Top 70 Saifedean Ammous Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “For as long as the government could print more money and have that money accepted by its citizens and foreigners, it could keep financing the war.”

— Saifedean Ammous

2. “While microeconomics has focused on transactions between individuals, and macroeconomics on the role of government in the economy, the reality is that the most important economic decisions to any individual’s well-being are the ones they conduct in their trade-offs with their future self.”

— Saifedean Ammous

3. “Sound money allows people to think about the long term and to save and invest more for the future. Saving and investing for the long run are the key to capital accumulation and the advance of human civilization.”

— Saifedean Ammous

4. “The Yap Island chiefs who refused O’Keefe’s cheap Rai stones understood what most modern economists fail to grasp: a money that is easy to produce is no money at all, and easy money does not make a society richer; on the contrary, it makes it poorer by placing all its hard-earned wealth for sale in exchange for something easy to produce.”

— Saifedean Ammous

5. “A good that assumes the role of a widely accepted medium of exchange is called money.”

— Saifedean Ammous

6. “What matters in money is its purchasing power, not its quantity, and as such, any quantity of money is enough to fulfil the monetary functions, as long as it is divisible and groupable enough to satisfy holders’ transaction and storage needs.”

— Saifedean Ammous

7. “Civilization is not about more capital accumulation per se; rather, it is about what capital accumulation allows humans to achieve, the flourishing and freedom to seek higher meaning in life when their base needs are met and most pressing dangers averted.”

— Saifedean Ammous

8. “The well-known phenomenon of the modern breakdown of the family cannot be understood without recognizing the role of unsound money allowing the state to appropriate many of the essential roles that the family has played for millennia, and reducing the incentive of all members of a family to invest in long-term familial relations.”

— Saifedean Ammous

9. “In reality, once one overcomes the propaganda of the twentieth-century state, there is no such thing as a victimless crime. If an action has no victims, it is no crime, regardless of what some self-important voters or bureaucrats would like to believe about their prerogative to legislate morality for others.”

— Saifedean Ammous

10. “The introduction of Bitcoin, as a currency native to the Internet superseding national borders and outside the realm of governmental control, offers an intriguing possibility for the emergence of a new international monetary system, to be analyzed in Chapter 9.”

— Saifedean Ammous

11. “This world came crashing down in the catastrophic year 1914, which was not only the year of the outbreak of World War I, but the year that the world’s major economies went off of the gold standard and replaced it with unsound government money. Only Switzerland and Sweden, who remained neutral during World War I, were to remain on a gold standard into the 1930s.”

— Saifedean Ammous

12. “Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York, The New Press, 2000.”

— Saifedean Ammous

13. “Creating new pieces of paper and digital entries to paper over the deficiency in savings does not magically increase society’s physical capital stock; it only devalues the existing money supply and distorts prices.”

— Saifedean Ammous

14. “A world of constant money supply would be one similar to that of much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, marked by the successful flowering of the Industrial Revolution with increased capital investment increasing the supply of goods and with falling prices for those goods as well as falling costs of production.”

— Saifedean Ammous

15. “Bitcoin effectively combines gold’s salability across time with fiat’s salability across space in one apolitical, immutable, open-source package.”

— Saifedean Ammous

16. “Bitcoin is the world’s first digital monetary network.”

— Saifedean Ammous

17. “On October 16, 1929, Fisher proudly proclaimed in the New York Times that stocks had reached a “permanently high plateau.”18 The stock market was to crash starting October 24, 1929, and as the Depression deepened, it would not be until the mid-1950s, years after Fisher died, that the stock market would get back to the “permanently high plateau” Fisher had proclaimed in 1929.”

— Saifedean Ammous

18. “An asset that holds its value is preferable to an asset that loses value, and savers who want to choose a medium of exchange will gravitate toward assets that hold value over time as monetary assets.”

— Saifedean Ammous

19. “The fundamental engineering feature of the fiat system is that it treats future promises of money as if they were as good as present money because the government guarantees these promises.”

— Saifedean Ammous

20. “But a government which raises taxes to fund a monarch’s lavish lifestyle will engender mass resentment among his population, endangering the legitimacy of his rule and making it ever more precarious.”

— Saifedean Ammous

21. “But in October 2009, an Internet exchange2 sold 5,050 bitcoins for $5.02, at a price of $1 for 1,006 bitcoins, to register the first purchase of a bitcoin with money.3 The price was calculated by measuring the value of the electricity needed to produce a bitcoin.”

— Saifedean Ammous

22. “See Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action, p. 250, for a discussion of how uncertainty about the future is the key driver of demand for holding money. With no uncertainty of the future, humans could know all their incomes and expenditures ahead of time and plan them optimally so they never have to hold any cash. But as uncertainty is an inevitable part of life, people must continue to hold money so they have the ability to spend without having to know the future.”

— Saifedean Ammous

23. “The three metals most widely used for this role were gold, silver, and copper, and their use as coins was the prime form of money for around 2,500 years, from the time of the Lydian king Croesus, who was the first recorded to have minted gold coins, to the early twentieth century.”

— Saifedean Ammous

24. “Because each bitcoin is divisible into 100 million satoshis, there is plenty of room for the growth of bitcoin through the use of ever-smaller units of it as the value appreciates.”

— Saifedean Ammous

25. “No government can successfully achieve all three goals of having a fixed foreign exchange rate, free capital flows, and an independent monetary policy.”

— Saifedean Ammous

26. “Whether in Rome, Constantinople, Florence, or Venice, history shows that a sound monetary standard is a necessary prerequisite for human flourishing, without which society stands on the precipice of barbarism and destruction.”

— Saifedean Ammous

27. “For Mises, the absence of control by government is a necessary condition for the soundness of money, seeing as government will have the temptation to debase its money whenever it begins to accrue wealth as savers invest in it.”

— Saifedean Ammous

28. “It is the author’s opinion that the history of China and India, and their failure to catch up to the West during the twentieth century, is inextricably linked to this massive destruction of wealth and capital brought about by the demonetization of the monetary metal these countries utilized.”

— Saifedean Ammous

29. “As Friedrich Hayek put it: I don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can’t take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can’t stop.25.”

— Saifedean Ammous

30. “In 1899, when American writer Nellie Bly set out on her record-breaking journey around the world in seventy-two days, she carried British gold coins and Bank of England notes with her.11 It was possible to circumnavigate the globe and use one form of money everywhere Nellie went.”

— Saifedean Ammous

31. “It is the third element, salability across time, which is the most crucial.”

— Saifedean Ammous

32. “The astonishing domes of Europe’s churches, built and decorated over decades of inspired meticulous work by incomparable architects and artists like Filippo Brunelleschi and Michelangelo, were all financed with sound money by patrons with very low time preference. The only way to impress these patrons was to build artwork that would last long enough to immortalize their names as the owners of great collections and patrons of great artists.”

— Saifedean Ammous

33. “This is a historical lesson of immense significance, and should be kept in mind by anyone who thinks his refusal of bitcoin means he doesn’t have to deal with it. History shows it is not possible to insulate yourself from the consequences of others holding money that is harder than yours.”

— Saifedean Ammous

34. “Further, wide acceptance of a medium of exchange allows all prices to be expressed in its terms, which allows it to play the third function of money: unit of account.”

— Saifedean Ammous

35. “But money’s marginal utility declines far slower than any other good, because it declines along with the utility of wanting any good, not one particular good.”

— Saifedean Ammous

36. “Now imagine one day hyperinflation strikes, and the price of your ribeye increases to one hundred dollars while your daily wage remains ten dollars. What happens to the price of your basket of goods? It cannot rise tenfold because you cannot afford the one-hundred-dollar ribeye. Instead, you make do with the chemical shitstorm that is a soy burger for ten dollars. The CPI, magically, shows zero inflation.”

— Saifedean Ammous

37. “Microprocessors will subvert and destroy the nation-state.”

— Saifedean Ammous

38. “The quantity of money available in the whole economy is always sufficient to secure for everybody all that money does and can do.”

— Saifedean Ammous

39. “Gold offered no mechanism for restraining the sovereigns, and had to rely on trust in them not abusing the gold standard and the population remaining eternally vigilant against them doing so.”

— Saifedean Ammous

40. “Based on the foregoing analysis, the real advantage of bitcoin lies in it being a reliable long-term store of value, and a sovereign form of money that allows individuals to conduct permissionless transactions.”

— Saifedean Ammous

41. “On May 22, 2010, someone else paid 10,000 bitcoins to buy two pizza pies worth $25, representing the first time that bitcoin was used as a medium of exchange. The token had needed seven months to transition from being a market good to being a medium of exchange.”

— Saifedean Ammous

42. “Austrian economists are rarely dogmatic or objectivist in their definition of sound money. They define it not as a specific good or commodity, but as whichever money emerges on the market, freely chosen by the people who transact with it.”

— Saifedean Ammous

43. “This explains why the silver bubble has popped before and will pop again if it ever inflates: as soon as significant monetary investment flows into silver, it is not as difficult for producers to increase the supply significantly and bring the price crashing down, taking the savers’ wealth in the process.”

— Saifedean Ammous

44. “For anything to function as a good store of value, it has to beat this trap: it has to appreciate when people demand it as a store of value, but its producers have to be constrained from inflating the supply significantly enough to bring the price down.”

— Saifedean Ammous

45. “Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation.”

— Saifedean Ammous

46. “The drain of gold from Britain is a little-known story with enormous consequences. Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance focuses on this episode, and does a good job of discussing the individuals involved and the drama taking place, but adopts the reigning Keynesian understanding of the issue, putting the blame for the entire episode on the gold standard.”

— Saifedean Ammous

47. “The problem with government-provided money is that its hardness depends entirely on the ability of those in charge to not inflate its supply. Only political constraints provide hardness, and there are no physical, economic, or natural constraints.”

— Saifedean Ammous

48. “A truly International Monetary System would be one where the whole world possessed a homogeneous currency such as obtains within separate countries and where its flow between regions was left to be determined by the results of the action of all individuals.5.”

— Saifedean Ammous

49. “Democracy thus becomes a mass delusion of people attempting to override the rules of economics by voting themselves a free lunch and being manipulated into violent tantrums against scapegoats whenever the bill for the free lunch arrives via inflation and economic recessions.”

— Saifedean Ammous

50. “Similarly, with money, it was inevitable that one, or a few, goods would emerge as the main medium of exchange, because the property of being exchanged easily matters the most. A medium of exchange, as mentioned before, is not acquired for its own properties, but for its salability. Further, wide acceptance of a medium of exchange allows all prices to be expressed in its terms, which allows it to play the third function of money: unit of account.”

— Saifedean Ammous