"[The book] grapples with a moral and political problem, which is: 'What is this hold that the idea of debt has over people's imaginations; that morality itself comes to be thought of as a matter of paying one's debts?'"

"No-one has ever written a history of debt [...] You do find histories of money, which turn out to be mostly about coinage, which is interesting given that the vast majority of transactions through history have been on credit [...] and you do find histories of credit, but it's not exactly the same thing [...] I have found that most of our basic, common-sense assumptions about debt are completely wrong and that the moral ambivalence typified by the 'but you just have to pay your debts' conversation has been happening for about 5,000 years."

"Debt, guilt, and sin are actually the same word in Sanskrit - i.e. life itself is a cosmic debt we owe to the gods [...] You owe a debt to your parents, so you become a parent; you owe a debt to the sages, so you become wise; you owe a debt to humanity, so you become humane. But this becomes absurd when we extend it - you're not really paying it back, even though the debt is annihilated by such action [...] Once you figure out what [the Vedas] are really saying it's that, in fact, you are the cosmos and so there can be no such thing as debt.

"The same thing happens in the Bible. In Arameic, the word for debt and sin is also the same word. Actually the Lord's Prayer - which we remember translated into terms of private property - is 'Forgive us our debts, just as we forgive those whom are indebted to us' [...] So what is sacred isn't actually paying back debts, it's forgiveness of debts."

"Debt forgiveness is, in fact, a tradition going back to Mesopotamia and the Biblical Jubilee. It was considered a divine act [...] Over and over, we find this situation in our civilizational stories where people start with the assumption that debt and morality are the same, and then they are forced to accept that they aren't and have to cast around for some other basis for a universal morality, often encountering great difficulty along the way. It's even more complicated, because when you do think of debt as sin, there is a question of who is the sinner?"

"97% of all transactions in England up until the 17th Century were by credit. This was partly because there wasn't a lot of currency floating around, and partly because actual money is associated with violence, war and soldiers. Nice people operate on credit and trust."

"That's community! Community means everybody owes everybody else something and everybody remembers what they owe and eventually they all settle it and start over again. In this sense, debt isn't a terrible thing, but there's still this shadow of sin floating over it. Where does that come from?

More generally: a debt is a promise which you can phrase in exactly quantifiable terms. Because you can quantify it, it's impersonal, and therefore transferable. According to some theories, this is what money actually is: a transferable promise. One of the great questions is how this came about? Why is there a need to quantify promises precisely?"

"How does this rough credit system - which we actually observe in places without money - turn into a system with exact proportional equivalence? The answer seems to be: when someone is really angry. When people are being nice to each other, there's no need to calculate [...] Very often it is the case, even in places where you don't have markets for goods, you do have very elaborate fines for personal damages [...] what they call the barbarian law code [...] So, in legal situations where there is the danger of a feud or outbreak of violence, people do need to quantify. This is the first circumstance in which something like money emerges."

"The association between money and violence is a constant and it helps to explain a lot about why debt takes on this incredibly powerful moral hold. If you are in a situation of violent inequality, probably the most effective technique ever invented to make it seem not only moral, but to make it seem like the victim is to blame, is to frame it in the language of debt."

"Why does debt motivate people across all ages in this way? Because it implies that you're equal! This is the inevitable conclusion of claiming that debt is morality. Suddenly the language of debt becomes all-pervasive, because you have to use the master's language and I think that's what we're dealing with in all these religious and philosophical texts which start by saying that debt is morality, but then end up saying, 'well, actually, it's not'. It's also why all this moral language becomes financial language, if you think about redemption and reckoning and so on. We're stuck with this language of debt, except that it periodically blows up."

💡 The first recorded word for freedom in any human language is the Sumerian 'ama-gi' which literally means 'return to mother', because that's what happened. Debt cancellation meant all the debt peons got to go home.

"This virtual money system comes first, which is always entertaining because people have this tendency to write about virtual money as a new phenomena, as if we're in this brave new world, but actually it's the original form of money. Coins come later. Barter only tends to show up where you have people who are used to using money, but can't get their hands on any [...]

"Coins are an interesting case, because they appear in different places using different physical techniques, though the social situations were the same. In all cases, money in the physical sense - currency - is invented to pay soldiers."

"Money and taxes have been used through the centuries as ways of creating markets. Which is interesting because we have this assumption that markets and governments are opposed principles and that political choice is largely about which one we are going to slant to: free markets or governments [...] Historically, in fact, markets tend to be created by governments as a side-effect of military operations.

"Coinage was invented around 600 BC in what Karl Jaspers called 'the axial age'. He pointed out that most major schools of philosophy and world religions developed in the exact same time and places where we invented coinage [...] World religions arise largely as peace movements against these empires that are using coins to fund armies."

"For example, most transactions in the market in Basra from 800 or 900 were done by cheque. This gives an interesting perspective on global markets; which are also nothing new. Cheque is, in fact, an Arabic word [and] cash is a Tamil word for Chinese money. How did that happen? [...] Again, it's not true that we reverted to barter in the Middle Ages [...] We used Roman money until Charlemagne, who never actually got around to making pounds though people still used them to measure. They actually called it imaginary money: an ideal system which spanned Europe with which you could trade on the basis of money that didn't exist. We even had a phenomenon called 'crying up' or 'crying down' the currency, by which the king dictated value."

"Adam Smith got most of his ideas and best lines from medieval Islam - like the pin factory, which actually comes from Al-Ghazzali in 1100 who spoke of a needle factory. It was made possible by shariah - civil law which bans usury and operates outside the purview of the state. As a result, we got the first true free markets. You could write a cheque in Mali and cash it in Indonesia and we get, for the first time, the idea that markets can run by themselves. But, since they have a real free market, which isn't enforced by the state, they don't assume it's about competition. The assumption is that it's all an extension of mutual aid."

"The reason is because we're doing things backward. If we look at this from a broad, historical perspective, what we learn is that whenever you have a system of virtual money - in which money is not a thing, but a promise - you have to set up some mechanism to protect debtors. You could have periodic debt cancellation, or anti-usury laws and profit-sharing. Usually it's some kind of giant cosmological system beyond the purview of any state or king. We do set up giant, overarching institutions like this today, but we do so in the form of the IMF, which protects creditors against debtors. All these backward institutions produce the idea that nobody should ever default, which is absurd."

"If democracy is to mean anything, it ought to mean that everybody gets to weigh in on what sort of promises are made, what sort of promises are kept, and - when circumstances change - what sort of promises are renegotiated. That's the political moment that we're in right now."

"Our entire perspective on what money should do goes back to arguments in the Middle Ages. Since usury was illegal, they came up with interest, which was really a late fee. You were not renting money, which is evil, but charging people for failure to return it on the basis that you could have earned ~5% by investing it had they returned it [...] But, I actually do think a jubilee would be reasonable. I end the book by throwing that out [...] because the very idea would allow us to reconceptualize what we're doing and realise that money isn't what we thought it was."

"I think we should start thinking about radically different forms of money entirely. Interest-free systems would be possible. The reason Islamic Banking doesn't work is because not everybody's doing it."

"Probably not, though there have been many speculative bubbles. The real mystery is who is it all owed to? Everyone seems to be in debt, which is puzzling, in a way."

"If the government had paid back mortgages, that would also have bailed out the banks, but they chose not to and gave the money directly to the banks. This is a pattern we see throughout world history: debt means something totally different depending on who it is between. Between equals, debt is just a broad moral feeling that you should come through. Between the big players, it's the same story. However, what seems to be treated as 'sacred' is not debt between equals, but debts between the people on top and the people on the bottom. All of a sudden it takes on a different color [...] The philosophy of debt as something which cannot be forgiven only ever crops up in situations of structural coercion and extreme inequality."

"When you try to justify things in terms of the 'big picture', that's when you fall back on the language of debt and reciprocity. People tend to use this language to justify social relationships which operate according to completely different principles."

"The vast majority of social movements throughout history have been about debt [...] The problem with organizing debtors politically is that debt is very alienating. Most people with student loan debt or mortgage debt don't actually know many others in the same situation and there is no forum to compare notes and come up with common strategies."