Economic Devastation Quotes

The sacrifices of our people were very great. Out of a population of one million, 28,000 were killed, 12,600 wounded, 10,000 were made political prisoners in Italy and Germany, and 35,000 made to do forced labor… all the communications, all the ports, mines and electric power installations were destroyed, our agriculture and livestock were plundered, and our entire national economy was wrecked.

Germany suffered most as a consequence of this Peace Treaty and the general insecurity which was bound to arise from it. The unemployment figure rose to a third of the number usually employed in the nation, which means, however, that by counting the families of the unemployed as well there were 26 million people in Germany out of a population of 65 millions faced by an absolutely hopeless future.

An AIG failure would have been devastating to the financial system and to the economy.

This whole theory [of John Law and Jean Terrasson], as dear to French financial schemers in the eighteenth century as to American "Greenbackers" in the nineteenth, had resulted, under the Orleans Regency and Louis XV, in ruin to France financially and morally, had culminated in the utter destruction of all prosperity, the rooting out of great numbers of the most important industries, and the grinding down of the working people even to starvation.

A war is going to destroy our economy even further. It's going to be a threefold humanitarian disaster.

We did not speak in terms of strategy, in terms of overall economies, in terms of production and territorial conquest. We spoke of the impact of the bomb on the homes and the hopes of men and women.

I covered the Lebanese civil war. I could see a place that had once been prosperous and now was impoverished. I'm not seeing that in America.

As horrific as this impact has been on my constituents, it is only a small part of the overwhelming destruction covering 90,000 square miles of the Gulf Coast.

So long as the most vulnerable people in our population are consigned to places that the rest of us will always shun and flee and view with fear, I am afraid that educational denial, medical and economic devastation, and aesthetic degradation will be inevitable.

In America, the top 1 percent led the country into war and economic devastation, leaving the less fortunate to fight for one and pay for both.

There was a brief moment, after Haiti's 2010 earthquake, when even Bill Clinton recognized what had been done to Haiti in the name of 'free trade': the destruction of local markets and rice production.

6,000 people were killed, crippled, and wounded during the War of Independence. The economy was devastated - there was no milk, just milk powder. No eggs, but egg powder. Meat was only once a week.

Never in our country's history have we witnessed a natural disaster that has impacted so many people in such a wide area. In fact, as of the writing of this column, millions of people along the Gulf Coast have been displaced from their homes in a period of only five days.

The Americans invaded a country without understanding what eight years of a war with Iran had meant, how that traumatized Iraq. They didn't appreciate what they support for a decade of sanctions in Iraq had done to Iraq and the bitterness that it created and that it wiped out the middle class.

British establishment uses "the royal we," as in, "We think this." You hear a lot of that these days. It erroneously suggests that those who are making the decisions to bomb countries, to devastate economies, to take part in acts of international piracy involve all of us.

I think that when we talk about the regulators and the politicians, the economic consequences of bad decisions back in '08, you know, were devastating, and they had repercussions throughout the world.

The toll of COVID-19 on the state of New Jersey cannot be understated.

Whole towns, communities and forms of agriculture with their homes, schools and churches have been built up under this system of protection [tariffs]. The grass will grow in a hundred cities, a thousand towns; the weeds will overrun millions of farms if that protection is taken away

A fertilizer bomb that kills hundreds in Oklahoma. Fuel-laden civil jets that kill 4000 in New York. A sanctions policy that kills one and a half million in Iraq. A trade policy that immiserates continents. You can make a bomb out of anything. The ones on paper hurt the most.

The Second World War had really devastating effects for much of Europe. It really didn't take them very long to reconstruct state capitalist democracies because it was in people's heads. There were other parts of the world that were pretty much devastated and they couldn't do it; they didn't have the conceptions in their mind. A lot of it is human consciousness.

Like Samson in the temple of the Philistines, a collapsing U.S. economy would inflict enormous, unacceptable damage on the rest of the world.

China wants to take our economic place in the world and, in doing so, will devastate our economy at the expense of our future and our families' futures.

No industry should have the capacity to inflict economic costs that may even surpass those of a world war.

There's no country in the world that's more devastated from natural resources than Afghanistan.

The poorest country in South America, Bolivia, had been devastated by neoliberal economic policies.