Lee Iacocca Quotes

If you've ever really been poor you remain poor at heart all your life. I've often walked when I could very well afford to take a taxi because I simply couldn't bring myself to waste the shilling it would cost.

My parents were born in 1912; they graduated from college into the Depression. They kept notebooks of every nickel they spent, and these habits of frugality from having grown up so poor never left them.

My parents were both in the army for 20 years and then worked in government departments; but they had gone through the Great Depression and known lean times. They always remained extremely frugal and lived far below their means.

When you grew up in a household where mom would keep the extra ketchup packets from McDonald's and keep them in a drawer just in case there came a day when you couldn't afford to buy ketchup anymore, that gets ingrained in you.

Sometimes I feel like I could have been a Depression-era person, just because of my need to make sure that I'm conservative in how I think about money.

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.

I'm old enough to remember in the 1930s and the 1940s when thrift, frugality, was considered an important virtue.

I never really had an itch for gambling. I work hard for my money, so I don't like going out and giving it away like that.

Americans have always been able to handle austerity and even adversity. Prosperity is what is doing us in.

They really do a disservice because these men and women came out of the Depression, they came out of the war.

Struggling with my finances, nudging toward 50, I sometimes daydream about being happily married to a matching frugaholic husband in a matching Christmas-red tracksuit with matching walkie-talkies as we troll Ralphs, excitedly comparing triple coupons.

If you want creativity, take a zero off your budget. If you want sustainability, take off two zeros.

My parents survived the Great Depression and brought me up to live within my means, save some for tomorrow, share and don't be greedy, work hard for the necessities in life knowing that money does not make you better or more important than anyone else. So, extravagance has been bred out of my DNA.

My parents were hardworking. They made every penny stretch as far as possible. That was probably the major reason everything they gave me was always two or three sizes too large.

Frugality, when all is spent, comes too late.

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

It was the unemployment that was the hardest to bear. The jobless millions were like an embolism in the nation's vital circulation; and while their indisputable existence argued more forcibly than any text that something was wrong with the system, the economists wrung their hands and racked their brains and called upon the spirit of Adam Smith, but could offer neither diagnosis or remedy.

I grew up in an era when money was not readily available. We were into the post-Depression years and World War II.

I'm cheap, and so I don't like wasting.

My mother made all of our clothes, my friends' mothers made all of their clothes. This was the Depression.

My father's money vanished in the Great Depression, and he had trouble keeping a job.

Mother always tries to buy things for a reasonable price. I was never allowed to buy things at full price. Probably, it's rooted in the Chinese mentality. We are very thrifty.

I've been really frugal with money since way back, so I can't buy something if it's too expensive. I'm not that brave.

Qualities not regulated run into their opposites. Economy before competence is meanness after it. Therefore economy is for the poor; the rich may dispense with it.

You can become rich by being cheap but the problem is that even though you are rich, you are still cheap