Top Highlights

• The invention of banking and the paper money system destroyed feudalism, changed the basis of organization from heredity to money, and it changed the basis of economic power from owning land to owning stocks, bonds, and corporations.
• Money constitutes the focal point of modern world culture. Money defines relationships among people, not just between customer and merchant in the marketplace or employer and laborer in the workplace. Increasingly in modern society, money defines relationships between parent and child, among friends, between politicians and constituents, among neig...
• Aphra Behn, a seventeenth-century dramatist who grew up in Surinam, wrote in her play The Rover in 1677, “Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.”
• “Birth and lineage mean nothing: money is the only family tree for a townsman.… Though mothers and fathers give us life, it is money alone which preserves it.”
• Gertrude Stein, who said that “the thing that differentiates man from animals is money.”