This quote has shown up recently on some Face Book posts of high school acquaintances, so, I wanted to set the historical record straight all the while empathizing with the posters because I use to use this quote often when I was on this mindset:
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property”
~ THOMAS JEFFERSON (CIRCA – 1802)
Now, some here may know that i am not a huge Ron Paul fan personally. I know from hearing him in person as well as Ezola Foster at an event that he holds to the conspiratorial view of history. While I think he has backed off of his previous John Birch Society thinking (as did I, but to a larger extent), he is still liked by the “Alex Jones” sheople out there in the ether of the www. So here we can see Ron Paul gets inundated with this quote from his conspiracy followers quite a bit, so much so he had to put the breaks on it. We can see this because he titled this post, “Can we please stop propagating the fake Jefferson quote about ‘PRIVATE BANKS’?” In this post he states the following:
This is a fake. No one has been able to say where Jefferson wrote this. It’s been spreading around the internet and has even made it in a few books (unsourced). This book points out that the quote is “spurious:” (The term “deflation” cannot even be traced back further than 1920, and the term “inflation” 1864 – long after Jefferson died).