Top 66 Great Depression Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I can’t dismiss my roots as a kid growing up during the Great Depression in the ordinary midwestern town of Grand Rapids, Michigan. From the standpoint of money and material possessions, we were barely scraping by.

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.

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.

Oh, sure, we have another world war coming, and another great depression, but where are the leaders this time?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

I’ve lived through the Great Depression.

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.

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

America has always built ourselves out of adversity. All the way back to the Great Depression.

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 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.

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.

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

It took capitalism half a century to come back from the Great Depression.

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.

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.

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 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.

My father’s money vanished in the Great Depression, and he had trouble keeping a job.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

By 1929, 5 percent of the population received one-third of the nation’s income. The structural weaknesses of this economy plunged the nation into the Great Depression.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I feel like I went through the Great Depression. All these companies are being successful around you, you’re on that track, and then the market collapses, and you’re out of a job. You’re trying to save your investors’ investment, and it doesn’t work, and you sell the company for nothing. It was brutal.