Louis D. Brandeis Quotes

If you had asked people in 1929, 'Here is what is about to happen. How much would you pay to avoid the Great Depression from occurring?' The answer is they would have paid a lot. They would have borrowed money if it could be used to prevent the Great Depression.

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

Like Samson in the temple of the Philistines, a collapsing U.S. economy would inflict enormous, unacceptable damage on the rest of the world.

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

America had been a boom-and-bust economy going into the Great Depression - just over and over and over, fortunes were wiped out, ordinary families were crushed under it.

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

Hard times are with us; the country is distracted; very few things are marketable at a price above the cost of production; tens of thousands are out of employment; the jails, penitentiaries, workhouses and insane asylums are full; the gold reserve at Washington is sinking; the government is running at a loss with a deficit in every department; a huge debt hangs like an appalling cloud over the country; taxes have assumed the importance of a mortgage, and 50 per cent of the public revenues are likely to go delinquent; hungered and half-starved men are banding into armies marching toward Washington; the cry of distress is heard on every hand; business is paralyzed; commerce is at a standstill; riots and strikes prevail throughout the land;

At the end of Friday, March 3, 1933, thirty-two states had closed all their banks ... Six other states had closed almost all their banks. In the other ten states and in the District of Columbia withdrawals were limited to 5 percent of deposits and in Texas to ten dollars per day. The U.S. financial system had reached the last extremity before it would collapse completely, taking the life's savings of tens of millions of people and what was left of the international economic system with it.

Americans did not suffer alone. World trade overall fell two-thirds in the first few years of the Depression.

I've lived through the Great Depression.

As far as I can find, almost no one in the profession - not even luminaries like John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, or Irving Fisher - made public statements anticipating the Great Depression.

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.

You almost had to live through it to really know the gut ripping misery of the depression during the early thirties which led to labor's bloodiest and most violent days.

A recession is when a neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.

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

You couldn't beg, borrow, or steal a job in 1931, 1932... it was really tough.

This recession is the deepest in our lifetimes, the deepest since 1929. If you take the people thrown out of work in the 1982 recession, the 1991 recession, the 2001 recession, not only is this bigger, this is bigger than all of those combined.

You could argue that Barack Obama faced in '08 a situation as bad as any president since the Great Depression. What Obama inherited from the Bush administration, we all remember, was just an absolute global catastrophe.

We do not want financial convulsions.

The depression in the business world is reaching its height. Unemployment is increasing daily. The family is breaking up. Starving people fill the streets…. This is the responsibility of statesmen who govern under the auspices of the Emperor’s will. To ignore this situation is to ignore the Emperor’s will.

Once upon a time my political opponents honored me as possessing the fabulous intellectual and economic power by which I created a world-wide depression all by myself.

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.

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.

The Medium of Exchange, the only thing which gives life to Business, Employs the Poor, Feeds the Hungry, and Cloaths the Naked, is so Exhausted; that in a little time we shall not have wherewith to Buy our Daily Bread, much less to pay our Debts or Taxes

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.