Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren’t so exciting.

I used to have insecurity about my finances, then I announced that I had debt, and now I don’t have any insecurities.

Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges – on gifts, trades, loans – and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.

If you count E-mail, I’m on the Internet all day, every day.

I get more spam than anyone I know.

I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I’m really good at email.

The capitalist system is about taking from the Earth and from the other great commodity, labour. What’s happening with this system is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and the only way out of it is supposed to be growth. But growth is debt. It’s going to make the situation worse.

Bad debt is debt that makes you poorer. I count the mortgage on my home as bad debt, because I’m the one paying on it. Other forms of bad debt are car payments, credit card balances, or other consumer loans.

A man in debt is so far a slave.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

At my lowest point, I was nearly $700,000 in debt.

SPAM is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool, and exploiting the idea that it’s very inexpensive to send mail.

Typically, your corporate e-mail account is not, today, that spam-targeted. It’s more the free e-mail accounts that are spam-targeted.

Those have a short Lent who owe money to be paid at Easter.

Oh, I think there are a lot of people who would be buying and selling online today that go up there and they get the information, but then when it comes time to type in their credit card they think twice because they’re not sure about how that might get out and what that might mean for them.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

A person who can’t pay gets another person who can’t pay to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don’t make either of them able to do a walking-match.

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound: great debts are like cannon; of loud noise, but little danger.

I declared bankruptcy, and that was the worst thing I ever should have done.

It shows nobility to be willing to increase your debt to a man to whom you already owe much.

Debt is a social and ideological construct, not a simple economic fact.

The difference between a stranger sending you a message that you might be interested in at a very low volume level, no repetition, just sending it to very few people, and that being done as spam – those things get close enough that you want to be careful never to filter out something that’s legitimate.

Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It’s a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are designed so that you can’t get out of it. If a business, say, gets in too much debt, it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy.

The problem is that the U.S. government is the biggest debtor in the world, and those depending on it to take care of them will only become poorer.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

In Europe first and now in America, elected men have taken it upon themselves to indebt their people to create an atmosphere of dependency. And why? For their own selfish need to increase their own personal power.

It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.

Worrying is like paying on a debt that may never come due.

People forget already how much utility they get out of the Internet – how much utility they get out of e-mail, how much utility they get out of even simple things like brochureware online.