Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

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 current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.

In the 1930s one was aware of two great evils - mass unemployment and the threat of war.

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.

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 Depression has caused an emergency more serious than war.

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.

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.

A serious dose of unemployment and a spate of bank failures can make the unelectable electable quite quickly.

The fear among economists across the political spectrum that was - was that we were rapidly plummeting towards a second Great Depression. So, in the weeks and months that followed, we undertook a series of difficult steps to prevent that outcome. And we were forced to take those steps largely without the help of an opposition party, which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that had led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve.

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

It is reported that about 30% of the world's population is unemployed. That's worse than the Great Depression, but it's now an international phenomenon.

You've got the Wall Street situation, the sub-prime situation. You've got a black president. We've got wars. We've got unemployment. But the music doesn't reflect that. And I challenge anybody to show me a music that's on the radio that reflects that.

With the loss of the American dollar as its own currency and its devaluation, I think that people will not even be able to afford bread and milk. They're facing a real crisis in America and I think the solution is Islam.

The simple fact of the matter is, as I know everyone in this room knows, that the recession that this country faced when this President took office was the worst since the Great Depression.

We are watching industries crumble, Wall Street firms disappear, unemployment spike, and unprecedented government intervention. And our designated opinion leaders want to know: Is Obama up this week? Is he down? And is his leadership style more like Bill Clinton's, or Abraham Lincoln's?

I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.

It's Obama's bad luck that he got elected just as the mayhem of the foreclosures, the banking collapse, and the General Motors disaster was accelerating the surge in unemployment to warp speed.

Importantly, in the 1930s, in the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve, despite its mandate, was quite passive and, as a result, financial crisis became very severe, lasted essentially from 1929 to 1933.

But if, if you take a look at what would have happened, I mean, do we need to see soup lines down the street to figure out what would have happened? We avoided - and all economists will tell you that millions of jobs were saved because of the Recovery Act, and we avoided a second Great Depression. That, that is a reality.

Oh, sure, we have another world war coming, and another great depression, but where are the leaders this time?

This economy is on life support.

I think when the bottom started to drop out, we didn't recognize it.

Long periods of recession, which tend to be self-perpetuating, are usually ended by war, or by preparations for it.