Great Depression Quotes

“When I was young
I wanted to be just like him.
One of the charm, of a bright orange smile
and muscular laughter.
Bold brown eyes flashing fearless
when he sat not alone
on cold blue nights
in empty boxcars.

Riding a freight train's
solitary wail
away from Nebraska
Depression, accompanying dreams
withered farms.
Nothing left but the
leaves of possibilities.”
― Larsen Bowker

“On summer nights when the windows are open, you can listen in on people's lives—babies crying, kids laughing, radios blaring, mothers yelling, couples fighting. Funny thing is, the sounds are always the same. Even though different people come and go, the sounds stay the same. I like that. It makes me feel a part of something big, something never ending, like the stars.”
― Jackie French Koller, Nothing to Fear

“I looked over at the empty, black windows of the Whites' apartment, windows that were warm and yellow just yesterday, and I shivered.”
― Jackie French Koller, Nothing to Fear

“Yet history tells us that a deep financial and economic crisis has never occurred without a prior agrarian crisis, which tends to last even after the financial crisis abates. Consider the great depression of the inter-war period: it started not in 1929 as the conventional dating would have it, but years earlier from 1924–25 when global primary product prices started steadily falling. The reasons for this, in turn, were tied up with the dislocation of production in the belligerent countries during the war of inter-imperialist rivalry, the First World War of 1914–18. With the sharp decline in agricultural output in war-torn Europe there was expansion in agricultural output elsewhere which, with European recovery after the war, meant over-production relative to the lagging growth of mass incomes and of demand in the countries concerned. The downward pressure on global agricultural prices was so severe and prolonged that it led to the trade balances of major producing countries going into the red.”
― Utsa Patnaik, The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry

“I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn't particularly want money. I didn't know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn't have to do anything. The thought of being something didn't only appall me, it sickened me. The thought of being a lawyer or a councilman or an engineer, anything like that, seemed impossible to me. To get married, to have children, to get trapped in the family structure. To go someplace to work every day and to return. It was impossible. To do things, simple things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor, Mother's Day . . . was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep.

My father had a master plan. He told me, "My son, each man during his lifetime should buy a house. Finally he dies and leaves that house to his son. Then his son gets his own house and dies, leaves both houses to his son. That's two houses. That son gets his own house, that's three houses . . ."

The family structure. Victory over adversity through the family. He believed in it. Take the family, mix with God and Country, add the ten-hour day and you had what was needed.

I looked at my father, at his hands, his face, his eyebrows, and I knew that this man had nothing to do with me. He was a stranger. My mother was non-existent. I was cursed. Looking at my father I saw nothing but indecent dullness. Worse, he was even more afraid to fail than most others. Centuries of peasant blood and peasant training. The Chinaski bloodline had been thinned by a series of peasant-servants who had surrendered their real lives for fractional and illusionary gains. Not a man in line who said, "I don't want a house, I want a thousand houses, now!"

He had sent me to that rich high school hoping that the ruler's attitude would rub off on me as I watched the rich boys screech up in their cream-colored coupes and pick up the girls in bright dresses. Instead I learned that the poor usually stay poor. That the young rich smell the stink of the poor and learn to find it a bit amusing. They had to laugh, otherwise it would be too terrifying. They'd learned that, through the centuries. I would never forgive the girls for getting into those cream-colored coupes with the laughing boys. They couldn't help it, of course, yet you always think, maybe . . . But no, there weren't any maybes. Wealth meant victory and victory was the only reality.

What woman chooses to live with a dishwasher?”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham On Rye

“Funny thing is, the sounds are always the same. Even though different people come and go, the sounds stay the same.”
― Jackie French Koller, Nothing to Fear

“Experts say that the movie King Kong (1933) released the pent-up rage of the Great Depression. Well, COVID-19 Halloween displays could do the same for our feelings about the 2020 lockdown.”
― Stewart Stafford

“There were occasional dances at the main prison compound with live bands as well as holiday dinners, activities that Blanche greatly enjoyed. In her scrapbooks, she placed an autographed promotional photograph of one visiting band, The Rural Ramblers. ...
Blanche loved to dance and by all accounts she was very good at it. She applied to a correspondence course in dancing that came complete with diagrams of select dance steps to place on the floor and practice. She also cut similar dance instructions and diagrams from newspapers and magazines and put them in her scrapbooks. By 1937, she had mastered popular dances like jitterbug, rumba, samba, and tango.
The men’s prison, or “the big prison” as the women called it, hosted movies on Friday nights. Features like Roll Along Cowboy ... were standard, usually accompanied by some short musical feature such as Who’s Who and a newsreel. The admission was five cents. Blanche attended many of these movies. She loved movies all of her life.
Blanche Barrow’s periodic visits to the main prison allowed her to fraternize with males. She apparently had a brief encounter with “the boy in the warden’s office” in the fall of 1934. There are few details, but their relationship was evidently ended abruptly by prison officials in December.
There were other suitors, some from Blanche Barrow’s past, and some late arrivals...”
― John Neal Phillips, My Life with Bonnie and Clyde

“It was the influence of the Great Depression, recycling, thriftiness, stocking up to the point of hoarding for fear of being without. ... She [Rhea Leen] remembered coming home from school before Jean [Billie Jean Parker] got off work to a cold, empty house, and finding only one can of soup in the cupboard, heating the soup and eating only half of it, saving the rest for he aunt. Rather remembered ... when her father took a job as a janitor because his savings had been wiped out in the crash of 1929 and there were no other jobs. He always distrusted banks thereafter, refusing to do business with them, preferring to bury his money in the yard. He was not alone.”
― John Neal Phillips, My Life with Bonnie and Clyde

“[At Eastham, probably after sexual abuse]: In Barrow's own words to Fults, 'I'd like to shoot all these damned guards and turn everybody loose.' Fults, initially unimpressed by the diminutive Barrow, later noted the change he witnessed. 'I seen him change from a schoolboy to a rattlesnake. He got real bitter.' ... This is echoed by members of the Barrow family who noted a distinct difference in Barrow's personality after his 1932 parole. According to his sister Marie, 'Something awful sure must have happened to him in prison, because he wasn't the same person when he got out.”
― John Neal Phillips, My Life with Bonnie and Clyde

“[W.D.] Jones later commented that people frequently helped them, 'Not because it was Bonnie and Clyde. People in them days just helped—no questions asked.”
― John Neal Phillips, My Life with Bonnie and Clyde

“This is just a short path we walkin'. The long road, the good road, lies ahead. And when we get there, you can count on one thing. Folks like Miss Emily that has spent this life lookin' down is sure 'nough gonna spend all eternity lookin' up.”
― Jackie French Koller, Nothing to Fear

“Above all, wealth was no longer to be flaunted. While an ostentatious displays of money might have been de rigueur in the Golden Twenties, it was decidedly out of fashion in the desperate days of the Destitute Thirties.

The splashy parties the socialite once gave and attended in the twenties in New York and Palm Beach now dwindled to a trickle and were replaced with charity teas, and fund raisers.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post

“Fear is historically the strongest emotion in economics. Remember FDR in the Great Depression? It's the most famous quote in financial history: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." In fact fear is probably the strongest human emotion, period. Who ever woke up at four in the morning because they were feeling half?”
― Robert Harris

“Depression, a lot like the Great Depression of the ’20s-’30s, has people swirling for quite a time in their own created labyrinths.”
― Sijdah Hussain, Red Sugar, No More

“Outside, the sweet smell of freshly cut alfalfa hay was a welcome change from the odours of sweat and cheap cologne on the dance floor.”
― Diana Stevan, Lilacs in the Dust Bowl

“It blew with a rustling noise, as if all the demons had sprung from hell and decided to release a raspy long sigh together.”
― Diana Stevan, Lilacs in the Dust Bowl

“I was sharp and thin, a bone-faced girl like all the other bone-faced girls they printed in magazines: Here is the Great Depression. Color of dust; pale brown hair and drab, blue-gray eyes. Color of the sky on days when bad things are about to happen. Color of droughts and heat and withering things.”
― Allie Ray, Holler

“An air of malaise had spread through Café Society and quite acutely in her coterie, friends impatient to find their way to the lightness, their place in the sun. The Great Depression cast shadows on the city. The roar of the Twenties had quieted to a soulful cry of the blues.”
― Pamela L Hamilton, Lady Be Good Lib/E: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale

“Men who once were titans of business now were unrecognizable to their friends, friends that found refuge at their homes in Newport and the Gold Coast, places with vodka and rare art and pretty dresses.”
― Pamela L Hamilton, Lady Be Good Lib/E: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale

“The Great Depression cast shadows on the city. The roar of the Twenties had quieted to a soulful cry of the blues.”
― Pamela Hamilton

“An air of malaise had spread through Café Society and quite acutely in her coterie, friends impatient to find their way to the lightness, their place in the sun. The Great Depression cast shadows on the city. The roar of the Twenties had quieted to a soulful cry of the blues.”
― Pamela Hamilton, Lady Be Good: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale

“Many cherished plans have failed. Not only radio and telephone, but running water in the house, furnace heat, modern lighting and refrigeration, have all passed beyond our dreaming. Even the three-cent postage is a burden.”
― Caroline Henderson, Letters from the Dust Bowl

“The longing for rain has become almost an obsession. We remember the gentle all-night rains that used to make a grateful music on the shingles close above our heads... But we waken to another day of wind and dust and hopes deferred, of attempts to use to the utmost every small resource, to care for the stock and poultry as well as we can with our scanty supplies, to keep our balance and to trust that upon some happier day our wage may even yet come in.”
― Caroline Henderson, Letters from the Dust Bowl

“And Tracy was young, just twenty, still wet behind the ears, and the old blinders were on him so he couldn't really see what was around and he believed the bull about freedomofopportunity and a chancetorise and ifyoureallywanttoworkyoucanalwaysfindajob and ruggedindividualism and something about pursuitofhappiness.”
― Tillie Olsen

“Full-blooded democracy still remains a brave new experiment, the history of ancient Athens notwithstanding. It would be unwise to assume that its victory across the globe is inevitable, for democracy is not always a simple mode of governing. It is almost forgotten that one reason why in this century the world stood three times on the verge of chaos — during two world wars and one world depression — was that the leading democracies were almost as prone to accidents and blunders as were their authoritarian rivals.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, In Our Time: The Issues and The People of Our Century

“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.”
― Andrew Mellon

“The first thought of writing this book came to me two years ago after I had driven through the mining district of Lanarkshire. The journey took me through Hamilton, Airdrie and Motherwell. It was a warm, overcast summer day; groups of idle, sullen-looking young men stood at the street corners; smaller groups were wandering among the blue-black ranges of pit-dumps which in that region are the substitute for nature; the houses looked empty and unemployed like the tenants; and the road along which the car stumbled was pitted and rent, as if it had recently been under shell-fire. Everything had the look of a Sunday which had lasted for many years, during which the bells had forgotten to ring - a disused, slovenly everlasting Sunday.”
― Edwin Muir, Scottish Journey

“When the cinema lights go down and the movie starts, it's such a relaxing moment knowing you can get away from your problems in the real world temporarily. That's how the film business started in The Great Depression. I've always thought moviegoing was akin to voluntarily retreating into a primal red (theatres are nearly always red) womb-like area where you're fed sustenance in the dark while having surreal experiences.”
― Stewart Stafford

“(but) for many in the city, the name Hoover had become a term of abuse. Hoover blankets were the sheets of old newspapers that the homeless wrapped themselves in to keep warm, Hoover leather was the cardboard they used to cover the holes in the soles of their shoes, and Hoover flags were their empty pants pockets turned inside out— the visible proof of their destitution as they held out their hands for alms. And at night they slept in Hoovervilles— shantytowns made of cardboard, tin, and scraps of broken wood.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea