DEBTS were invented to make poets sing and to make artists paint. They are the fulcrum on which the levers of progress rest. If it were not for debts we probably would not have had the glorious paintings of Hakusi, the novels of Balzac and Scott, the short stories of Poe, or the music of Wagner.
Everyone except the miser works to pay off debts; if not his own, then the national debt or some obligation contracted somewhere, sometime, somehow by somebody now dead.
Debts are the real Deus ex Machina of this world, and the human race is forever working for dead horse.
Benjamin De Casseres.
Source: Life, Nov. 9, 1916, Vol. 68 No. 1776, p. 818