Top 70 Saifedean Ammous Quotes (2025 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. “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

3. “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

4. “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

5. “As H. L. Mencken put it: “Every election is an advanced auction on stolen goods.”

— Saifedean Ammous

6. “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

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

— Saifedean Ammous

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “French economist Jacques Reuff coined the phrase “deficit without tears” to describe the new economic reality that the United States inhabited, where it could purchase whatever it wanted from the world and finance it through debt monetized by inflating the currency that the entire world used.”

— Saifedean Ammous

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

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

— Saifedean Ammous

17. “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

18. “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

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

— Saifedean Ammous

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

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

— Saifedean Ammous

24. “Carl Menger, the father of the Austrian school of economics and founder of marginal analysis in economics, came up with an understanding of the key property that leads to a good being adopted freely as money on the market, and that is salability – the ease with which a good can be sold on the market whenever its holder desires, with the least loss in its price.”

— Saifedean Ammous

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

— Saifedean Ammous

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

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. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “History has shown that governments will inevitably succumb to the temptation of inflating the money supply.”

— Saifedean Ammous

42. “The average savings rate of the seven largest advanced economies12 was 12.66% in 1970, but has dropped to 3.39% in 2015, a fall of almost three-quarters.”

— Saifedean Ammous

43. “Money that is deposited in a bank as savings is money taken away from consumption by people who are delaying the gratification that consumption could give them in order to gain more gratification in the future.”

— Saifedean Ammous

44. “When comparing different national currencies, we find that the major and most widely used national currencies have a lower annual increase in their supply than the less salable minor currencies.”

— Saifedean Ammous

45. “Hyperinflation is a form of economic disaster unique to government money. There was never an example of hyperinflation with economies that operated a gold or silver standard, and even when artifact money like seashells and beads lost its monetary role over time, it usually lost it slowly, with replacements taking over more and more of the purchasing power of the outgoing money.”

— Saifedean Ammous

46. “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. Money is the information and measurement system of an economy, and sound money is what allows trade, investment, and entrepreneurship to proceed on a solid basis, whereas unsound money throws these processes into disarray.”

— Saifedean Ammous

47. “The operation of a market economy is dependent on prices, and prices, to be accurate, are dependent on a common medium of exchange, which reflects the relative scarcity of different goods. If this is easy money, the ability of its issuer to constantly increase its quantity will prevent it from accurately reflecting opportunity costs. Every unpredictable change in the quantity of money would distort its role as a measure of interpersonal value and a conduit for economic information.”

— Saifedean Ammous

48. “Sound money is also an essential element of a free society as it provides for an effective bulwark against despotic government.”

— Saifedean Ammous

49. “A sound money, on the other hand, makes service valuable to others the only avenue open for prosperity to anyone, thus concentrating society’s efforts on production, cooperation, capital accumulation, and trade.”

— Saifedean Ammous

50. “The better the money is at holding its value, the more it incentivizes people to delay consumption and instead dedicate resources for production in the future, leading to capital accumulation and improvement of living standards, while also engendering in people a low time preference in other, non-economic aspects of their life.”

— Saifedean Ammous