Thabo Mbeki Quotes

The Depression has caused an emergency more serious than war.

I come from a country in which I experienced economic collapse.

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

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.

I've tried to get better about weighing what I think the accessibility of an idea is against the cost of executing it. I've tried to be smarter about that, because if you're not smart about that, you're going to be unemployed. But I'm still mystified about what works for people. And I'm not talking about my movies, I'm talking in general. I'm mystified by the stuff that doesn't work. I'm mystified by what's going on in the critical side, too.

We're talking about a prison-industrial complex. We're talking about a war on drugs that's generating unprecedented levels of incarcerated folk. We're talking about dilapidated housing. We're talking about joblessness and underemployment.

In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.

People would rather live in an area of poverty than in an area where there are no jobs, because if they live in poverty, they have a certain sense of hope they can get out of it. If there are no jobs, there's no hope. And bad things come from that.

What has happened to Africa is very severe. We are talking about the collapse of this and the collapse of that, of good government, of the economy particularly. And this has hit education badly. The news you get from the universities in Nigeria is often appalling. I don't think a lot of it gets out. There is the obsession with cults and all kinds of dreadful things going on and all this is taking its toll and it is not surprising that quality of students and graduates who come out is not good. It will not be surprising if this shows in the quality of work they do.

Men aren't able to find jobs anymore, and they're withdrawing from society, essentially creating a matriarchy. For the upper social classes, marriage is still a successful model, but for poorer people it's not.

We think we can't survive without deficit spending - but we soon won't be able to survive with deficit spending, either.

I'm especially baffled by the idea of taking insurance against a U.S. default. If America defaults, we're talking about a chaotic world - Mad Max, more or less - in which case, who imagines that insurance claims will be honored?

Could there be anything but widespread misery, where a privileged few controlled a nation's wealth, while millions labored for a pittance, and millions more were desperate for want of employment?

It's a different kind of economic recovery. The kind where bankers steal trillions and you don't have a job.

The President [Barack Obama], I think if you look at it from his shoes, you know, was facing a very difficult situation where he had to own Washington, tame New York, save a collapsing economy, with a collapsed financial system. He moved, I think, to a team that he felt was tried and true, in terms of dealing with financial crisis. That was his decision.

I can't pay my [bills]. I can't go to work. My car is out of gas.

The IMF economists were doubtless shaken by the extreme failures of their prescriptions over many years, and by the collapse of the intellectual edifice of economic theory on which they were relying.

What do you think this very difficult situation will push? Especially in the hearts of those who are facing the starvation, facing the unemployment, facing this siege, facing the tragedy of their families - the poverty of their families. Some of them, they didn't find food to eat. What do you expect from them? In spite of death, our people are still patient. But patience has limits.

I was about to move out of my apartment because I was so broke. I'd sort of made a pact with myself that I wouldn't take a job unless it was interesting to me, and I became broke very fast.

The Great Depression was going on, so that the station and the streets teemed with homeless people, just as they do today. The newspapers were full of stories of worker layoffs and farm foreclosures and bank failures, just as they are today. All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War.

Once I saw a homeless man wearing his underwear on top of his pants. Now we say, why don't the homeless just go out and get a job? If he's wearing his underwear on top of his pants, I doubt his resume is in order, and I don't think he's going to make it too far in the interview process. In fact, I'm pretty sure that McDonald's has a no underwear over your pant policy.

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.

The presently existing global financial and monetary system will disintegrate during the near term. The collapse might occur this spring, or summer, or next autumn; it could come next year; it will almost certainly occur during President William Clinton's first term in office; it will occur soon. That collapse into disintegration is inevitable, because it could not be stopped now by anything but the politically improbable decision by leading governments to put the relevant financial and monetary institutions into bankruptcy reorganization.

We've learned our lesson with finance because they made a huge goddamn explosion that almost shut down the world. But the thing I realized is that there might never be an explosion on the scale of the financial crisis happening with big data.