Quotes On The Great Depression

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. The current moral decay perceived in society has often been blamed on the lack of God in the public schools. During the Great Depression God was prominent in the schools, hence She must have caused the depression. Challenge my logic.

Eric Welch

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

Jon Meacham

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Whatever change you desire for the world, create that change in your own life. You are here for a purpose. Seek it out. Hunt it down. The greatest misery is to be purposeless. The great depression of our age is not economic, but spiritual. Our spiritual poverty is rooted in our purposelessness.

Matthew Kelly

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. I don't think that any economist disputes that we're in the worst economic crisis since the great depression. The good news is that we're getting a consensus around what needs to be done.

Barack Obama

#11. During the Great Depression, the philosophy of grin-and-bear-it became a national coping mechanism.

Maureen Corrigan

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

James Tobin

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. After the war, Prohibition was passed, and with liquor no longer legally available the nation plunged headlong into the Great Depression.

Dave Barry

#16. 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.

Tom Brokaw

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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.

Bill O'Reilly

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

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

Barry Eichengreen

#28. 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.

Robert McCloskey

#29. I am worried that the collapse of home prices might turn out to be the most severe since the Great Depression.

Robert J. Shiller

#30. 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

#31. A middle child, I was born in the depths of the Great Depression. My dad and mom were factory workers, struggling to make ends meet.

Dennis L. McKiernan

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. Facts are facts: No president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Great Depression inherited a worse economy, bigger job losses or deeper problems from his predecessor. But President Obama is moving America forward, not back.

Martin O'Malley

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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.

Tom Brokaw

#41. It is still possible to find people who believe that government policy did not end the Great Depression and undergird the Great Prosperity, just as it is possible to uncover people who do not believe in evolution.

Robert B. Reich

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. Victimhood and a 'can't do' spirit is what the Democratic Party has mostly been about since the Great Depression.

Cal Thomas

#46. Everything I learned about the Great Depression was from a college textbook.

Ralph Abernathy

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. Dodd-Frank is the most restrictive financial regulation since the Great Depression - but it won't stop another bubble.

Ziad K. Abdelnour

#52. It's almost worth the Great Depression to learn how little our big men know.

Will Rogers

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. The money cost of the reservoir plan literally fades into insignificance when it is compared with the financial burden which the great depression imposed on the nation.

Benjamin Graham

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. September and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression,

Ben Bernanke

#59. Although the United States, with its unit banking laws, had thousands of bank failures, Canada, which permitted branch banking, didn't have a single failure during the Great Depression.

Jim Powell

#60. In his first term, President Barack Obama played a cautious manager navigating the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression and cleaning up the messes left by President George W. Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Kevin O'Leary

#61. 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

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

James Surowiecki

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

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

Tom Brokaw

#67. During the Great Depression, when people laughed their worries disappeared. Audiences loved these funny men. I decided to become one.

Jerry Stiller

#68. 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

#69. African Americans had been compelled to work in Alabama mines prior to the Great Depression. His grandfather, once a coal miner himself, had told him stories of a similar burial field near the family home place south of Birmingham.

Douglas A. Blackmon

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. Bernanke has cultivated this idea that he is a brilliant scholar of The Great Depression, but that's not true at all.

David Stockman

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. I once read that more millionaires per capita were created during the Great Depression than at any other time in history.

Harry S. Dent

#77. Well, I never lived through the Great Depression, sometimes I feel as though I did.

Kasey Chambers

#78. 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

#79. Back in the days of the great Depression, an old sign dangled by one staple from a piece of rusting barbed wire. The owner of the farm had written:
'Burned out by drought,
Drowned out by flud waters,
Et out by jack-rabbits,
Sold out by sheriff,
STILL HERE.

Gordon B. Hinckley

#80. The Great Depression in the 1930s turned many young people away from corporations towards communism. By contrast, the Great Recession in the first decade of this century seems to have turned many away from corporations towards entrepreneurship.

Ron Davison

#81. 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

#82. '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

#83. 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

#84. Came of age in the Great Depression, when economic despair hovered over

Tom Brokaw

#85. 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

#86. 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

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

S. Truett Cathy

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

Karen Elson

#89. In Chicago [during the Great Depression], a crowd of some fifty hungry men fought over barrel of garbage set outside the back door of restaurant

William E. Leuchtenburg

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

Ben Shapiro

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.

Chuck Palahniuk

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. One loves and is loved in great pain, and one is alive in the experience of it. It is the walking-death quality of depression that I have tried to eliminate from my life;

Andrew Solomon

#98. The Great War proved how confused the world is. Depression is proving it again.

Anne Sullivan

#99. For the immediate future, at least, the outlook (stocks) is bright.

Irving Fisher

#100. When I was a kid, all of the parents and grandparents came out of the Depression Era. They were all freezing bread in their freezer, they were covering their sofas with plastic, and they had plastic runners on the floor. There was a great distance between them and anything authentic.

Lance Henriksen