Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The people who are filing for bankruptcy in increasing numbers every year, it's not the poorest. It's not the people at the economic fringes. It's people who worked hard and played by the rules.

We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt.

In 1958, my father invested everything he had in a business venture and became the largest automobile dealership in Chicago for Ford's new Edsel line. But Edsel sales plummeted and my father fell into bankruptcy. I watched him struggle; working long hours to protect us from poverty.

No I don't think it was a myth at all, anymore than what the recession that the whole country was experiencing was a myth, which obviously seems like it's going to get worse and worse.

Recessions are hard on people, but they are not hard on art.

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

Spain is facing an economic situation of extreme difficulty, I repeat, of extreme difficulty, and anyone who doesn't understand that is fooling themselves.

I had been working for eight years and all I had to show for it was this horrible debt. At one point we had the bailiff at the door.

I grew up in the heart of the Depression.

During the financial crisis and bailouts of 2008, it probably occurred to very few average people that we were entering a period of hardship for billionaires.

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

We're living in hard times.

We have discharged one generation of debtors after another, but we do not find that their numbers lessen. We find only that we forget, when times are good, that times were ever bad.

We cannot allow the heavy weight of the debt to bring us to our knees..

A recession forces excruciatingly difficult choices.

Today, somewhere in America, more foreclosures. More auctions. Another farmer plots his own death. And another. There is an art to making your death by combine look like an accident.

At my lowest point, I was nearly $700,000 in debt.

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

I felt quite frankly having been raised during the depression and looking back at the roaring twenties, the jazz age, which was a very magic timer in my mind because it was something that I had missed.

As the economy unravels, as hundreds of millions of Americans confront the fact that things will not get better, life for those targeted by this culture of hate will become increasingly difficult. Rational debate will prove useless.

It is the debtor that is ruined by hard times.

I guess the best way to describe that would be to connect with the fact that I came out of college just before the big Depression, and I came to New York.

Poverty became something one could see and experience firsthand, no matter where one was on the economic ladder; it became something you could viscerally experience through the lives of friends, family, neighbors, colleagues. I'd venture to say it's a rare person in 2013 America who knows nobody who lost a job in the recession, or knows nobody whose home went underwater or who went into foreclosure.

I would certainly rather the industry not go broke, but if that's what it takes for everyone to acquire some values and lose that sense of entitlement, maybe a little belt-tightening wouldn't be so tragic.

The economy is so bad that bedbugs are now infesting sleeping bags and tents, because they can't afford to stay in hotels anymore.