Tony Bennett Quotes

We were so poor that my mother would often leave me in a foster home until she could raise enough money to rent rooms for us.

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

It's really hard to be poor in New York - I was really poor when I lived in New York.

People who didn't know the depression just don't know what being poor means.

I've lived in poverty.

I was having trouble making ends meet, and my beginnings weren't meeting either.

I had a low image of myself because I was brought up in the deep Depression.

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.

If you were out of a job and your kid needed diapers and your husband just left you, you would be so confused.

When I was growing up, my family was so poor we couldn't afford to pay attention.

Like everyone, I am formed by my background, and mine was - well, we didn't have a lot of money. I didn't live in a cardboard box, but I did live in a place where, at the end of the week, the money was gone.

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.

I grew up in poverty. For 25 years I was fed on aid.

I have always had a horror and detestation of poverty.

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.

l had a job, and if you had a job in the depression you were rich.

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?

I was very poor when I was young.

I started when I was 39 as a cabinet secretary, and so I feel like I have lived an experience in my life where I can relate to families that struggle, and are scraping by and scrounging.

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.

I grew up in New York City during the Depression. My earliest recollections were of my parents talking about what they would do if they didn't have the rent money. Luckily, we were never evicted. But my father was unemployed most of the time.

There were times when I couldn't even buy a loaf of bread.

I was working maybe four different jobs just to make ends meet. I was really broke. I could barely pay rent. I didn't have a car. I was riding my bike from one job to another and then to audition in between.

I can go back to poverty if a situation comes. I have sailed through the worst days of my life, and I am prepared for any crisis.

My dad was a civil servant before he retired, and my mum worked, too. We could not always get three meals in a day; sometimes we'd struggle.