Economic Hardship Quotes

Our time of trouble is because we have not paid good attention to the Messenger of God that He raised among us to warn us of the days that we are now witnessing; days when factories closed and long lines of persons looking for a job. He asked us to get up and do something for ourselves before we were forced to do it. Unfortunately we did not listen.

The Bank is trying to kill me, but I shall kill it.

The hopes of Europe's six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked, 'Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?' I replied, 'No'....From the depths of the tragedy I want to save two million young people...The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They were dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world...Only the branch of the young shall survive...They have to accept it.

There was years when my father didn't even make a hundred grand - or barely made a hundred grand - and sure, we had a maid, but she only came twice a week. What do you think happened the other five days? You think those dishes washed themselves? You think those clothes got themselves in the hamper?

I have made no money. I am as poor now as ever I was in my life - except in hope, which is by no means bankable.

My father died when I was 14, and my mother juggled two jobs so she could make sure my sister and I were OK.

A recession is when a neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.

In really bad times, the hungriest would gather at his door at nightfall, vying for the chance to earn a few coins to feed their families by selling their bodies. Had I been older when my father died, I might have been among them. Instead I learned to hunt.

I think the one advantage to a failed - recovering, but a pretty broken - economy, and a lot of broken promises, is that we've pulled the veils from our eyes way earlier than most people do, and realize "Hey, you know what, maybe I should try do this thing that I really care about, and why not spend the time now during my best years to get into knitting, or coding, or swamp boat sailing." And there's this resource called the Internet that's going to provide you with a stage and a library for all of those things.

Frankly that's what makes such a big difference between President Obama on one hand and Mitt Romney on the other. Gov. Romney has not walked in those shoes of the ordinary Americans and frankly I don't think he has the capacity to quite understand the struggle that the 98 percent of Americans go through every single day.

I never felt the Great Depression firsthand. I learned about it at Harvard.

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.

Nobody who works 40 hours a week should be living in poverty.

Not only do I have to live, right, I have to get some cash for my troubles - it's a scary thing, and people need to start to think about the messages that they send in the movies.

We have caused them to be barren and unemployed though each of them had been working and qualified in a trade from which he could make a living.

My parents were working class folks. My dad was a bartender for most of his life, my mom was a maid and a cashier and a stock clerk at WalMart. We were not people of financial means in terms of significant financial means. I always told them, 'I didn't always have what I wanted. I always had what I needed.' My parents always provided that.

Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-man is always just below political awareness. A strike is a catastrophe for him because it threatens a man truly blinded by his hunger; this man achieves an awareness of the working-class condition only when the poor man and the proletarian coincide under the gaze (and the blows) of the police.

I've lived in so many different towns - Guttenberg, Union City, West New York, Jersey City. We didn't have a lot of money, and we'd get kicked out of places a lot.

Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.

When our jewellery business went into receivership we avoided bankruptcy by selling our houses and possessions.

The American farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything he buys at retail, sells everything he sells at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways.

I don't think people who are already burdened with social, economic, psychological situations, dysfunctional families, need to be burdened with other people with the same problems.

… there are a great many people who not only can make no budget but can barely manage to exist with their families on what they earn from day to day

The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits - food stamps, housing subsidies and the like - if their income goes up.

Tough times call for tougher decisions.