moral leadership to make the case that such limits are important. Our Founders did that. To an exceptional degree, their words tutored succeeding generations in the ways of liberty. It is to America's everlasting credit that our Founders got freedom right.

I wish to pay my debt. To give you the night I owe' ... 'Oh, Charlotte. You play with fire.' 'Do I?' Roman looked at the woman in front of him, calm and collected, but there was heat there, such precious heat that was straining. Offering. It took only one second for the words to form and emerge. 'Consider the debt of the night wiped free.' He saw her blink. Stunned. Watched the disappointment form. He felt nearly giddy as her disappointment form. 'What, but-' 'But what?' He smiled, loving the look on her face, even the desire that was slowly shuttering - for he would obliterate those shutters with his next words. 'You think I am freeing you? ... I am a selfish man.' 'A selfish man takes what is offered to him.' Was that doubt in her voice, doubt of her charms? 'No, a selfish man destroys what is offered to him and demands more. He demands everything.

In fact, war itself could become a commodity, just like opium. In 1821 the Greeks rebelled against the Ottoman empire. The uprising aroused great sympathy in liberal and romantic circles in Britain - Lord Byron, the poet, even went to Greece to fight alongside the insurgents. But London financiers saw an opportunity as well. They proposed to the rebel leaders the issue of tradable Greek Rebellion Bonds on the London stock exchange. The Greeks would promise to repay the bonds, plus interest, if and when they won their independence. Private investors bought bonds to make a profit, or out of sympathy for the Greek cause, or both. The value of Greek Rebellion Bonds rose and fell on the London stock exchange in tempo with military successes and failures on the battlefields of Hellas. The Turks gradually gained the upper hand. With a rebel defeat imminent, the bondholders faced the prospect of losing their trousers. The bondholders' interest was the national interest, so the British organised an international fleet that, in 1827, sank the main Ottoman flotilla in the Battle of Navarino. After centuries of subjugation, Greece was finally free. But freedom came with a huge debt that the new country had no way of repaying. The Greek economy was mortgaged to British creditors for decades to come.

One might object that [debt peonage] was just assumed to be in the nature of things: like the imposition of tribute on conquered populations, it might have been resented, but it wasn’t considered a moral issue, a matter of right and wrong. Some things just happen. This has been the most common attitude of peasants to such phenomena throughout human history. What’s striking about the historical record is that in the case of debt crises, this was not how many reacted. Many actually did become indignant. So many, in fact, that most of our contemporary language of social justice, our way of speaking of human bondage and emancipation, continues to echo ancient arguments about debt. It’s particularly striking because so many other things do seem to have been accepted as simply in the nature of things. One does not see a similar outcry against caste systems, for example, or for that matter, the institution of slavery. Surely slaves and untouchables often experienced at least equal horrors. No doubt many protested their condition. Why was it that the debtors’ protests seemed to carry such greater moral weight? Why were debtors so much more effective in winning the ear of priests, prophets, officials, and social reformers? Why was it that officials like Nehemiah were willing to give such sympathetic consideration to their complaints, to inveigh, to summon great assemblies? Some have suggested practical reasons: debt crises destroyed the free peasantry, and it was free peasants who were drafted into ancient armies to fight in wars. Rulers thus had a vested interest in maintaining their recruitment base. No doubt this was a factor; clearly, it wasn’t the only one. There is no reason to believe that Nehemiah, for instance, in his anger at the usurers, was primarily concerned with his ability to levy troops for the Persian king. It had to be something deeper. What makes debt different is that it is premised on an assumption of equality. To be a slave, or lower caste, is to be intrinsically inferior. These are relations of unadulterated hierarchy. In the case of debt, we are talking about two individuals who begin as equal parties to a contract. Legally, at least as far as the contract is concerned, they are the same.

The great irony, then, is that the nation’s most famous modern conservative economist became the father of Big Government, chronic deficits, and national fiscal bankruptcy. It was Friedman who first urged the removal of the Bretton Woods gold standard restraints on central bank money printing, and then added insult to injury by giving conservative sanction to perpetual open market purchases of government debt by the Fed. Friedman’s monetarism thereby institutionalized a régime which allowed politicians to chronically spend without taxing. Likewise, it was the free market professor of the Chicago school who also blessed the fundamental Keynesian proposition that Washington must continuously manage and stimulate the national economy. To be sure, Friedman’s “freshwater” proposition, in Paul Krugman’s famous paradigm, was far more modest than the vast “fine-tuning” pretensions of his “salt-water” rivals. The saltwater Keynesians of the 1960s proposed to stimulate the economy until the last billion dollars of potential GDP was realized; that is, they would achieve prosperity by causing the state to do anything that was needed through a multiplicity of fiscal interventions. By contrast, the freshwater Keynesian, Milton Friedman, thought that capitalism could take care of itself as long as it had precisely the right quantity of money at all times; that is, Friedman would attain prosperity by causing the state to do the one thing that was needed through the single spigot of M1 growth.

The god of the prosperity gospelists is a pathetic doormat, a genie. The god of the cutesy coffee mugs and Joel Osteen tweets is a milquetoast doofus like the guys in the Austen novels you hope the girls don’t end up with, holding their hats limply in hand and minding their manners to follow your lead like a butler—or the doormat he stands on. The god of the American Dream is Santa Claus. The god of the open theists is not sovereignly omniscient, declaring the end from the beginning, but just a really good guesser playing the odds. The god of our therapeutic culture is ourselves, we, the “forgivers” of ourselves, navel-haloed morons with “baggage” but not sin. None of these pathetic gods could provoke fear and trembling. But the God of the Scriptures is a consuming fire (Deut. 4:24). “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31). He stirs up the oceans with the tip of his finger, and they sizzle rolling clouds of steam into the sky. He shoots lightning from his fists. This is the God who leads his children by a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire. This is the God who makes war, sends plagues, and sits enthroned in majesty and glory in his heavens, doing what he pleases. This is the God who, in the flesh, turned tables over in the temple as if he owned the place. This Lord God Jesus Christ was pushed to the edge of the cliff and declared, “This is not happening today,” and walked right back through the crowd like a boss. This Lord says, “No one takes my life; I give it willingly,” as if to say, “You couldn’t kill me unless I let you.” This Lord calms the storms, casts out demons, binds and looses, and has the authority to grant us the ability to do the same. The Devil is this God’s lapdog. And it is this God who has summoned us, apprehended us, saved us. It is this God who has come humbly, meekly, lowly, pouring out his blood in infinite conquest to set the captives free, cancel the record of debt against us, conquer sin and Satan, and swallow up death forever. Let us, then, advance the gospel of the kingdom out into the perimeter of our hearts and lives with affectionate meekness and humble submission. Let us repent of our nonchalance. Let us embrace the wonder of Christ.

The average household income in America is right around $50,000 per year, according to the Census Bureau. Joe and Suzy Average would invest $7,500 (15 percent) per year or $625 per month. If you make $50,000 per year and have no payments except the house mortgage and live on a budget, can you invest $625 per month? Follow me here. If Joe and Suzy invest $625 per month with no match into Roth IRAs from age thirty to age seventy, they will have $7,588,545 tax-FREE! That is almost $8 million. What if I’m half-wrong? What if you end up with only $4 million? What if I’m six times wrong? Sure beats the 97 out of 100 sixty-five-year-olds who can’t write a check for $600! I would submit to you that Joe and Suzy are well below average. Why? In our example they started at the average household income in America, and in forty years of work never got a raise. They saved 15 percent of income and never increased it by one dollar. There is no excuse to retire without financial dignity in the United States today. Most of you will have well over $2 million pass through your hands in your working lifetime, so do something about catching some of that money. Gayle asked me one day if it was too late for her to start saving. Gayle wasn’t twenty-seven like Joe and Suzy. She was fifty-seven years old, but with her attitude you would have thought this lady was 107. Harold Fisher had a much better outlook at age one hundred than Gayle did at age fifty-seven. Life had dealt her some blows and had knocked most of the hope out of her. A Total Money Makeover is not a magic show. You start where you are, and you do the steps. These steps work if you are twenty-seven or fifty-seven, and they don’t change. Gayle might be starting the retirement investing step at sixty that Joe and Suzy start at thirty years old. Gayle was unwise to enter her sixties without an emergency fund and with credit-card debt and a car payment. She, like all of us, couldn’t save when she has debt and no umbrella for when it rains. Would it have been better for Gayle to start when she was twenty-seven or even forty-seven? Obviously. But once she was done with the pity party, she still needed to start with Baby Step One and follow The Total Money Makeover step-by-step to put herself in the best position possible.

the planned destruction of Iraq’s agriculture is not widely known. Modern Iraq is part of the ‘fertile crescent’ of Mesopotamia where man first domesticated wheat between 8,000 and 13,000 years ago, and home to several thousand varieties of local wheat. As soon as the US took over Iraq, it became clear its interests were not limited to oil. In 2004, Paul Bremer, the then military head of the Provisional Authority imposed as many as a hundred laws which made short work of Iraq’s sovereignty. The most crippling for the people and the economy of Iraq was Order 81 which deals, among other things, with plant varieties and patents. The goal was brutally clear-cut and sweeping — to wipe out Iraq’s traditional, sustainable agriculture and replace it with oil-chemical-genetically-modified-seed-based industrial agriculture. There was no public or parliamentary debate for the conquered people who never sought war. The conquerors made unilateral changes in Iraq’s 1970 patent law: henceforth, plant forms could be patented — which was never allowed before — while genetically-modified organisms were to be introduced. Farmers were strictly banned from saving their own seeds: this, in a country where, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, 97 per cent of Iraqi farmers planted only their own saved seeds. With a single stroke of the pen, Iraq’s agriculture was axed, while Order 81 facilitated the introduction and domination of imported, high-priced corporate seeds, mainly from the US — which neither reproduce, nor give yields without their prescribed chemical fertiliser and pesticide inputs. It meant that the majority of farmers who had never spent money on seed and inputs that came free from nature, would henceforth have to heavily invest in corporate inputs and equipment — or go into debt to obtain them, or accept lowered profits, or give up farming altogether.

We cannot pick and choose whom among the oppressed it is convenient to support. We must stand with all the oppressed or none of the oppressed. This is a global fight for life against corporate tyranny. We will win only when we see the struggle of working people in Greece, Spain, and Egypt as our own struggle. This will mean a huge reordering of our world, one that turns away from the primacy of profit to full employment and unionized workplaces, inexpensive and modernized mass transit, especially in impoverished communities, universal single-payer health care and a banning of for-profit health care corporations. The minimum wage must be at least $15 an hour and a weekly income of $500 provided to the unemployed, the disabled, stay-at-home parents, the elderly, and those unable to work. Anti-union laws, like the Taft-Hartley Act, and trade agreements such as NAFTA, will be abolished. All Americans will be granted a pension in old age. A parent will receive two years of paid maternity leave, as well as shorter work weeks with no loss in pay and benefits. The Patriot Act and Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the military to be used to crush domestic unrest, as well as government spying on citizens, will end. Mass incarceration will be dismantled. Global warming will become a national and global emergency. We will divert our energy and resources to saving the planet through public investment in renewable energy and end our reliance on fossil fuels. Public utilities, including the railroads, energy companies, the arms industry, and banks, will be nationalized. Government funding for the arts, education, and public broadcasting will create places where creativity, self-expression, and voices of dissent can be heard and seen. We will terminate our nuclear weapons programs and build a nuclear-free world. We will demilitarize our police, meaning that police will no longer carry weapons when they patrol our streets but instead, as in Great Britain, rely on specialized armed units that have to be authorized case by case to use lethal force. There will be training and rehabilitation programs for the poor and those in our prisons, along with the abolition of the death penalty. We will grant full citizenship to undocumented workers. There will be a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions. Education will be free from day care to university. All student debt will be forgiven. Mental health care, especially for those now caged in our prisons, will be available. Our empire will be dismantled. Our soldiers and marines will come home.

Many aspects of how the Chinese political class manages its economy are antithetical to the Western values of democracy and free markets. But this stance has not put off foreign investors, who are attracted to the government’s willingness to prioritize physical infrastructure, political security, and stability over the health of the population, transparency in decision making, and transparency in the rule of law (if not necessarily the system of governance). In essence, the pursuit of economic growth overrides any views on the political system they invest in. Currently China’s political class has a strategy to evolve from an investment-led exporting economy to one more in line with Western economies, relying on domestic consumption. The transition to this new economic equilibrium will not be linear. China will likely experience significant economic volatility and market gyrations as the structure of its economy shifts. There is also mounting skepticism about China’s ability to manage its debt levels, and the country’s lack of individual political freedoms will continue to hamper its growth prospects. But Chinese policymakers will, no doubt, be focused on continuing to show economic progress in advance of two target dates: 2021—one hundred years after the formation of the Communist Party—and 2049, one hundred years after the formation of the People’s Republic of China.