Yip Harburg Quotes

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.

When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.

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

A host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

Men and women of high professional standing were reduced to the status of vagrants, unable to find employment and forced to eat the bitter bread of public or private charity.

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.

In the Great Depression in which I grew up and remember vividly, unemployment was over 25 percent, and over 35 percent where I lived. A grown man would work all day, 16 hours, for a dollar. I remember hundreds of people walking by, people who had come down from the North just to get warm. They would come to our house as beggars even though they might have a college education. People didn't have money. They bartered; they'd trade eggs or pigs. It was just completely different.

The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.

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

I can remember living in the housing projects and being broke like it was yesterday.

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

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 grew up in the heart of the Depression.

I grew up poor.

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're living in hard times.

People who didn't know the depression just don't know what being poor means.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

Jobless Men Keep Going We Can’t Take Care of Our Own

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.

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

An entire nation, it seemed, was standing in one long breadline, desperate for even the barest essentials. It was a crisis of monumental proportions. It was known as the Great Depression.

When I was born, my family was so poor that there was no money to buy food. So the church bought groceries for us - there wasn't any kind of privilege.

It was a very difficult time after the fall of the Soviet Union. Jobs were difficult, and you had to fight to have anything nice.

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.