Peter Drucker Quotes

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

A recession is a period in which you tighten your belt. In a depression, you have no belt to tighten. In a panic you have no pants left to hold up.

Arsenal of Democracy

… a depression is for capitalism like a good, cold douche.

Back in the days of world wars, American companies didn't think twice about pitching in to help fight the enemy. Car companies helped bolster tanks, food companies created rations - sometimes they had to do it, but no one had to twist their arm.

A war is going to destroy our economy even further. It's going to be a threefold humanitarian disaster.

After the war, Prohibition was passed, and with liquor no longer legally available the nation plunged headlong into the Great Depression.

War is one of the nation's most honored virtues, and its militaristic values now bear down on almost every aspect of American life.

If you raise taxes during a recession, you head to depression.

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.

The U. S. is headed toward a period of business depression... beginning within the next two years, which may exceed that which preceded the War. ... The only thing that will save us is a new gold policy or the discovery of a new process or additional gold fields. If the fall [of gold production] is not prevented by design or accident we shall throttle business, wringing out all profits and experiencing all the evils of deflation.

And war is wonderful, isn't it? For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been preparing for and are preparing for this way step by step. In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition that could not fail to arise on all sides.

During the next four years...unless drastic steps are taken by Congress, the U.S. will have nearly 8,000,000 unemployed and will stand on the brink of a deep depression.

If they can send you to war at 18, maybe it's beneficial for some people to think that most of us gotta go to war for our own existence.

The blood of a nation ought never to be shed except for its own preservation in the utmost extremity.

I did a week-long assessment in 2005 at (then Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld's request. Following our return, I told him that Afghanistan was going to be the longest campaign of what we then termed "the long war."

I told them that my grandfather had died in the Great Crash of 1929 - a stockbroker jumped out of a window and crushed him and his pushcart down below.

Sugar is gone; silk has gone; iron is threatened; wool is threatened; cotton will go! How long are you going to stand it? At the present moment these industries...are like sheep in a field.

It was the German schoolhouse which destroyed Napoleon III. France, since then, is making monster cannon and drilling soldiers still, but she is also building schoolhouses. As long as war is possible, anything that makes better soldiers people want.

Government intervention in the economy - through taxes, regulation and, most importantly, currency inflation - causes distortions and misallocations of capital that must eventually be unwound. The distortions degrade the general standard of living, and the economy goes into a recession (call that an incomplete cleansing). Or it goes into a depression - wherein the entire sickly structure comes unglued.

From the Cooperative League, I suppose, with the Depression lingering as long as it did, the next step in terms of, as you call it, professional relationship, was to go to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP]. I went there as an assistant field secretary, and so forth. So, I suppose that was the first organized step.

The more a country makes military weapons, the more insecure it becomes: if you have weapons, you become a target for attack.

I believe war is the inevitable fruit of our economic system.

My father had a couple of kids at the beginning of the Depression. There was not much employment. Not much welfare. People barely got by. People were tougher then.

[D]rilling and arming, when carried on on a national scale, excite whole populations to frenzies which end in war.