A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove you don't need it.


A banker is a fellow who lends his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.


Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.


Good bankers, like good tea, can only be appreciated when they are in hot water.


I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?


I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.


It is easier to rob by setting up a bank than by holding up a bank clerk.


It is no accident that banks resemble temples, preferably Greek, and that the supplicants who come to perform the rites of deposit and withdrawal instinctively lower their voices into the registers of awe. Even the most junior tellers acquire within weeks of their employment the officiousness of hierophants tending an eternal flame. I don't know how they become so quickly inducted into the presiding mysteries, or who instructs them in the finely articulated inflections of contempt for the laity, but somehow they learn to think of themselves as suppliers of the monetarized DNA that is the breath of life.


There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were all feeding off their gold plate; not now! At present they have not only my sympathy but my preference. They are the last representatives of our native industries.


What's breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?


With a group of bankers I always had the feeling that success was measured by the extent one gave nothing away.