The Depression Quotes

#1. There were nine children in my father's family and eight in my mother's. My grandparents did the best with what they had. After the Depression, they were scratching out a living and working hard. They kept the family going.

Cheryl Ladd

#2. American political discourse had framed the Jewish problem as an immigration problem. Germany's persecution of Jews raised the specter of a vast influx of Jewish refugees at a time when America was reeling from the Depression.

Erik Larson

#3. People saw the Depression as a necessary thing - a chance to squeeze out the excesses, get back to Puritan morality. That just made things worse.

Ben Bernanke

#4. There has always been a display of wealth and always will be, until the depression comes, which it always does. And let me tell you, a display is a good thing. It shows people that you can be successful. It can show you a way of life.

Donald Trump

#5. Ben didn't want to lose money. He had had a rough time during the depression.

Walter Schloss

#6. I think that everyone thought that the Depression like everything else, was for the white-folks, so it had nothing to do with them.

Maya Angelou

#7. I was never very good at picking cotton, and then I only made fifty cents or $1 a day. People would work for $1 a day during the Depression. So we would get $2 for playing music and just having fun. I think that as a result of that it was not just the money, but we enjoyed doing it.

Johnny Gimble

#8. Bill Hewlett and I were brought up in the Depression. We weren't interested in the idea of making any money. Our idea was if you couldn't find a job, you'd make one for yourself.

David Packard

#9. I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.

Sharon Olds

#10. Well over fifty years ago I was making radio loudspeakers and radio sets in Rochester, New York; pretty young and inexperienced; but we survived the depression.

Stuart Symington

#11. The time when I had desire to go to the United States I didn't have a penny. It was in the middle of the depression, you know. I couldn't get as far as Hoboken at that time.

Ben Shahn

#12. Depression is an illness that robs one of the meaning of life. Heal the illness. As the depression heals, enthusiasm, well-being, and a sense of life's purpose will return.

Peter McWilliams

#13. It was the height of the Depression, and suddenly I am earning pots of money.

Ann Rutherford

#14. The cause of the depression is traceable directly to the worldwide habit of trying to reap without sowing.

Napoleon Hill

#15. The big question about the American depression is not whether war with Germany and Japan ended it. It is why the Depression lasted until that war. From 1929 to 1940, from Hoover to Roosevelt, government intervention helped to make the Depression Great.

Amity Shlaes

#16. I grew up in the heart of the Depression.

Bob Cousy

#17. They really do a disservice because these men and women came out of the Depression, they came out of the war.

Richard M. Daley

#18. We did a show called The Orphan Train, during the depression, when families didn't have enough money to support their children, they'd put them on the train and hope someone would pick them up who had enough money to support their children.

Robert Stack

#19. As far as I was concerned, the Depression was an ill wind that blew some good. If it hadn't occurred, my parents would have given me my college education. As it was, I had to scrabble for it.

Sargent Shriver

#20. History gets named afterwards: The Age of Enlightenment, the Depression. Which is not to say that people sometimes aren't depressed with all the enlightenment around them, or strangely elevated during otherwise grey times.

Terry Pratchett

#21. Franklin D. Roosevelt was fortunate: He didn't take office until nearly four years after the Wall Street crash, by which time the Republicans' responsibility for the Depression was taken for granted.

Tina Brown

#22. I think one of the lessons of the Depression - and this is something that Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated - was that when orthodoxy fails, then you need to try new things. And he was very willing to try unorthodox approaches when the orthodox approach had shown that it was not adequate.

Ben Bernanke

#23. You almost had to live through it to really know the gut ripping misery of the depression during the early thirties which led to labor's bloodiest and most violent days.

Jimmy Hoffa

#24. I was literally fabricated over in France and born about six months after the boat landed at Ellis Island. This was the heart of the Depression. For the first 12 years of my life we lived in a terrible ghetto on the East River.

Bob Cousy

#25. My mother was a big influence; she was exceedingly chic, completely dressed in a completely different manner than I did. I was a child of the Depression, so she taught me all about accessories, and I always tell everybody she worships at the altar of the accessory.

Iris Apfel

#26. I think i am too chaotic to ever get depressed. Depression somehow requires an ordered mind where the depression can get hold. Depressions just give up on me, usually at first sight. It's mutual - I find them really tedious and boring.

Martijn Benders

#27. Synchronize each breath with the present moment and become intertwined with happiness. Breathing in, we are grateful for the opportunities that are given to us; breathing out, we let go of the depression and anxiety that hold us back.

Forrest Curran

#28. That i didn't just feel depressed - instead, it was like the depression was the core of me, of every part of me, from my mind to my bones?

John Green

#29. It seems, in theory, that I should be able to control at least a few of my bad habits. The problem is that my habits make me depressed, and the depression makes me want to indulge my habits and so I do. There isn't any solution to this.

John S. Hall

#30. Greatest generation came through some stuff that we can't even imagine - the Depression, World War I - and all they wanted after that was a breather and a calm and a quiet life, and they get us.

P. J. O'Rourke

#31. Every time you feel depressed about something, try to identify a corresponding negative thought you had just prior to and during the depression. Because these thoughts have actually created your bad mood, by learning to restructure them, you can change your mood.

David D. Burns

#32. Tiny: but there is the word, this word phil wrayson taught me once: weltschmerz. it's the depression you feel when the world as it is does not line up with the world as you think it should be. i live in a big goddamned weltzschermz ocean, you know? and so do you.

David Levithan

#33. When entertainment was begun, during the Depression, it was supposed to take people's minds off reality. People could sing, dance, act or do anything. It was the type of entertainment that was available.

Tina Yothers

#34. The depths of the Depression. You didn't ask what the job was, what the pay was, you didn't ask about stock options, or - you said yes.

Art Linkletter

#35. As to whether the depression will come back, it is every depressive's fear.

Sally Brampton

#36. To my mind, the main reason for the Depression in the United States as a whole, is the bondage of debt and the spirit of speculation among the people.

Heber J. Grant

#37. Every few years when it's been another five years that have passed and I haven't made a film and the depression starts taking over totally, I allow myself to do a commercial. And then I feel really dirty and get to work promptly.

Terry Gilliam

#38. I came along and was a teenager in the Depression, and nobody had jobs. So I went out hitchhiking, when I met a man named Woody Guthrie. He was the single biggest part of my education.

Pete Seeger

#39. I was born in 1928 and by 1931 the Depression was beginning to mount.

Vidal Sassoon

#40. In the Depression especially, I think you learn to face problems and not run away from them.

Lilla Crawford

#41. When I was in Philadelphia during the Depression in 1930 or '31, I got a very sad job as a night watchman in a garage. The cars in the garage had been abandoned by their owners, since they had lost their jobs and couldn't keep up the payments.

Tom Glazer

#42. In the Age of Aquarius, the depression and stress on mankind will tear up people who do not have the technical knowledge of self.

Harbhajan Singh Yogi

#43. Any increase in the relative size of government in the economy, therefore, shifts the societal consumption-investment ratio in favor of consumption, and prolongs the depression.

Murray N. Rothbard

#44. If you want to understand geology, study earthquakes. If you want to understand the economy, study the Depression.

Ben Bernanke

#45. I grew up on what everybody called a plantation - but believe me, it wasn't a plantation. It was just an old farm. I grew up with a lot of black people working in the fields, and it was during the Depression between 1930 and the war, so we were all poor - black and white.

Sam Phillips

#46. Not since the Depression has the state been this dry, have our rivers been this low, our water table this low, and our reservoirs this low.

Parris Glendening

#47. There are many misconceptions about depression-mostly negative. Unfortunately, because depressed people think negatively about depression and its treatment, they don't get help, which allows the depression to worsen, which leads to more negative thinking, which produces a vicious cycle of suffering.

Peter McWilliams

#48. The more these readjustments are delayed ... the longer the depression will have to last, and the longer complete recovery is postponed.

Murray Rothbard

#49. During the Depression, my dad made radios to sell to make extra money. Nobody had any money to buy the radios, so he would trade them for dogs. He built kennels in the backyard, and he cared for the dogs.

Betty White

#50. At the end of the Depression, people were perhaps looking for something to cheer themselves up. They fell in love with a dog and a little girl. It won't happen again.

Shirley Temple

#51. I believe that one of the great problems for us as individuals is the depression and the tension resulting from existence in a world which is increasingly less pleasing to the eye.

Lady Bird Johnson

#52. You have been disappointed,you have undergone defeat during the depression, you have felt the great heart within you crushed until it bled. Take courage, for these experiences have tempered the spiritual metal of which you are made- they are assets of incomparable value.

Napoleon Hill

#53. We would go down to Riverside, California, which is very poor now, but that's where my grandfather grew up. He grew up during the Depression in Riverside.

Greta Gerwig

#54. I didn't feel the Depression at all. I always had a pocketful of money.

Walter Annenberg

#55. My parents were both born and raised in the Depression. They instilled great values about integrity and the importance of hard work, and I've taken that with me to every job.

Mary Barra

#56. The values transmitted through oral history are many - courage, selflessness, the ability to endure, and to do so with humor and grace. I got those values listening to my dad's stories about the Depression and how their family survived. It gave me courage that I, too, could survive hard times.

Ann Turner

#57. Winston County was a pocket of Republicans. Even in the depression days, when Democrats dominated Alabama, Winston County remained a Republican county and all the elected officials were Republican.

Jeff Sessions

#58. The Depression taught me what frugality means and the importance of not losing money.

Irving Kahn

#59. This may surprise you, but there were a large number of valuable buys during the Depression.

Irving Kahn

#60. It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression.

E.B. White

#61. By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn't have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps - all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm.

Gore Vidal

#62. I thought by masking the depression with silence, the feelings might disappear.

Sharon E. Rainey

#63. But surely if you loved someone it was your job to stick with him? To help him through the depression? In sickness and in health, and all that?

Jojo Moyes

#64. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.

Warren Buffett

#65. I presumably lost $150,000 in the depression of 1937 - on my one stock investment - because I did everything Lehman Brothers told me. I said, well, this is a fool's procedure ... buying stock in other people's businesses.

Studs Terkel

#66. When I was born, the economy wasn't in a great state; it was the Depression, and my father had to be quick to try and find work.

Clint Eastwood

#67. People don't know I've got a deep social conscience. I'm a child of the Depression, born in 1933. My parents were very liberal in their social views.

Eli Broad

#68. I'll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.

Henry Rollins

#69. My grandmother raised five children during the Depression by herself. At 50, she threw her sewing machine into the back of a pickup truck and drove from North Dakota to California. She was a real survivor, so that's my stock. That's how I want my kids to be too.

Michelle Pfeiffer

#70. Just as the Depression left a generation of dads feeling they never had enough money, so father deprivation is leaving a generation of sons and daughters with different psychic wounds.

Warren Farrell

#71. The Depression did more to me than being a little Lebanese kid did.

Joe Jamail

#72. I don't feel the depression the people who are always looking back to the '50s, to 'Father Knows Best' feel. I can see the coming of another glorious era.

Bharati Mukherjee

#73. I do not know what horrified me most [during the depression]: the economic misery of my companions [or] their moral and ethical coarseness.

Adolf Hitler

#74. My brother and I laughed a lot as kids. We came up in the middle of the Depression, and neither one of us knew we were poor. We had nothing, but we didn't know it.

Dick Van Dyke

#75. It was good fortune to be a child during the Depression years and a youth during the war years.

Martin Lewis Perl

#76. The way out of the depression is to start spending and doing things.

Henry Ford

#77. Rumination can also make the depression stronger by creating conditions that are, well, more depressing.

Daniel Goleman

#78. Understanding the true causes of the Depression, as well as the real economic record of the United States in the 1930s, is an essential ingredient in anyone's economic and historical education.

Thomas Woods

#79. In short, and this is a highly important point to grasp, the depression is the "recovery" process, and the end of the depression heralds the return to normal, and to optimum efficiency.

Murray N. Rothbard

#80. My parents were born in 1912; they graduated from college into the Depression. They kept notebooks of every nickel they spent, and these habits of frugality from having grown up so poor never left them.

Roz Chast

#81. I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps.

John Updike

#82. I studied chemical engineering. I was a good student, but these were the hard times of the depression, my scholarship came to an end, and it was necessary to work to supplement the family income.

Jack Steinberger

#83. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.

Ray Bradbury

#84. During the Depression, much of my career was dictated by a fanatical aversion to washing dishes. The only job I could find to finance college involved washing dishes,so I joined the Navy instead.

Keith Robertson

#85. What the Depression teaches us is that when the economy is so depressed that even a zero interest rate isn't low enough, you have to put conventional notions of prudence and sound policy aside.

Paul Krugman

#86. The depression we find ourselves in here, and which is causing havoc in America, is allowing people to give weight to that which divides them, rather than to the shared experiences and elements of connection they see mirrored in their fellow man.

Jacqueline Winspear

#87. If you have a little sensibility or a heart, you have all the reason to be depressed once in a while. But the depression is like a motor for creation. I need a little bit of depression, a bit of acid in my stomach, to be able to create. When I'm happy, I just want to dance.

Marjane Satrapi

#88. With great profundity I note the pleasure one gets or takes in pushing wheeled objects, as opposed to the depression involved in pulling them.

Michael Cisco

#89. We were just emerging from the Depression. Superman started in 1938. Batman started in 1939. So, we were just recovering.

Jerry Robinson

#90. I used to love to create outfits, and I still do - I just don't have the time. How can you wear one thing and never wear it again? Even my wedding dress - I had a dress made that I could wear again. I'm a child of the depression, so I'm very, very practical.

Iris Apfel

#91. Growing up during the Depression, I worked for the Forest Service and CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps). I tend to work very, very hard. I wouldn't change that for anything.

Raymond Burr

#92. The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negro had but few pegs to fall.

Langston Hughes

#93. My father made false teeth. Unfortunately, during the Depression, not many people could afford them, and my parents lost their home.

Al Feldstein

#94. I felt quite frankly having been raised during the depression and looking back at the roaring twenties, the jazz age, which was a very magic timer in my mind because it was something that I had missed.

Hugh Hefner

#95. Fear of poverty is a state of mind, nothing else! But it is sufficient to destroy one's chances of achievement in any undertaking, a truth which became painfully evident during the depression.

Napoleon Hill

#96. To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about.

Friedrich August Von Hayek

#97. It was so dry in Saskatchewan during the Depression that the trees were chasing the dogs.

John Robert Colombo

#98. The panic of the Depression loosened my inhibitions against being different. I could be myself.

Emanuel Celler

#99. I was born in 1935. But my mother and father - who were immigrants from Ireland - and everybody that I knew growing up in Brooklyn came out of the Depression, and they were remarkable people.

Pete Hamill

#100. I can only speak from my own experience, and I would say that the depression I experienced feels like a chemical change. When it came over me, when it comes over me, it feels like it's coming over me like a flu.

Sarah Silverman