Ben Shahn Quotes

The depths of the Depression. You didn't ask what the job was, what the pay was, you didn't ask about stock options, or - you said yes.

Unemployment is a great tragedy. The man who goes about hopelessly seeking work in order to earn bread for his children is a living reproach to civilization.

Your grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, when everyday life was about deprivation and sacrifice, when the economic conditions of the time were so grave and so unrelenting it would have been easy enough for the American dream to fade away.

When I was in Philadelphia during the Depression in 1930 or '31, I got a very sad job as a night watchman in a garage. The cars in the garage had been abandoned by their owners, since they had lost their jobs and couldn't keep up the payments.

I grew up in the heart of the Depression.

At my lowest I was making nothing, of course.

Show me a man with very little money and I will show you a bum.

My parents didn't have any money.

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.

A guy I interviewed for Hard Times says, "What do I remember about the Great Depression? That I was hungry, that's all." Elemental things.

I was having trouble making ends meet, and my beginnings weren't meeting either.

I'd met a woman and I got married, but the money ran out right away. I hadn't had a job for seven months, and it just came over me that I was never going to work again. It hit me.

If you were out of a job and your kid needed diapers and your husband just left you, you would be so confused.

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

For a long time, I couldn't even afford food and clothing. I climbed from the very bottom of the society.

Like everyone, I am formed by my background, and mine was - well, we didn't have a lot of money. I didn't live in a cardboard box, but I did live in a place where, at the end of the week, the money was gone.

As far as I was concerned, the Depression was an ill wind that blew some good. If it hadn't occurred, my parents would have given me my college education. As it was, I had to scrabble for it.

You know, my Grandpop Finnegan used to have an expression: he used to say, 'Joey, the guy in Olyphant's out of work, it's an economic slowdown. When your brother-in-law's out of work, it's a recession. When you're out of work, it's a depression.'

How can a man help breaking the law when he don't have money to live on?

I have lost everything, and I am so poor now that I really cannot afford to let anything worry me.

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.

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

It's really hard to be poor in New York - I was really poor when I lived in New York.

I grew up poor.