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By its means the banker creates the means of payment out of nothing, whereas when he receives a bag of money from his customer, one means of payment, a bank credit, is merely substituted for another, an equal amount of cash.

— Ralph George Hawtrey Currency and Credit (1919)

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Source: Chapter II, "Metallic Money", p. 20 (2nd ed. 1921)
Work: Currency and Credit, 1919
Source quality: Precise citation Points to a specific work with a page, chapter, date or similar locator, so you can look it up.

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Indeed it would have been a mean-spirited course to go back on the century-old standard on account of so trifling a premium on gold, a premium which, as it turned out, the action of the market wiped out in a few months, before any of the provisions of the Act of 1819 had come into operation.

Currency and Credit (1919)

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If each member of society can be induced or impelled to do his allotted task by associating it with some motive that appears to him adequate, then he need never know how he is contributing to the real end, and need not even be aware of the end at all. It is this problem of organization that we shall call the Economic Problem. It is in fact the real subject matter of political economy.

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Man is a rational animal, and if human affairs are hard to regulate, his twofold nature is usually the cause. Reason is something ultimate; it would be the same in another planet, or in another universe, as it is here. Animal nature is something contingent; it might have been different. Our life is a compromise, a blend between the animal and the rational.

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