These recession quotes will inspire you. In economics, a recession is a business cycle contraction when there is a general decline in economic activity.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging recession quotes, recession sayings, and recession proverbs.
Best Recession Quotes
- “A recession is very bad for publicly traded companies, but it’s the best time for startups. When you have massive layoffs, there’s more competition for available jobs, which means that an entrepreneur can hire freelancers at a lower cost.” ~ Tim Ferriss
- “You get recessions, you have stock market declines. If you don’t understand that’s going to happen, then you’re not ready, you won’t do well in the markets.” ~ Peter Lynch
- “So I think the winners in recession are the people who produce new technology that does things better, which people really want.” ~ James Dyson
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“The quality of our journalism will make or break our industry, not the recession.” ~ Rebekah Brooks
- “In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.” ~ Warren Buffett
- “Let’s stop for a second and remember where we were eight years ago [in 2008]. We had the worst financial crisis, the Great Recession, the worst since the 1930s. That was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm.” ~ Hillary Clinton
- “In an economic recession, naturally, when you ask people to list their priorities, they’re going to place a higher priority on the immediate economic situation.” ~ Al Gore , Economic recession quotes
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“In this time of recession, it is the time for invention. Did you know both the telephone and the automobile were invented during recessions? So was ‘talking dirty.'” ~ Eugene Mirman
- “Many Americans are feeling, you know, shut out, shut down, the great recession hasn’t ended for too many Americans, wages are flat, families are struggling, not enough new jobs, or new businesses are being created, and it’s important that we all try to figure out what we’re going to do, and that’s what I’ve done my entire life, fighting for a higher minimum wage, or family leave, now paid family leave which I believe in, equal pay for equal work.” ~ Hillary Clinton
- “If the question is, how do we best produce business people who can succeed in the post-Great Recession era, then I think the MBA programs and their connection to large companies remains intact but it’s not the path to a “Business Brilliant” life. It’s a path to a middle-class existence marked by large stretches of security and comfort with occasional eruptions that you’re probably ill-prepared to handle. Do I sound too cynical?” ~ Lewis Schiff
- “Rising unemployment and the recession have been the price that we have had to pay to get inflation down. That price is well worth paying.” ~ Norman Lamont
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“The fact is, there are Fortune 500 companies that have been founded during recessions.” ~ Marianne Williamson
- “Studying the martial Way is like climbing a cliff: keep going forward without rest. Resting is not permissible because it causes recessions to old adages of achievement. Persevering day in, day out improves techniques, but resting one day causes lapses. This must be prevented.” ~ Mas Oyama
- “Even when [Federal Reserve Chairman Ben] Bernanke said the recession was over … you think that would have been a bigger boom somewhere, but it seems we just take everything in stride.” ~ Bill Maher
- “Successful people save in prosperous times so they have a financial cushion in times of recession.” ~ Brian Tracy
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“I believe strongly that we need a finance industry that is good for the economy, and I don’t think anybody would argue that during the eight years leading up to the Great Recession, a lot of bets were made [and] risks taken that weren’t good for the economy.” ~ Hillary Clinton
- “This crisis is not simply a more severe version of the usual business cycle recession, the typical downturn in which economies ultimately adjust and stabilize.” ~ Timothy Geithner
- “If there’s a severe recession, the automatic stabilizers will come into effect, and we will still try to reduce the structural deficit, but we will not try to keep cutting the budget so that we keep worsening a severe recession.” ~ Franklin Raines
- “We spent $100 billion on education, saving the education system 300,000 teachers who were laid off because of the recession. We also put tens of thousands of lower income kids in college through Pell grants which has fundamentally all their opportunity. We did the same thing with regard to what we did on transportation. So we weren’t just trying to – we knew we had to do something big to keep us from going over the cliff into a depression and pull us out of hole.” ~ Joe Biden
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“You’ve heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession.” ~ Phil Gramm
- “My big “double-aha” moment came while anchoring the national news at CBS News. It was at the height of the recession, and on top of the usual negative stories, my newscasts became full of especially heart wrenching stories of people losing their homes, jobs, and retirement savings. Starting the morning off like that could leave even the most optimistic person feeling helpless and hopeless. The lightning bolt came when we changed how we talked about the negative.” ~ Michelle Gielan
- “People think of a business cycle, which is a boom followed by a recession and then automatic stabilizers revive the economy. But this time we can’t revive. The reason is that every recovery since 1945 has begun with a higher, and higher level of debt. The debt is so high now, that since 2008 we’ve been in what I call, debt deflation.” ~ Michael Hudson
- “[The immigrant] becomes a kind of insurance policy against the effects of the recession. By blaming him, the pressure valve is regulated in times of crisis … What we have now is a public mindset of us versus them, and an overall anti-immigrant climate that is both troubling and morally reprehensible.” ~ Andrew Lam
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“There may be a recession in stock prices, but not anything in the nature of a crash.” ~ Irving Fisher
- “We haven’t had a recession for 25 years in Australia. It’s partly because of our trade with China. China’s been doing relatively well. So some of the tensions around a low-wage economy haven’t quite happened here in the same way as they have in the United States.” ~ Richard Glover
- “We haven’t had a recession for 25 years in Australia. It’s partly because of our trade with China.” ~ Richard Glover
- “Even though the play [ The Best Man] was written a long time ago, the characters seem modern and their struggles to make ends meet and to “have a little fun along the way” have a very contemporary feel. The similarity between the The Great Depression and The Great Recession – as well as the gulf between the super-rich and the ordinary Joe – still rings a bell. One of the things this production accentuates is how beautifully Grandpa and his family accept all kinds of people – rich or poor, black or white – and the best thing that can happen to you is to be part of a loving family.” ~ Chris Hart
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“I think it will get moving faster. I mean once you get it off the – once credit flows – now the recession is going to get worse.” ~ Warren Buffett
- “Independent experts have looked at what I’ve proposed and looked at what Donald’s [Trump] proposed, and basically they’ve said this, that if his tax plan, which would blow up the debt by over $5 trillion and would in some instances disadvantage middle-class families compared to the wealthy, were to go into effect, we would lose 3.5 million jobs and maybe have another recession.” ~ Hillary Clinton
- “We’ve been in a recession, by any common sense definition, because if you look at the American public, they’ve got 20 billion – 20 trillion, I should say, worth of residential homes.” ~ Warren Buffett
- “I finished VCA at the height of the last big recession in the early 90s, and seeing that I was not going to be able to join one of the dwindling number of commercial galleries, I started an ARI called the Basement Project which ran for three years. Things came a little at a time and all of a sudden it’s 20 years later and I’m still making art, which is really all I ever wanted to do.” ~ Patricia Piccinini
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“Most of the gains in the last years since the Great Recession have gone to the very top. So we are going to have the wealthy pay their fair share. We’re going to have corporations make a contribution greater than they are now to America.” ~ Hillary Clinton
- “In other words: we can fight pollution and poverty at the same time, with the same method. We can beat global warming and the global recession at the same time, with the same method. We can do this by putting people to work re-powering America with clean energy.” ~ Van Jones
- “Donald Trump would send us back into recession with his tax plans that benefit the wealthiest of Americans.” ~ Hillary Clinton
- “I think it’s been unfortunate, but it’s happened, that since the Great Recession, the gains have all gone to the top. And we need to reverse that.” ~ Hillary Clinton
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“How is it having more control if we have a recession as the Bank of England and IFS say?” ~ Sadiq Khan
- “What I do believe absolutely is that in the middle of a recession, the American middle class and working class needs a tax relief.” ~ Bernie Sanders
- “Increased revenues, meaning higher taxes, will be a central element of any successful long-term budget plan, and President Obama is right to insist that the wealthy – the slice of America that has come through the recession in by far the best financial health – should provide those funds.” ~ Steven Rattner
- “Our first goal is to stop the recession and start with recovery.” ~ Antonis Samaras
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“The unemployment rate has effectively not gone down from where it was at the peak of the recession. The only reason it’s gone technically from 10 percent to 8 percent is so many people are discouraged and have quit work.” ~ Jim Talent
- “Before Barack Obama took office, it looked like that pride could have vanished forever, but today, from the staggering depths of the Great Recession, the nation has had 29 straight months of job growth. Workers across my state and across the country are getting back the dignity of a good job and a good salary.” ~ Ted Strickland
- “I favor the extension of the middle-class tax cuts because in a recession they’re stimulative and they help with demand.” ~ Peter Welch
- “The FHA’s success provides strong evidence that government can and should play a role in the nation’s mortgage finance system. It also demonstrates that although government intervention in the economy during the Great Recession was messy, things would have been a lot messier without it.” ~ Mark Zandi
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“Housing was ground zero for the Great Recession. Between early 2006 and Obama’s inauguration in 2009, average house prices fell by a third across the country. In certain areas, including cities as diverse as Akron, Orlando and Las Vegas, house prices fell by more than half.” ~ Mark Zandi
- “It has become fashionable to rail against government intervention in the economy, and the FHA is a favorite example by those trying to show the government’s overreach. In reality, the FHA shows how government action during the Great Recession forestalled a much worse economic fate.” ~ Mark Zandi
- “Once supply begins to dwindle, the years to follow will see shortages that at best will cause global recession, possibly worse than the 1930s Great Depression, … war, famine, pestilence and death.” ~ Kenneth S. Deffeyes
- “I feel like I’ve gone through stages with the industry; when I first started showing it was during the time of the recession, the economical situation meant fashion was suffering. But now the fashion business is back and booming, and I think it just encourages me to constantly set myself bigger and bigger challenges and reach new goals.” ~ Roksanda Ilincic
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“I think governments are quietly terrified. There’s massive unemployment, a recession they don’t know how to deal with, and the measures they’ve taken are not working yet, and maybe they’re not going to work. There’s a prospect of significant social disorder.” ~ Simon Critchley
- “There are 249 millionaires in Congress. Remember a couple of years ago when this new Congress told us they had the solution to the recession? Apparently, they didn’t share it with the rest of us.” ~ Jay Leno
- “As the United States continues its slow but steady recovery from the depths of the financial crisis, nobody actually wants a massive austerity package to shock the economy back into recession, and so the odds have always been high that the game of budgetary chicken will stop short of disaster. Looming past the cliff, however, is a deep chasm that poses a much greater challenge — the retooling of the country’s economy, society, and government necessary for the United States to perform effectively in the twenty-first century.” ~ Fareed Zakaria
- “A standard of living is of the nature of habit. …it acts almost solely to prevent recession from a scale of conspicuous expenditure that has once become habitual.” ~ Thorstein Veblen
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“Europe is a strong market for the U.S. If it has problems, if there’s a lack of consumer confidence, if there’s a deeper recession, this will deeply affect jobs in the U.S.” ~ George Papandreou
- “Cold-turkey deficit reduction would cause a significant recession. A recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office estimated that going headlong over the cliff would cause our gross domestic product, which has been growing at an annual rate of around 2 percent, to fall at a rate of 2.9 percent in the first half of 2013.” ~ Christina Romer
- “If you listen to the news, read the news, you’d think we were still in a recession. Well, we’re not in a recession. We’ve had growth; people need to know that. They need to be more upbeat, more positive.” ~ Dan Quayle
- “I wouldn’t like Greece to stay recession. I do think that everything has to be undertaken to reconnect with growth.” ~ Jean-Claude Juncker
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“I think the great majority of Republicans, mainstream Republicans from across the country, don’t want to see Donald Trump as president of the United States either. They’re concerned they’d see a recession and I think they are also concerned we’d see a more dangerous world.” ~ Mitt Romney
- “These people in the establishment have been telling us they’re the ones to fix everything and everything they’ve tried to fix, they’ve botched – TARP, the recession fix such as the stimulus bill. Look at the college – college education is an impediment because of how much it costs. A college education is no longer a step up.” ~ Rush Limbaugh
- “I realized that the artists who managed to fight through this recession have a better shot at longevity than most. The recession was a test of your resolve and passion. I think as we come out of these rough times we will be more adept at survival and will have gained the skills necessary to make a long fruitful artistic career. There will still be those that fade away but we are more likely to grow and bend with the times and prosper.” ~ Mark Edward
- “The United State has a net worth against which our debt is a joke … we wrote in 2008 the United States is going to come out of this recession fast. The Europeans are going to fragment. The Chinese are going to be cremated. Why could we come out of it? Why has all economic theory been proven wrong? Because we’re rich and we could afford it.” ~ George Friedman
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“What most Americans mean when they say “the end of the recession” is, “When will it be back to normal? When can we get jobs? When will the employment rate be back to 4 percent or 5 percent?”” ~ Joseph Stiglitz
- “The trade unions in the UK are campaigning around zero-hours contracts, which isn’t about feminism, but it’s a feminist issue. Women are affected by zero-hours contracts, and the recession has and is affecting women more than men.” ~ Rachel Holmes
- “There are different flavors of recession. You can get into some pretty dark scenarios pretty quickly.” ~ Mark Zandi
- “Sustainability requires that we demand enduring quality. Steve Strong has a slide presentation pointing out that much of Oxford was built 800 years ago. What are we building today that will be here 800 years from now? If something like that emerged from this recession, it would help justify the hardship so many people are currently experiencing.” ~ Denis Hayes
- “When it comes to America’s economy, the truth is that Mitt Romney believes that the key to our country’s economic future lies in the failed policies of the past, the same ones that put banks before people, Wall Street before Main Street, plunging us into recession and devastating the middle class.” ~ Charlie Gonzalez
- “In China anything less than 6% growth is a recession meaning that it also causes financial problems and it’s disruptive and it’s a problem.” ~ Ray Dalio
