Great Depression Quotes

We were growing up in West Virginia. Everybody was poor there in the southern part of the state. It was like growing up in the Great Depression from the stories I hear people tell. Everybody was poor and so we didn’t know that we were any different from anybody else.

When I was a deacon, the ominous signs of the Great Depression began to appear. Tens of thousands lost their jobs. Money was scarce. Families had to do without. Some young people did not ask their mothers, ‘What’s for dinner?’ because they knew all too well that their cupboards held very little.

But through world wars and a Great Depression, through painful social upheaval and a Cold War, and now through the attacks of September 11, 2001, our Nation has indeed survived.

In my view, Obamacare is the most existential threat to our economy than anything we’ve ever had since the Great Depression, so I think a little bit of additional deficit is nothing compared to delaying if not repealing Obamacare.

In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they’d never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.

But despite historic levels of obstruction, President Obama was able to bring the economy back from the verge of a second Great Depression.

In the Great Depression, you bought something if you had the cash to buy it.

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

We are a resilient country. We’ve been through a Civil War; we’ve been through two World Wars. We’ve been through a Great Depression; we even made it through Jimmy Carter! We will make it through the Obama years!

I am obsessed with the Great Depression and with former showgirls – and the Victorians – the idea of wistful, dark romance.

Your grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, when everyday life was about deprivation and sacrifice, when the economic conditions of the time were so grave and so unrelenting it would have been easy enough for the American dream to fade away.

I’ve lived through the Great Depression.

As a young man, I lived through the Great Depression, when banks failed and so many lost their jobs and homes and went hungry. I was fortunate to have a job at a canning factory that paid 25 cents an hour.

During the Great Depression, African Americans were faced with problems that were not unlike those experienced by the most disadvantaged groups in society. The Great Depression had a leveling effect, and all groups really experienced hard times: poor whites, poor blacks.

My parents had become adults during the Great Depression, as had many of my aunts and uncles, so I got stories from all of them. They are fastened up inside me, and now and again, they have to come out.

I did not throw out my education lightly, but what I was being taught was of no use in explaining what I saw around me. It was the Great Depression.

I am, as it happens, a baby boomer, but not one who feels any broad-gauge nostalgia for the ’60s and ’70s. My attitude resembles that of my parents, who were born in the ’20s and lived through the Great Depression and World War II.

I grew up in an era of pretty severe poverty. My parents weathered the Great Depression, and money was always a very big concern. I was weaned on a shortage mentality and placed in foster homes largely because there simply wasn’t enough money to take care of the most basic of needs.

In his first year in office, President Obama pulled us back from the brink of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression and worked to lay a new foundation for economic growth. The president identified three key strategies to build that lasting prosperity: innovation, investment, and education.

If we go back to the birth of ‘Superman’ and ‘Batman’ in America in the ’30s, they were created because of events like the Great Depression, crime and Al Capone, among others. Everybody was corrupt back then, and if you can’t have a hero in real life, it helps to have one in your fantasies.

There was so much going on in 1936 with the height of the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War and Germany on the move and all of those things. There was a tension in the air.

The miserable failures of capitalist economies in the Great Depression were root causes of worldwide social and political disasters.

I was born in Chicago in 1927, the only child of Morris and Mildred Markowitz, who owned a small grocery store. We lived in a nice apartment, always had enough to eat, and I had my own room. I never was aware of the Great Depression.

The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.

I was born January 6, 1937, eight years after Wall Street crashed and two years before John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the plight of a family during the Great Depression.

As we learned after President Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff at the outset of the Great Depression, vibrant international trade is a key component to economic recovery; hindering trade is a recipe for disaster.

World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man.

We certainly had an upheaval at the start of the Great Depression, and that resulted in a lot of financial reform, but it wasn’t done in one stroke, and it wasn’t done immediately. The Depression was in 1929 and resulted in the Securities and Exchange Act of ’33, ’34, ’35, ’37, ’39, and ’41.

The Great Depression, they come out with the New Deal, black people didn’t have access to those government stimulus packages. The New Deal set up what is known as the modern-day middle class. We didn’t have access to programs – the G.I. Bill, Social Security, home loans – none of that.

DiMaggio was never a rube. He was very smart and very urban. Coming out of the Great Depression, he was the immigrant boy who made it big. Coming back from World War II, he had all the wealth and power that New York aspired to. When New York saw itself as the center of the world, he was its paragon of class.

Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression.

The 24% unemployment reached at the depths of the Great Depression was no picnic.

Raised by an irresponsible mother during the Great Depression in the Jim Crow south, my father was on his own from the age of 13.

The movies saved my life. I grew up in the great depression, the only child of a pair of star crossed lovers. My father lost his job. My mother drank. They fought. The movies were my escape.

Americans who have parents raised during the Great Depression or World War II understand how drastically things have changed on the home front. My father did not care a whit whether I liked him, and it would have been unthinkable for him to pick up my stuff. There were rules in the house, and they were enforced.

Unemployment is sky-rocketing; deflation is in our future for the first time since the Great Depression. I don’t care whose fault it is, it’s the truth.

Consider trade protectionism. It’s been tried – and found wanting – since the Great Depression.

‘The Little Rascals’ was set against the background of the Great Depression: the characters were living in poverty. It’s just that it wasn’t focused on it. It was focused on what makes childhood universal. We’re all laughing at kids because we see ourselves in them; we remember our childhood.

If you look at the Greek economic record, it’s been very similar to the U.S. experience in the first four years of the Great Depression. And after having a Depression-sized event, they’ve cut the unit-labor cost in Greece – they’ve closed something like half the gap with Germany.

We have had a great depression in agriculture, caused mainly by several seasons of bad harvests, and some of our traders have suffered much from a too rapid extension in prosperous years.

We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don’t care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it’s the worst recovery since the Great Depression.

In the midst of the pain and panic of the Great Depression, as many as 2 million people of Mexican descent were expelled from the United States.

Herbert Hoover failed through no fault of his own. The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression were beyond his control, and every remedy he tried failed adequately to work.

The most striking development of the great depression of 1929 is a profound skepticism of the future of contemporary society among large sections of the American people.

The greatest generation was formed first by the Great Depression. They shared everything – meals, jobs, clothing.

Market capitalism survived and prospered after the boom-bust industrial revolution of the 19th century, and the Great Depression and world wars of the 20th century. It will recover from the financial panic of 2008-09 and Obamanomics.

If you had asked people in 1929, ‘Here is what is about to happen. How much would you pay to avoid the Great Depression from occurring?’ The answer is they would have paid a lot. They would have borrowed money if it could be used to prevent the Great Depression.

My grandfather was a wealthy and respected merchant in Montclair, New Jersey, where I was born. But his estate was wiped out in the Great Depression, and as a result, I had what I consider the ideal upbringing: We were a proud family, good citizens, and we didn’t have a sou.

Because its hard to realize now that that was the end of the great depression, you know. All of a sudden all of this is in front of me and I’m solvent, you know. I’m making some money and I know where my next meal is coming from, and I have a new pair of shoes and that’s it.

Debates go on to this day about what caused the Great Depression. Economics is not very good at explaining swings in economic activity.

From a generation that came of age during the Great Depression, millions of our country’s best and bravest took up arms in a worldwide struggle against tyranny.

The downturn following the collapse of Japan’s so-called bubble economy of the 1980s was not as severe as the Great Depression.

Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.

My mother lived through the Great Depression. Her family of 11 children pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and moved to wherever there was work at the time. And in rural Oklahoma, that wasn’t easy to find.

Recovery measures work better when they raise confidence – as Franklin D. Roosevelt understood. His fireside chats, and his inaugural address proclaiming he would fight the Great Depression with the same resolve he would muster against a foreign foe, were aimed at reassuring Americans.

Men and women whose early youth was shaped in the ordeal of the Great Depression showed the values formed in that crucible when tyranny threatened a world.

In the five years since the end of the Great Recession, the economy has made considerable progress in recovering from the largest and most sustained loss of employment in the United States since the Great Depression.

In the Great Depression, employment and investment were low because labor market institutions and industrial polices changed.

The minimum wage is something that F.D.R. put in place a long time ago during the Great Depression. I don’t think it worked then. It didn’t solve any problems then and it hasn’t solved any problems in 50 years.

‘Rainwater’ was particularly special because it was a complete departure from the suspense novels. It’s set in the Great Depression and based on an incident that occurred when my dad was a boy.

On both sides of my family, my grandparents grew up in total poverty and came to California during the Great Depression. The only way they were able to work their way out of that was by joining the military, which is how they both went on to be able to go to college.

I got a job in advertising. So even though I was writing, I was always supporting myself. That’s the thing that would matter for my father, who was absolutely a creature of the Great Depression.

‘Up in the Air’ may be a glossy production sprinkled with laughter and sex, but it captures the distinctive topography of our Great Recession as vividly as a far more dour Hollywood product of 70 years ago, ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ did the vastly different landscape of the Great Depression.

My parents were children during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it scarred them. Especially my father, who saw destitution in his Brooklyn, New York neighborhood; adults standing in so called ‘bread lines,’ children begging in the streets.

After clearing the land, planting the orchard, building the house and barn, and surviving the Great Depression, our father died suddenly one winter night when we were small, leaving us to learn about loss before we even knew its name.

The trade deficit always goes up when the economy is strong and plummets when the economy sinks, as it did during both the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2008-09.