“We were taking out mortgages we couldn’t afford because they were camouflaged to look as if we had a reasonable chance of paying them back. Banks then changed the bankruptcy laws so that we could not get out of our obligations once the rates changed. Lastly, they sold us back our own mortgages, shifting back to us any of the risk through our money-market accounts and pension funds.”

“And to whom were these bundles of unrecognizably mashed-up mortgages ultimately sold? Quite often, to you and me. Our pension funds, municipalities, and money-market accounts were made up largely of these “mortgage-backed securities.”

“For us what was killing was how nothing had changed. We'd been waiting to be transformed, and now here we were, back in our old life.”

“We're all human beings,when did we change to havings?Living out our life through things.How do we get back to being again?”

“We were, all of us, prisoners of our character, unable to alter our true inner natures. When we said we had changed, what had only really changed was our luck. Put us in the same circumstances as our previous folly and suddenly we’d revert, all of us, to what we were. That’s what I believed”

“Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won't last forever. We must take it or leave it.”