Quotes About Debt Relief

“So, is there hope for a truly democratic Africa? Long answer: Only if continent-wide improvements in education, human rights and public health are coupled with an aggressive and far-sighted debt-relief program that breaks the cycle of subsistence farming and urban squalor. Short answer: No.”

— Jon Stewart

“This is the debt I pay
Just for one riotous day,
Years of regret and grief,
Sorrow without relief.
Pay it I will to the end
Until the grave, my friend,
Gives me a true release
Gives me the clasp of peace.
Slight was the thing I bought,
Small was the debt I thought,
Poor was the loan at best
God! but the interest!”

— Paul Laurence Dunbar

“One of the things that Africa needs, everybody seems to agree, is some measure of debt relief.”

— Gwen Ifill

“When Uganda got debt relief in 1999, the first item President Museveni bought was a presidential jacket for himself.”

— George Ayittey

“Greece, maneuvering for debt relief, is flirting treacherously with Moscow. Recession-hit economies such as Italy seem to believe business as normal with Russia trumps calls for solidarity over Ukraine.”

— Anonymous.

“No amount of debt restructuring, even debt forgiveness, will help the Greeks achieve real prosperity. What they need is not short-term relief but, rather, a long-term cure.”

— Edmund Phelps

“I've been working with Pat Robertson on Africa debt-relief, and we disagree on virtually everything except certain very specific, inalienable rights, and the truth is that morality and patriotism come in all shapes and sizes.”

— George Clooney

“Giving debt relief to people that really need it, that's what foreclosure is.”

— J. P. Morgan

“The Treasury plan is a disgrace: a bailout of reckless bankers, lenders and investors that provides little direct debt relief to borrowers and financially stressed households and that will come at a very high cost to the US taxpayer. And the plan does nothing to resolve the severe stress in money markets and interbank markets that are now close to a systemic meltdown.”

— Nouriel Roubini

“We need a revolution in development thinking and practice. Foreign aid, debt relief, family planning, democracy, education, and free markets have not succeeded.”

— William Easterly

“The Catholic community, with many others, has long worked for this new commitment on global health and debt relief (President George W. Bushs proposed $15 billion Global AIDS initiative). I hope that Congress will now appropriate the money needed to make this legislation a reality, and that the U.S. government will press for strengthening the debt relief program along the lines proposed by this legislation.”

— John Ricard

“What our economy needs is direct job creation by the government and mortgage-debt relief for stressed consumers. What it very much does not need is a transfer of billions of dollars to corporations that have no intention of hiring anyone except more lobbyists.”

— Paul Krugman

“Consider in Washington, around the country today we are talking about balanced budgets, paying down our national debt, getting the economy going, defending ourselves, activist judges. Newt Gingrich did all those things when he was speaker. We got tax relief. We got balanced budgets. We got, you know, job creation. We paid down our national debt.”

— J. C. Watts

“This law represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means completed
a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions, to act as a protection to future administrations of the Government against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy
a law to flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation
in other words, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

“What is gained by debt relief and aid can be lost if we don't get a proper trade agreement in Hong Kong,”

— Gordon Brown

“Let us, above all, be clear that, without a convincing program of debt relief to start the new millennium, our objective of halving world poverty by 2015 will be only a pipe dream.”

— Kofi Annan