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Great Depression Quotes

Browse 242 quotes about Great Depression.

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Great Depression Quotes

“In the spring of 1931, West African natives in the Cameroons sent New York $3.77 for relief for the "starving"; that fall Amtorgs's new York office received 100,000 applications for job in Soviet Russia. On a single weekend in April, 1932, the 'Ile de france' and other transatlantic liner carried nearly 4,000 workingmen back to Europe; in June, 500 Rhode Island aliens departed for Mediterranean ports.”

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Book:Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940
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“In spring, 1937, of course, families still rode the rails because of the Depression, which everyone said was already in the history books as the worst ever. The jobs still couldn’t be found, at least for most people. Everett itself—the smaller, poorer, little brother lying north of Seattle—ached with the unemployed and the hopeless. The labor union tensions in the woods still festered and got bloody at times. But Skybillings—and the railroad logging shows of the Cascade Mountains—felt like they were, inch-by-inch, rebuilding America.”

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Book:The Woods
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“Ethan got some books out of an old trunk. They were history books, some passed down from his great-grandfather Tom through his grandfather Jeb and father Andrew. Ethan expected that he’d pass them on to his own child, one day. History and family trees had always been very important to the Fortner family.”

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Book:The Adventures of the Home For Supper Kids
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“The world was a miserable, wretched place to be in the 1930’s. It was a time when death lurked around every street corner — death which could be as slow as starvation or as quick as a whistling machinegun bullet. . . . [It was a time when] everyone and everything — including immediate future — was in doubt. . . . While a handful of men were getting rich . . . the average citizen was being whittled shorter and shorter with every skimpy meal.”

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Author:Billie Jean Parker Moon
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“The world was a miserable, wretched place to be in the 1930’s. It was a time when death lurked around every street corner — death which could be as slow as starvation or as quick as a whistling machinegun bullet. . . . [It was a time when] everyone and everything — including immediate future — was in doubt. . . . While a handful of men were getting rich . . . the average citizen was being whittled shorter and shorter with every skimpy meal.' — Billie Jean Parker Moon, 1975”

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Book:Bonnie & Clyde and Me!: The Floyd Hamilton Story, Public Enemy #1, 1938...in His Own Words!
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“The world was a miserable, wretched place to be in the 1930’s. It was a time when death lurked around every street corner — death which could be as slow as starvation or as quick as a whistling machinegun bullet. . . . [It was a time when] everyone and everything — including immediate future — was in doubt. . . . While a handful of men were getting rich . . . the average citizen was being whittled shorter and shorter with every skimpy meal.' — Billie Jean Parker Moon (Bonnie Parker's sister), 1975”

Great Depression1930sBonnie And Clyde
Book:Bonnie and Clyde and Me
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“There were occasional dances at the main prison compound with live bands as well as holiday dinners, activities that Blanche greatly enjoyed. In her scrapbooks, she placed an autographed promotional photograph of one visiting band, The Rural Ramblers. ... Blanche loved to dance and by all accounts she was very good at it. She applied to a correspondence course in dancing that came complete with diagrams of select dance steps to place on the floor and practice. She also cut similar dance instructions and diagrams from newspapers and magazines and put them in her scrapbooks. By 1937, she had mastered popular dances like jitterbug, rumba, samba, and tango. The men’s prison, or “the big prison” as the women called it, hosted movies on Friday nights. Features like Roll Along Cowboy ... were standard, usually accompanied by some short musical feature such as Who’s Who and a newsreel. The admission was five cents. Blanche attended many of these movies. She loved movies all of her life. Blanche Barrow’s periodic visits to the main prison allowed her to fraternize with males. She apparently had a brief encounter with “the boy in the warden’s office” in the fall of 1934. There are few details, but their relationship was evidently ended abruptly by prison officials in December. There were other suitors, some from Blanche Barrow’s past, and some late arrivals...”

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Book:My Life with Bonnie and Clyde
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“[At Eastham, probably after sexual abuse]: In Barrow's own words to Fults, 'I'd like to shoot all these damned guards and turn everybody loose.' Fults, initially unimpressed by the diminutive Barrow, later noted the change he witnessed. 'I seen him change from a schoolboy to a rattlesnake. He got real bitter.' ... This is echoed by members of the Barrow family who noted a distinct difference in Barrow's personality after his 1932 parole. According to his sister Marie, 'Something awful sure must have happened to him in prison, because he wasn't the same person when he got out.”

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Book:My Life with Bonnie and Clyde
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“There were, of course, other heroes, little ones who did little things to help people get through: merchants who let profits disappear rather than lay off clerks, store owners who accepted teachers' scrip at face value not knowing if the state would ever redeem it, churches that set up soup kitchens, landlords who let tenants stay on the place while other owners turned to cattle, housewives who set out plates of cold food (biscuits and sweet potatoes seemed the fare of choice) so transients could eat without begging, railroad "bulls" who turned the other way when hoboes slipped on and off the trains, affluent families that carefully wrapped leftover food because they knew that residents of "Hooverville" down by the dump would be scavenging their garbage for their next meal, and more, an more. But they were not enough, could not have been enough, so when the government stepped in to help, those needing help we're thankful.”

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Book:Inside Alabama: A Personal History of My State
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“In the large sense the primary cause of the Great Depression was the war of 1914-1918. Without the war there would have been no depression of such dimensions. There might have been a normal cyclical recession; but, with the usual timing, even that readjustment probably would not have taken place at that particular period, nor would it have been a "Great Depression.”

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Book:The great depression, 1929-1941
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“Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets.”

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Author:Paul Krugman
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“I look back to the Great Depression, and what Roosevelt was able to do in very difficult times, to get Social Security through back in the time when it was seen as - well, it wasn't what it is today. It was sort of a last-ditch, if you really need it, you got it, but, today, it's much more a part of your retirement program.”

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Author:Chris Matthews
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“The fear among economists across the political spectrum that was - was that we were rapidly plummeting towards a second Great Depression. So, in the weeks and months that followed, we undertook a series of difficult steps to prevent that outcome. And we were forced to take those steps largely without the help of an opposition party, which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that had led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve.”

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Author:Barack Obama
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“I was born into a working class Irish Catholic family at the brutal bottom of the Great Depression. I suppose this early imprinting and conditioning made me a life-long radical. My education was mostly scientific, majoring in electrical engineering and applied math. Those imprints made me a life-long rationalist. I have become increasingly skeptical about, or detached from, the assumption that radicalism and rationalism are the only correct perspectives with which to view life, but they remain my favorite perspectives.”

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Author:Robert Anton Wilson
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“We had the great depression, we had two world wars, we had the flu epidemic. We had oil shock. We had all these terrible things happen. But something about the American system unleashed more and of a potential to human beings over that hundred years so that we had a seven for one improvement in - there's never been any - I mean, you have centuries where if you've got a 1 percent improvement, then it's something. So we've got a great system. And we've got more productive capacity now than we ever have.”

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Author:Howard Warren Buffett
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“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.”

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Author:Joseph Stiglitz
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“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.”

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Author:Lorrie Moore
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“In the great depression, things could only be set right by causing the idle plant to work again . . . Roosevelt . . . spent billions of public money and created a huge public debt, but by so doing he revived production and brought his country out of the depression. Businessmen, who in spite of such a sharp lesson continued to believe in old-fashioned economics, were infinitely shocked, and although Roosevelt saved them from ruin, they continued to curse him and to speak of him as 'the madman in the White House.' . . . [It's one more] striking example of inability to learn from experience.”

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Author:Bertrand Russell
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