Great Depression quotes:

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  • Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives. -- Chuck Palahniuk
  • During the Great Depression, when people laughed their worries disappeared. Audiences loved these funny men. I decided to become one. -- Jerry Stiller
  • 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. -- Milton Friedman
  • I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope. -- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
  • The 24% unemployment reached at the depths of the Great Depression was no picnic. -- Barry Eichengreen
  • In the Great Depression, you bought something if you had the cash to buy it. -- S. Truett Cathy
  • The miserable failures of capitalist economies in the Great Depression were root causes of worldwide social and political disasters. -- James Tobin
  • Debates go on to this day about what caused the Great Depression. Economics is not very good at explaining swings in economic activity. -- Eugene Fama
  • 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. -- John Mellencamp
  • 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. -- Steve Buyer
  • 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. -- Steve Buyer
  • Although I was not aware of it at the time, the experience of growing up during the Great Depression was to have a profound impact on my intellectual and professional career. -- Lawrence R. Klein
  • --
  • 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. -- Lou Holtz
  • No one can possibly have lived through the Great Depression without being scarred by it. No amount of experience since the depression can convince someone who has lived through it that the world is safe economically. -- Isaac Asimov
  • The singer-songwriter has always played music that was stylistically rooted in the '30s and the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. But the fact of the matter is that none of us remember the Depression firsthand. -- Steve Earle
  • My parents were both in the army for 20 years and then worked in government departments; but they had gone through the Great Depression and known lean times. They always remained extremely frugal and lived far below their means. -- Veronica Webb
  • --
  • The Great Depression of the 1930s saw more American unmarried women working from nine to five, mostly in repetitive, boring, subordinate, dead-end jobs. But the number of working women doubled between 1870 and 1940. During World War II it doubled once again. -- Helen Fisher
  • 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. -- William Julius Wilson
  • I was born illegitimately and almost immediately, as I understand it, placed in an orphanage. So my very earliest memories were in an orphanage. It was the tag end of the Great Depression when I was born. People were desperately poor. -- Bryce Courtenay
  • 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. -- James Surowiecki
  • 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. -- Tom Vilsack
  • 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. -- James Green Somerville
  • During the Great Depression, levels of crime actually dropped. During the 1920s, when life was free and easy, so was crime. During the 1930s, when the entire American economy fell into a government-owned alligator moat, crime was nearly non-existent. During the 1950s and 1960s, when the economy was excellent, crime rose again. -- Ben Shapiro
  • My parents survived the Great Depression and brought me up to live within my means, save some for tomorrow, share and don't be greedy, work hard for the necessities in life knowing that money does not make you better or more important than anyone else. So, extravagance has been bred out of my DNA. -- David Suzuki
  • When I was in high school, I used to have breakfast with my grandpa every morning. He instilled a lot of values in me: hard work, loyalty. He grew up during the Great Depression in Philly in poverty - he didn't have enough to eat as a kid. Sometimes his family would get kicked out of their apartment because they couldn't pay the rent. -- Matthew Quick
  • World War II was really unusual, because America was in the Great Depression before. So the war did help the US economy to get securely out of this decline. This time, the war [in Iraq] is bad for the economy in both the short and long run. We could have spent trillions in research or education instead. This would have led to future productivity increases. -- Joseph Stiglitz
  • We beat the Great Depression without lotteries and legalized gambling -- John Warren Kindt
  • Everything I learned about the Great Depression was from a college textbook. -- Ralph Abernathy
  • It took capitalism half a century to come back from the Great Depression. -- Ben Shapiro
  • It's almost worth the Great Depression to learn how little our big men know. -- Will Rogers
  • Well, I never lived through the Great Depression, sometimes I feel as though I did. -- Kasey Chambers
  • September and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression, -- Ben Bernanke
  • Victimhood and a 'can't do' spirit is what the Democratic Party has mostly been about since the Great Depression. -- Cal Thomas
  • Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression. -- James Surowiecki
  • World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man. -- Jon Meacham
  • One of [ways being lucky] was to go to school during the Great Depression because teaching became a plum job. -- Kurt Vonnegut
  • The downturn following the collapse of Japan's so-called bubble economy of the 1980s was not as severe as the Great Depression. -- Ben Bernanke
  • After the war, Prohibition was passed, and with liquor no longer legally available the nation plunged headlong into the Great Depression. -- Dave Barry
  • I once read that more millionaires per capita were created during the Great Depression than at any other time in history. -- Harry S. Dent
  • We have the worst revival of an economy since the Great Depression. And believe me: We're in a bubble right now. -- Donald Trump
  • I am worried that the collapse of home prices might turn out to be the most severe since the Great Depression. -- Robert J. Shiller
  • I admire President Obama. He inherited the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That was a terrible time for America. -- Hillary Clinton
  • There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks. -- John Kenneth Galbraith
  • --
  • But despite historic levels of obstruction, President Obama was able to bring the economy back from the verge of a second Great Depression. -- Steny Hoyer
  • It is reported that about 30% of the world's population is unemployed. That's worse than the Great Depression, but it's now an international phenomenon. -- Noam Chomsky
  • 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. -- Larry Elder
  • The minimum wage was enacted in 1937 during the Great Depression and it has been increased 16 times. It's a well-established economic policy to help families. -- John Freeman
  • I think that when the education system started to be dismantled during the first Great Depression in the 1930s, we didn't recover from that. -- Wynton Marsalis
  • I think what happened during the Great Depression was that African Americans understood that Republicans championed citizenship and voting rights but they became impatient for economic emancipation. -- Rand Paul
  • 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. -- Nick Rahall
  • Hank Paulson, the happy capitalist warrior who spent his life pursuing and defending free markets, is now the biggest interventionist Treasury secretary we've had since the Great Depression. -- Charles Duhigg
  • The Federal Reserve the privately owned U.S. central bank definitely caused The Great Depression by contracting the amount of currency in circulation by one third from 1929 to 1933. -- Milton Friedman
  • Ever since the Great Depression, economists have known that demand shortages tend to persist in the wake of severe financial crises like the ones that happened in 1929 and 2008. -- Bob Frank
  • America had been a boom-and-bust economy going into the Great Depression - just over and over and over, fortunes were wiped out, ordinary families were crushed under it. -- Elizabeth Warren
  • First and foremost, it's important to remember that, from my perspective at least, my most important legacy was making sure that the world didn't go into a Great Depression. -- Barack Obama
  • The remedy [for the Great Depression] is to give the workers access to the means of production, and let them produce for themselves, not for others, . . . the American way. -- Upton Sinclair
  • The Great Depression in the United States was caused - I won't say caused, was enormously intensified and made far worse than it would have been by bad monetary policy. -- Milton Friedman
  • Importantly, in the 1930s, in the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve, despite its mandate, was quite passive and, as a result, financial crisis became very severe, lasted essentially from 1929 to 1933. -- Ben Bernanke
  • Although I was not aware of it at the time, the experience of growing up during the Great Depression was to have a profound impact on my intellectual and professional career. -- Lawrence R. Klein
  • Once supply begins to dwindle, the years to follow will see shortages that at best will cause global recession, possibly worse than the 1930s Great Depression, ... war, famine, pestilence and death. -- Kenneth S. Deffeyes
  • So I analyzed that and decided I didn't want to be the president during a depression greater than the Great Depression, or the beginning of a depression greater than the Great Depression. -- George W. Bush
  • I think there is universal agreement within the economics profession that the decline - the sharp decline in the quantity of money played a very major role in producing the Great Depression. -- Milton Friedman
  • In the Great Depression, employment was not low because investment was low. Employment and investment were low because labor market institutions and industrial policies changed in a way that lowered normal employment. -- Edward C. Prescott
  • The Recovery Act, which helped saved the economy and prevented us going into the Great Depression, was the largest investment in green technology, the largest investment in education. We rebuilt roads and bridges. -- Barack Obama
  • [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt was the central world figure in the two great disasters of this century - the Great Depression and World War II. By contrast, JFK came in relatively peaceful, agreeable times. -- John Kenneth Galbraith
  • After the Great Depression and after public urging, a nationwide public competition was held to determine a design for a memorial that would honor President Thomas Jefferson's bold vision for westward expansion for America. -- Russ Carnahan
  • What I find so interesting is, Herbert Hoover in August 1928 said no country in the world was closer to abolishing poverty than the United States. And then, of course, we had the Great Depression. -- Robert Dallek
  • The simple fact of the matter is, as I know everyone in this room knows, that the recession that this country faced when this President took office was the worst since the Great Depression. -- Jay Carney
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  • 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. -- Mark Skousen
  • 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. -- Janet Yellen
  • You could argue that Barack Obama faced in '08 a situation as bad as any president since the Great Depression. What Obama inherited from the Bush administration, we all remember, was just an absolute global catastrophe. -- Tony Kushner
  • I know that some poor immigrants from that era had unrealistic expectations and were disappointed, but I don't think my grandparents were disappointed at all, even though they experienced some very hard times during the Great Depression. -- Samuel Alito
  • My professional apprenticeship at Iowa State College from 1930 to 1943 could not have been better; the Great Depression made it so, and the talented younger economists at Ames during that period made it an exciting and profitable intellectual experience. -- Theodore Schultz
  • My parents, products of the Great Depression, were successful people, but lived in a state of constant fear that my sister and I, and they, would sink into the kind of economic insecurity that their generation knew so well. -- Ben Stein
  • Failing to curb the impact of climate change could damage the global economy on the scale of the Great Depression or the world wars by spawning environmental devastation that could cost 5 to 20 percent of the world's annual gross domestic product. -- Nicholas Stern
  • Burlesque thrived during the Great Depression, and by extension, so, too, did Gypsy [Rose Lee]. Men could no longer afford to pay $5.50 to see a show on Broadway, but they could scrape together $1.00 for a matinee at a burlesque house. -- Karen Abbott
  • 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. -- John Raese
  • 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. -- Virginia Euwer Wolff
  • 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. -- James E. Faust
  • We call for a green New Deal, like the New Deal that got us out of the Great Depression, but in this case focusing on green jobs to create 100% clean renewable energy by 2030, which is exactly what the science calls for. -- Jill Stein
  • This crisis of long-term unemployment is having a profoundly damaging impact on the lives of those bearing the brunt of it. We know this thanks to a series of careful studies of the problem conducted in the depths of the 1930s Great Depression. -- Barry Eichengreen
  • This crisis of long-term unemployment is having a profoundly damaging impact on the lives of those bearing the brunt of it. We know this thanks to a series of careful studies of the problem conducted in the depths of the 1930s Great Depression. -- Barry Eichengreen
  • 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. -- Christina Romer
  • Indeed, the FHA was born out of the Great Depression, which was also caused in significant part by a foreclosure crisis. Mortgages in the early 1930s were mostly three- to five-year 'bullet' loans, which did not amortize and were due in full at maturity. -- Mark Zandi
  • 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. -- Harry Markowitz
  • The smartest people in Indianapolis became teachers [during the Great Depression]. And, for once, there was something for women to do because teaching was regarded as a woman's profession, like nursing. So the smartest women in town - Jesus, my women teachers were so exciting. -- Kurt Vonnegut
  • 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. -- Terry Teachout
  • 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. -- Arthur Laffer
  • I grew up in the 1930s Great Depression when many families struggled to make ends meet, and in an area where old-fashioned country gospel music was popular. Later, as an adult with a more mature outlook on Christianity, I realized that a lot of that music was rather shallow. -- Jerry Bridges
  • 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. -- Austan Goolsbee
  • 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. -- Frank Rich
  • 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 didnt know that we were any different from anybody else. -- James Green
  • One intriguing subplot of the economic crisis is the failure of most economists to predict it. Here we have the most spectacular economic and financial crisis in decades - possibly since the Great Depression - and the one group that spends most of its waking hours analyzing the economy basically missed it. -- Robert J. Samuelson
  • The Great Depression in the United States, far from being a sign of the inherent instability of the private enterprise system, is a testament to how much harm can be done by mistakes on the part of a few men when they wield vast power over the monetary system of the country. -- Milton Friedman
  • 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. -- Wayne Dyer
  • Between the Great Depression and the 1970s, private business was viewed with suspicion even in most capitalist economies.Businesses were, so the story goes, seen as anti-social agents whose profit-seeking needed to be restrained for other, supposedly loftier, goals, such as justice, social harmony, protection of the weak and even national glory." -- Ha Joon Chang
  • 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. -- Lloyd Blankfein
  • 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. -- Joseph B. Wirthlin
  • --
  • But if, if you take a look at what would have happened, I mean, do we need to see soup lines down the street to figure out what would have happened? We avoided - and all economists will tell you that millions of jobs were saved because of the Recovery Act, and we avoided a second Great Depression. That, that is a reality. -- Alexi Giannoulias
  • What little reality television I've seen seems to be about economic desperation. Like the marathon dancing of the Great Depression, which should give us pause. People willing to eat flies and worms for a sum that is less than the weekly paycheck of the show's producer. I haven't seen "reality television" that is other than this kind of painful, sadistic exploitation of fit young people looking for agents. -- Lorrie Moore
  • The Great Depression was going on, so that the station and the streets teemed with homeless people, just as they do today. The newspapers were full of stories of worker layoffs and farm foreclosures and bank failures, just as they are today. All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War. -- Kurt Vonnegut
  • FISHER SEES STOCKS PERMANENTLY HIGH -- Irving Fisher
  • The Government's business is in sound condition. -- Andrew Mellon
  • The country is not in good condition. -- Calvin Coolidge
  • We will not have any more crashes in our time. -- John Maynard Keynes
  • American labor may now look to the future with confidence. -- James J. Davis
  • I am convinced that through these measures we have reestablished confidence. -- Herbert Hoover
  • Gentleman, you have come sixty days too late. The depression is over. -- Herbert Hoover
  • Oh, sure, we have another world war coming, and another great depression, but where are the leaders this time? -- Kurt Vonnegut
  • The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it. -- John Steinbeck
  • Looking to the future I see in the further acceleration of science continuous jobs for our workers. Science will cure unemployment. -- Charles M. Schwab
  • The spring of 1930 marks the end of a period of grave concern...American business is steadily coming back to a normal level of prosperity. -- Julian Barnes
  • 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. -- C. L. R. James
  • While the crash only took place six months ago, I am convinced we have passed the worst and with continued unity of effort we shall rapidly recover. -- Herbert Hoover
  • All safe deposit boxes in banks or financial institutions have been sealed... and may only be opened in the presence of an agent of the I.R.S. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
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