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Wednesday, May 23rd 2012

Presidential money quotes

Forget walking miles in the snow to return borrowed books or chopping down cherry trees. In their private and professional lives, our presidents worried about money. A lot.

Think you can relate? See if you can match the money quote to the U.S. president who actually said it. After each answer, you’ll get a little trivia on the man's personal finances and his real attitudes about the crunchy green stuff. But the words don't always match the deeds, so don't say you haven’t been warned.

1. "In terms of the economy, look, I inherited a recession, I am ending on a recession."

John Adams
George W. Bush
Abraham Lincoln
William Howard Taft

2. "Our present financial condition is without a parallel in history. No nation has ever before been embarrassed from too large a surplus in its treasury."

James Monroe
James Buchanan
George W. Bush
John Kennedy

3. "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."

Andrew Jackson
Franklin D. Roosevelt
John F. Kennedy
Lyndon B. Johnson

4. "The business of America is business."

Rutherford B. Hayes
John Adams
John Quincey Adams
Calvin Coolidge

5. "I pray we are still a young and courageous nation, that we have not grown so old and so fat and so prosperous that all we can think about is to sit back with our arms around our money bags. If we choose to do that I have no doubt that the smoldering fires will burst into flame and consume us -- dollars and all."

Lyndon Baines Johnson
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Ronald Reagan
George H.W. Bush

6. "We need no national banks or other extraneous institutions planted around the government to control or strengthen it in opposition to the will of its authors. Experience has taught us how unnecessary they are as auxiliaries of the public authorities -- how impotent for good and how powerful for mischief."

George Washington
John Adams
Martin Van Buren
James K. Polk

7. "... the only thing we have to fear is fear itself ... "

Abraham Lincoln
Franklin D. Roosevelt
John F. Kennedy
Ronald Reagan

8. "The circulation of confidence is better than the circulation of money."

George Washington
James Madison
Lyndon B. Johnson
Ronald Reagan

9. "Never spend money before you have it."

Thomas Jefferson
James Polk
Gerald R. Ford
Jimmy Carter

10. "Wealth can only be accumulated by the earnings of industry and the savings of frugality."

John Adams
John Tyler
Zachary Taylor
Ulysses S. Grant

  
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