John F. Kennedy Quotes

I've lived through the Great Depression.

Everything I learned about the Great Depression was from a college textbook.

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

The 1930s had been a time of tremendous economic distress. And the unemployment rate was enormously high by any historic standard.

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've always been interested in the Depression as this very dramatic pivotal period in American history.

They were the darkest of times, the years following the crash of the stock market in 1929. Thousands of people across the United States were cast out of their Jobs, off their farms, out of their homes and apartments, and into the crushing depths of poverty.

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

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

The crisis of the 1930s and the populist reactions of that time must not be forgotten.

You know, my Grandpop Finnegan used to have an expression: he used to say, 'Joey, the guy in Olyphant's out of work, it's an economic slowdown. When your brother-in-law's out of work, it's a recession. When you're out of work, it's a depression.'

I learned more about the economy from one South Dakota dust storm that I did in all my years of college.

The Depression was an incredibly dramatic episode - an era of stock-market crashes, breadlines, bank runs and wild currency speculation, with the storm clouds of war gathering ominously in the background... For my money, few periods are so replete with human interest.

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.

It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours.

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.

When I was a deacon, the ominous signs of the Great Depression began to appear. Tens of thousands lost their jobs. Money was scarce. Families had to do without. Some young people did not ask their mothers, 'What's for dinner?' because they knew all too well that their cupboards held very little.

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.

The Depression has caused an emergency more serious than war.

There is something wrong when we had more bankruptcies last year than college graduates.

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.

We happen to be living in an era when, in consequence of human gullibility and fallibility, the world has been overtaken by panic and distress such as private initiative alone cannot cope with. To an extent that could previously never have been expected the cities, the states, and the central government have been compelled to undertake to provide relief where voluntary agencies have been unequal to the task.

I did not throw out my education lightly, but what I was being taught was of no use in explaining what I saw around me. It was the Great Depression.

I left college with a deep sense that I needed to understand poverty more.

I came to the University of Chicago on the morning of January 2, 1932. I wasn't yet a graduate of high school for another few months. And that was about the low point of the Herbert Hoover/Andrew Mellon phase after October of 1929. That's quite a number of years to have inaction.