Heber J. Grant Quotes

Every day it seems more likely that we are destined - or should one say doomed? - to replay the disastrous economic history of the 1930s.

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

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

Within a few months in 2008, household finances were crushed as asset values fell, millions of jobs were lost, countless credit cards were canceled, and thousands of homes were foreclosed on.

Unemployment is sky-rocketing; deflation is in our future for the first time since the Great Depression. I don't care whose fault it is, it's the truth.

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.

Two months ago we were facing serious problems. The country was dying by inches. It was dying because trade and commerce had declined to dangerously low levels; prices for basic commodities were such as to destroy the value of the assets of national institutions such as banks, savings banks, insurance companies, and others. These institutions, because of their great needs, were foreclosing mortgages, calling loans, refusing credit. Thus there was actually in process of destruction the property of millions of people.

I have 13 bankers in my office, and they say that if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II.

Massive runs on short-term debt helped trigger the Great Recession.

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.

The only surprise about the economic crisis of 2008 was that it came as a surprise to so many.

It was a lack of system that made the '30s Depression as inevitable as all others previously suffered.

Debates go on to this day about what caused the Great Depression. Economics is not very good at explaining swings in economic activity.

The Depression was an incredibly dramatic episode - an era of stock-market crashes, breadlines, bank runs and wild currency speculation, with the storm clouds of war gathering ominously in the background... For my money, few periods are so replete with human interest.

The reality for us in America is that we will never get out of debt with more than 15 million people out of work.

At many points during our nation's history, there have been times - known in our history textbooks as 'panics' - when adverse conditions affecting the financial and economic sectors of the country have caused individuals to hoard more than they need.

The financial crisis that began in the summer of 2007 was an extraordinarily complex event with multiple causes.

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.

The bankers of the country are more to blame than are any other group for the present depression.

The Depression has caused an emergency more serious than war.

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

I've lived through the Great Depression.

Every serious deflation I've looked at is preceded by an asset bubble, and then it bursts.

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 have to take it seriously that the economy is in crisis.