Welcome to our collection of Great Depression quotes, where the poignant words of individuals who lived through one of the most challenging periods in modern history are immortalized. The Great Depression, spanning from 1929 to the late 1930s, left an indelible mark on the global landscape, reshaping economies, societies, and the collective psyche of nations. It was a time of immense hardship, where unemployment soared, businesses collapsed, and families struggled to make ends meet. Yet, amidst the despair and uncertainty, emerged voices of resilience, wisdom, and reflection, encapsulating the human experience during those tumultuous years.
These quotes offer a glimpse into the emotional and psychological toll of the Great Depression, capturing the struggles, fears, and hopes of individuals grappling with unprecedented adversity. From the heartfelt words of ordinary citizens to the insights of influential leaders and thinkers, each quote serves as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity. As we delve into these profound expressions, we are reminded of the enduring lessons gleaned from one of history’s darkest chapters, inspiring us to persevere in the face of our own challenges and uncertainties. Explore the wisdom of the past and draw inspiration from the resilience of those who weathered the storm of the Great Depression. Below, you’ll find a curated selection of quotes on this topic, ready to be copied, adorned with imagery, or enhanced with stylish fonts to suit your preferences.
In the five years since the end of the Great Recession, the economy has made considerable progress in recovering from the largest and most sustained loss of employment in the United States since the Great Depression. Janet Yellen
Raised by an irresponsible mother during the Great Depression in the Jim Crow south, my father was on his own from the age of 13. Larry Elder
But despite historic levels of obstruction, President Obama was able to bring the economy back from the verge of a second Great Depression. Steny Hoyer
During the Great Depression, African Americans were faced with problems that were not unlike those experienced by the most disadvantaged groups in society. The Great Depression had a leveling effect, and all groups really experienced hard times: poor whites, poor blacks. William Julius Wilson
I think if there’s a great depression there might be some hope. Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other. Tom Brokaw
We have had a great depression in agriculture, caused mainly by several seasons of bad harvests, and some of our traders have suffered much from a too rapid extension in prosperous years. John Bright
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. Jay Carney
When I was a deacon, the ominous signs of the Great Depression began to appear. Tens of thousands lost their jobs. Money was scarce. Families had to do without. Some young people did not ask their mothers, ‘What’s for dinner?’ because they knew all too well that their cupboards held very little. Joseph B. Wirthlin
But through world wars and a Great Depression, through painful social upheaval and a Cold War, and now through the attacks of September 11, 2001, our Nation has indeed survived. Nick Rahall
The greatest generation was formed first by the Great Depression. They shared everything – meals, jobs, clothing. Tom Brokaw
Hoovers didn’t like Democrats because of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s libelous partisan attacks on my great-grandfather Herbert Hoover, tethering him to the Great Depression. Margaret Hoover
Herbert Hoover failed through no fault of his own. The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression were beyond his control, and every remedy he tried failed adequately to work. Pat Buchanan
When someone takes their existing business and tries to transform it into something else – they fail. In technology that is often the case. Look at Kodak: it was the dominant imaging company in the world. They did fabulously during the great depression, but then wiped out the shareholders because of technological change. Charlie Munger
‘Rainwater’ was particularly special because it was a complete departure from the suspense novels. It’s set in the Great Depression and based on an incident that occurred when my dad was a boy. Sandra Brown
Recovery measures work better when they raise confidence – as Franklin D. Roosevelt understood. His fireside chats, and his inaugural address proclaiming he would fight the Great Depression with the same resolve he would muster against a foreign foe, were aimed at reassuring Americans. Christina Romer
Although I was not aware of it at the time, the experience of growing up during the Great Depression was to have a profound impact on my intellectual and professional career. Lawrence R. Klein
The Great Depression, they come out with the New Deal, black people didn’t have access to those government stimulus packages. The New Deal set up what is known as the modern-day middle class. We didn’t have access to programs – the G.I. Bill, Social Security, home loans – none of that. Eric Reid
My parents had become adults during the Great Depression, as had many of my aunts and uncles, so I got stories from all of them. They are fastened up inside me, and now and again, they have to come out. Joe R. Lansdale
Oh, sure, we have another world war coming, and another great depression, but where are the leaders this time? Kurt Vonnegut
We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don’t care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it’s the worst recovery since the Great Depression. Arthur Laffer
Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives. Chuck Palahniuk
My mother lived through the Great Depression. Her family of 11 children pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and moved to wherever there was work at the time. And in rural Oklahoma, that wasn’t easy to find. Chuck Norris
During the Great Depression, when people laughed their worries disappeared. Audiences loved these funny men. I decided to become one. Jerry Stiller
After the Great Depression and after public urging, a nationwide public competition was held to determine a design for a memorial that would honor President Thomas Jefferson’s bold vision for westward expansion for America. Russ Carnahan
My grandfather was a wealthy and respected merchant in Montclair, New Jersey, where I was born. But his estate was wiped out in the Great Depression, and as a result, I had what I consider the ideal upbringing: We were a proud family, good citizens, and we didn’t have a sou. John C. Bogle
The Great Depression of the 1930s saw more American unmarried women working from nine to five, mostly in repetitive, boring, subordinate, dead-end jobs. But the number of working women doubled between 1870 and 1940. During World War II it doubled once again. Helen Fisher
Franklin Delano Roosevelt eventually became the greatest liberal leader of 20th century United States, but he started as a fiscal conservative. His greatness is founded in his willingness to change his mind to save his country from the Great Depression. Abhijit Banerjee
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. Elizabeth Warren
I was born January 6, 1937, eight years after Wall Street crashed and two years before John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the plight of a family during the Great Depression. Lou Holtz
America has always built ourselves out of adversity. All the way back to the Great Depression. Jim Gray
I was born in Chicago in 1927, the only child of Morris and Mildred Markowitz, who owned a small grocery store. We lived in a nice apartment, always had enough to eat, and I had my own room. I never was aware of the Great Depression. Harry Markowitz
Out of the ashes of the Great War came the freewheeling cultural renaissance that was the Jazz Age, but the decade-long party of flapper dresses and bootlegging came to a crashing halt with the Crash of ’29 – triggering the Great Depression and the New Deal that would help America get back on its feet, just in time for another, greater war. Sarah Weinman
When I was in high school, I used to have breakfast with my grandpa every morning. He instilled a lot of values in me: hard work, loyalty. He grew up during the Great Depression in Philly in poverty – he didn’t have enough to eat as a kid. Sometimes his family would get kicked out of their apartment because they couldn’t pay the rent. Matthew Quick
On both sides of my family, my grandparents grew up in total poverty and came to California during the Great Depression. The only way they were able to work their way out of that was by joining the military, which is how they both went on to be able to go to college. Katie Hill
The miserable failures of capitalist economies in the Great Depression were root causes of worldwide social and political disasters. James Tobin
Americans who have parents raised during the Great Depression or World War II understand how drastically things have changed on the home front. My father did not care a whit whether I liked him, and it would have been unthinkable for him to pick up my stuff. There were rules in the house, and they were enforced. Bill O’Reilly
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. Ben Bernanke
I think what happened during the Great Depression was that African Americans understood that Republicans championed citizenship and voting rights but they became impatient for economic emancipation. Rand Paul
As we learned after President Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff at the outset of the Great Depression, vibrant international trade is a key component to economic recovery; hindering trade is a recipe for disaster. Asa Hutchinson
As far as I can find, almost no one in the profession – not even luminaries like John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, or Irving Fisher – made public statements anticipating the Great Depression. Robert J. Shiller
DiMaggio was never a rube. He was very smart and very urban. Coming out of the Great Depression, he was the immigrant boy who made it big. Coming back from World War II, he had all the wealth and power that New York aspired to. When New York saw itself as the center of the world, he was its paragon of class. Richard Ben Cramer
The 24% unemployment reached at the depths of the Great Depression was no picnic. Barry Eichengreen
I can’t dismiss my roots as a kid growing up during the Great Depression in the ordinary midwestern town of Grand Rapids, Michigan. From the standpoint of money and material possessions, we were barely scraping by. Richard M. DeVos
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. Alexi Giannoulias
If you had asked people in 1929, ‘Here is what is about to happen. How much would you pay to avoid the Great Depression from occurring?’ The answer is they would have paid a lot. They would have borrowed money if it could be used to prevent the Great Depression. Austan Goolsbee
Indeed, the FHA was born out of the Great Depression, which was also caused in significant part by a foreclosure crisis. Mortgages in the early 1930s were mostly three- to five-year ‘bullet’ loans, which did not amortize and were due in full at maturity. Mark Zandi
Hank Paulson, the happy capitalist warrior who spent his life pursuing and defending free markets, is now the biggest interventionist Treasury secretary we’ve had since the Great Depression. Charles Duhigg
‘Up in the Air’ may be a glossy production sprinkled with laughter and sex, but it captures the distinctive topography of our Great Recession as vividly as a far more dour Hollywood product of 70 years ago, ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ did the vastly different landscape of the Great Depression. Frank Rich
The trade deficit always goes up when the economy is strong and plummets when the economy sinks, as it did during both the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2008-09. Stephen Moore
I was born illegitimately and almost immediately, as I understand it, placed in an orphanage. So my very earliest memories were in an orphanage. It was the tag end of the Great Depression when I was born. People were desperately poor. Bryce Courtenay
The most striking development of the great depression of 1929 is a profound skepticism of the future of contemporary society among large sections of the American people. C. L. R. James
In the middle of the Great Depression, George Jenkins, Jr. left his job at a grocery store and decided he would open up his own store. I am sure many people thought Mr. Jenkins was crazy, but he had a dream. Today, his chain of stores employs 127,000 Floridians and is the largest employee-owned company in the country. We know it as Publix. Rick Scott
Debates go on to this day about what caused the Great Depression. Economics is not very good at explaining swings in economic activity. Eugene Fama
During the Great Depression, levels of crime actually dropped. During the 1920s, when life was free and easy, so was crime. During the 1930s, when the entire American economy fell into a government-owned alligator moat, crime was nearly non-existent. During the 1950s and 1960s, when the economy was excellent, crime rose again. Ben Shapiro
If you look at the Greek economic record, it’s been very similar to the U.S. experience in the first four years of the Great Depression. And after having a Depression-sized event, they’ve cut the unit-labor cost in Greece – they’ve closed something like half the gap with Germany. Austan Goolsbee
Market capitalism survived and prospered after the boom-bust industrial revolution of the 19th century, and the Great Depression and world wars of the 20th century. It will recover from the financial panic of 2008-09 and Obamanomics. Mark Skousen
We were growing up in West Virginia. Everybody was poor there in the southern part of the state. It was like growing up in the Great Depression from the stories I hear people tell. Everybody was poor and so we didn’t know that we were any different from anybody else. James Green Somerville
In the midst of the pain and panic of the Great Depression, as many as 2 million people of Mexican descent were expelled from the United States. Naomi Klein
My professional apprenticeship at Iowa State College from 1930 to 1943 could not have been better; the Great Depression made it so, and the talented younger economists at Ames during that period made it an exciting and profitable intellectual experience. Theodore Schultz
I am obsessed with the Great Depression and with former showgirls – and the Victorians – the idea of wistful, dark romance. Karen Elson
This crisis of long-term unemployment is having a profoundly damaging impact on the lives of those bearing the brunt of it. We know this thanks to a series of careful studies of the problem conducted in the depths of the 1930s Great Depression. Barry Eichengreen
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. Bill O’Reilly
I feel like I went through the Great Depression. All these companies are being successful around you, you’re on that track, and then the market collapses, and you’re out of a job. You’re trying to save your investors’ investment, and it doesn’t work, and you sell the company for nothing. It was brutal. Nick Woodman
There was so much going on in 1936 with the height of the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War and Germany on the move and all of those things. There was a tension in the air. Matt Bomer
The singer-songwriter has always played music that was stylistically rooted in the ’30s and the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. But the fact of the matter is that none of us remember the Depression firsthand. Steve Earle
The minimum wage is something that F.D.R. put in place a long time ago during the Great Depression. I don’t think it worked then. It didn’t solve any problems then and it hasn’t solved any problems in 50 years. John Raese
I got a job in advertising. So even though I was writing, I was always supporting myself. That’s the thing that would matter for my father, who was absolutely a creature of the Great Depression. Peter Carey
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. Tom Brokaw
In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they’d never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy. James Surowiecki
‘The Little Rascals’ was set against the background of the Great Depression: the characters were living in poverty. It’s just that it wasn’t focused on it. It was focused on what makes childhood universal. We’re all laughing at kids because we see ourselves in them; we remember our childhood. Sean Baker
My parents survived the Great Depression and brought me up to live within my means, save some for tomorrow, share and don’t be greedy, work hard for the necessities in life knowing that money does not make you better or more important than anyone else. So, extravagance has been bred out of my DNA. David Suzuki
I did not throw out my education lightly, but what I was being taught was of no use in explaining what I saw around me. It was the Great Depression. Paul Samuelson
It took capitalism half a century to come back from the Great Depression. Ben Shapiro
You could argue that Barack Obama faced in ’08 a situation as bad as any president since the Great Depression. What Obama inherited from the Bush administration, we all remember, was just an absolute global catastrophe. Tony Kushner
The movies saved my life. I grew up in the great depression, the only child of a pair of star crossed lovers. My father lost his job. My mother drank. They fought. The movies were my escape. Orson Bean
We certainly had an upheaval at the start of the Great Depression, and that resulted in a lot of financial reform, but it wasn’t done in one stroke, and it wasn’t done immediately. The Depression was in 1929 and resulted in the Securities and Exchange Act of ’33, ’34, ’35, ’37, ’39, and ’41. Lloyd Blankfein
World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man. Jon Meacham
In 2013, I went through a really great depression. Israel Adesanya
My parents, products of the Great Depression, were successful people, but lived in a state of constant fear that my sister and I, and they, would sink into the kind of economic insecurity that their generation knew so well. Ben Stein
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. John Mellencamp
In his first term, President Barack Obama played a cautious manager navigating the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression and cleaning up the messes left by President George W. Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kevin O’Leary
Everything I learned about the Great Depression was from a college textbook. Ralph Abernathy
What I find so interesting is, Herbert Hoover in August 1928 said no country in the world was closer to abolishing poverty than the United States. And then, of course, we had the Great Depression. Robert Dallek
Facts are facts: No president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Great Depression inherited a worse economy, bigger job losses or deeper problems from his predecessor. But President Obama is moving America forward, not back. Martin O’Malley
If we go back to the birth of ‘Superman’ and ‘Batman’ in America in the ’30s, they were created because of events like the Great Depression, crime and Al Capone, among others. Everybody was corrupt back then, and if you can’t have a hero in real life, it helps to have one in your fantasies. Vikramaditya Motwane
I am, as it happens, a baby boomer, but not one who feels any broad-gauge nostalgia for the ’60s and ’70s. My attitude resembles that of my parents, who were born in the ’20s and lived through the Great Depression and World War II. Terry Teachout
Consider trade protectionism. It’s been tried – and found wanting – since the Great Depression. Elaine Chao
I grew up in the Great Depression, and the jazz artists and Dixieland musicians were at the core of our communications and enjoyment. They were not passing fancies. They are something that is, and will be, listened to again and again. I have a space of reverence for some of those old jazz stars such as Sydney Bechet and Louis Armstrong. Harry Belafonte
In the Great Depression, you bought something if you had the cash to buy it. S. Truett Cathy
We are a resilient country. We’ve been through a Civil War; we’ve been through two World Wars. We’ve been through a Great Depression; we even made it through Jimmy Carter! We will make it through the Obama years! Rick Perry
Men and women whose early youth was shaped in the ordeal of the Great Depression showed the values formed in that crucible when tyranny threatened a world. Steve Buyer
As a young man, I lived through the Great Depression, when banks failed and so many lost their jobs and homes and went hungry. I was fortunate to have a job at a canning factory that paid 25 cents an hour. James E. Faust
Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression. James Surowiecki
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. Kathi Appelt
In the Great Depression, employment and investment were low because labor market institutions and industrial polices changed. Edward C. Prescott
After clearing the land, planting the orchard, building the house and barn, and surviving the Great Depression, our father died suddenly one winter night when we were small, leaving us to learn about loss before we even knew its name. Virginia Euwer Wolff
From a generation that came of age during the Great Depression, millions of our country’s best and bravest took up arms in a worldwide struggle against tyranny. Steve Buyer
In his first year in office, President Obama pulled us back from the brink of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression and worked to lay a new foundation for economic growth. The president identified three key strategies to build that lasting prosperity: innovation, investment, and education. Tom Vilsack
I grew up in an era of pretty severe poverty. My parents weathered the Great Depression, and money was always a very big concern. I was weaned on a shortage mentality and placed in foster homes largely because there simply wasn’t enough money to take care of the most basic of needs. Wayne Dyer