Dennis L. McKiernan Quotes

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.

I was born on the other side of the tracks, in public housing in Brooklyn, New York. My dad never made more than $20,000 a year, and I grew up in a family that lost health insurance. So I was scarred at a young age with understanding what it was like to watch my parents lose access to the American dream.

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.

Growing up, I wouldn't say I was poor. But my parents, although we lived in a nice, middle-class home, they had their struggles.

I couldn't do it at all. I was never really good at it, but I can't imagine what it can be like as a fortunate person not having to deal with it. I mean, people of all ages, not just my age, 25, 35, all the way down the line.

Unemployment is a great tragedy. The man who goes about hopelessly seeking work in order to earn bread for his children is a living reproach to civilization.

My parents were working class folks. My dad was a bartender for most of his life, my mom was a maid and a cashier and a stock clerk at WalMart. We were not people of financial means in terms of significant financial means. I always told them, 'I didn't always have what I wanted. I always had what I needed.' My parents always provided that.

I can remember living in the housing projects and being broke like it was yesterday.

Poverty is the only load which is the heavier the more loved ones there are to assist in bearing it.

I was the second of six kids. I wouldn't say we were poor; we had no money. That's different.

Poverty us no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.

My family in general - they're troubled or poorer people.

Poverty itself is not so bad as the poverty thought. It is the conviction that we are poor and must remain so that is fatal.

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.

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.

People who didn't know the depression just don't know what being poor means.

I started when I was 39 as a cabinet secretary, and so I feel like I have lived an experience in my life where I can relate to families that struggle, and are scraping by and scrounging.

I've seen poverty up close until I was four or five.

I understand the pain of working-class Americans because I have experienced the pain.

I didn't grow up in the slums or anything that dire, but I know what it is to grow up without having money or being able to support family.

My parents were not professionals. They were products of the Depression.

For a good part of my childhood, we were super poor and lived in government housing. I don't characterize the American dream as being successful and having a lot of material wealth to show for it. I did fine without it for a really long time.

I'm proud that I've never stopped writing about being poor.

I was just a toddler when my dad died in a car crash. With my mum, Eunice, being a young widow with a large family, she really struggled money-wise.

I never felt poor. Our family euphemism was that we were broke, which I think psychologically gave you a different feeling. There were people far worse than we were.