Karen Elson Quotes

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

If you look at Charles Dickens's time, there were so many different levels of society and everybody understood their place in it, it was that complex and simple. I'm not sure we have that now.

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

I was poor white trash, no glitter, no glamour, but I'm not ashamed of anything.

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.

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.

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.

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.

Our institute's agenda is relatively simple. We study the relationship between social-economic change and culture. By culture we mean beliefs, values and lifestyles. We cover a broad range of issues, and we work very internationally.

l had a job, and if you had a job in the depression you were rich.

I never felt the Great Depression firsthand. I learned about it at Harvard.

Remember 1932. You remember the closed banks and the breadlines and the starvation wages; the foreclosures of homes and farms, and the bankruptcies of business; the Hoovervilles: and the young men and women of the Nation facing a hopeless, jobless, future: the closed factories and mines and mills: the ruined and abandoned farms: the stalled railroads and the empty clocks; the blank despair of a whole Nation—and the utter impotence of the Federal Government.

I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.

I've lived through the Great Depression.

My grandma was a child of the Depression, and knew the tragedy of having her home outside Diller was destroyed by a tornado.

Nobody talks about the poor. Everybody talks about the middle class and just kinda want to ignore that the poor exist. And you cannot ignore that they exist if you want to help them.

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

If you look at European societies since the financial crisis began in 2008, with very, very few exceptions, the differences between rich and poor have increased, and sometimes hugely.

Victorian sorrow: the stars are winking in the sky, but not for us.

I find beauty in melancholy.

Class is rarely talked about in the United States; nowhere is there a more intense silence about the reality of class differences than in educational settings.

The Bush administration made us nostalgic for ... well, any other time in history.

There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which has no English equivalent; it means 'the longing for something'. It has Romantic and mystical connotations; C.S. Lewis defined it as the 'inconsolable longing' in the human heart for 'we know not what'. It seems rather German to be able to specify the unspecifiable. The longing for something - or, in our case, for someone.

The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.

The trajectory of this country [USA] is not positive and particularly for the disadvantaged, as we see what's happening. The gains in productivity have dropped, the gains in income for the middle class and the least advantaged have slowed, at best.