Jerry Buss Quotes

I grew up in poverty. For 25 years I was fed on aid.

When you're poor, an egg sandwich is dinner and you cut your potatoes with a butter knife.

We had to get on food stamps for a short period of time, so I understand the need for those.

I was happy, I wasn't beaten, and I lacked nothing. But it wasn't what people expect - it was very much sort of pinching and scraping. I don't know how my mother did it.

It is difficult to describe in short the enthusiasm and devotion provoked by and given to my research. We lived almost in poverty. I used pencils, two for a nickel, and could not buy a fountain pen, when I lost mine.

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.

We didn't really feel poor. You don't know that as a kid, but we really didn't have any cash. When machinery broke down, we didn't have money for parts, so we did our best to fix it.

I know what it's like not to have food in the fridge or money to buy more.

I thought it was normal to recycle pants and shoes from your older cousins. That was just my way of life. At the end of the month, there was not much food in the refrigerator and you're hoping the first comes so food can come again. You never forget those things.

I can describe to you the taste of government cheese.

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.

We were below welfare. We begged from people on welfare. My father tried to repair our shoes with pieces of bicycle tires.

I loved my mom so much because she had to work on a penny just to put food on the table... During the Depression in the United States, everybody had a tough time. And I was so hurt because she was crying that she didn't have any food for us for Thanksgiving.

We came from nothing really. One house. Ten people. Even days the lights was off. The worst days was not eating. Surviving off rice and toast.

I grew up eating quite well, even though the idea has got around that my family were terribly poor in Communist Georgia. I think it's partly because we had different standards then - it was tough, but we never truly struggled for food.

I was born and raised during Depression Years when we were on County relief and we all went out and we hustled. we worked. I worked in a restaurant, I washed dishes.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it.

Luckily, I didn't get too beaten up before someone gave me a shot, but there were times when I was living on friends' couches and eating five-dollar subs from Subway almost every meal.

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

Physical hunger and physical poverty is something I could only imagine. I've been poor when I was in China... As kids we never had to starve, but just didn't have enough meat, enough rice.

In simple terms, I realised that food is the most fundamental need for a person. In difficult economic times, people's priorities change, and they might be willing to do something that secures for them the lowest possible weekly food bill.

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.

Every day I've got to hear about unemployment and people starving.

Things were so bad we ate rabbits that neighbours had run over and gave to us because they knew we were broke.

For a long time, I couldn't even afford food and clothing. I climbed from the very bottom of the society.