It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose your own.
Harry S. Truman

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

Unemployment is of vital importance, particularly to the unemployed

Unemployment is capitalism’s way of getting you to plant a garden.
Orson Scott Card

Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders.

Hunger is not the worst feature of unemployment; idleness is.
William E. Barrett

Working in the theater has a lot in common with unemployment

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under this sun.
Thomas Carlyle

They’ve managed to keep their unemployment low although their overall unemployment is high.

You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live.
William Shakespeare

When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results.

A man who has no office to go to – I don’t care who he is – is a trial of which you can have no conception.
George Bernard Shaw

When large numbers of men are unable to find work unemployment results

The trouble with unemployment is that the minute you wake up in the morning you’re on the job.
Slappy White

Any degree of unemployment worries me.
Gerhard Schroder

Of all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment.
Jane Addams

As legal slavery passed, we entered into a permanent period of unemployment and underemployment from which we have yet to emerge.
Julian Bond

Cessation of work is not accompanied by cessation of expenses.
Cato the Elder

Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.
Joseph E. Stiglitz

The hardest work in the world is being out of work.
Whitney Young, Jr.

Currently a level of unemployment of 7 percent or more seems to be required to keep inflation from accelerating, a level quite unacceptable as a permanent situation.
William Vickrey

An “acceptable” level of unemployment means that the government economist to whom it is acceptable still has a job.

Despite our high rate of unemployment, 300,000 jobs go unfilled largely because many of the unemployed lack the skills needed today as a result of technological progress.
Kim Campbell

Unemployment diminishes people. Leisure enlarges them.
Mason Cooley

Enterprise Washington is economic development in areas of high unemployment around the state of Washington.
Mike Lowry

Unemployment is like a headache or a high temperature – unpleasant and exhausting but not carrying in itself any explanation of its cause.
William Henry Beveridge

For me, unemployment and poverty in the Greater Montreal area is not mainly a problem of structure, or design, or statistics. It is a profoundly human situation.
Kim Campbell

We believe that if men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work.
John F. Kennedy

Hundreds of millions of human beings on our planet increasingly suffer from unemployment, poverty, hunger, and the destruction of their families.
Hans Kung

When I quit working, I lost all sense of identity in about fifteen minutes.
Paige Rense

I define genuine full employment as a situation where there are at least as many job openings
as there are persons seeking employment, probably calling for a rate of unemployment, as currently measured, of between 1 and 2 percent.
William Vickrey

When we’re unemployed, we’re called lazy; when the whites are unemployed it’s called a depression.
Jesse Jackson

I did go through a period where I was on unemployment. That was my low point: Martha Quinn on line at unemployment, hoping nobody will recognize her.
Martha Quinn

I do not believe we can repair the basic fabric of society until people who are willing to work have work. Work organizes life. It gives structure and discipline to life.
Bill Clinton

I had to think ahead. How much would I really enjoy committing five or seven years to working on this? When you’re an unemployed actor offered a TV pilot, no matter who you are you’re tempted by the good hunk of change to be made. It keeps you out of the unemployment line.
Gerald McRaney

What is the good of being a genius if you cannot use it as an excuse for being unemployed?
Gerald Barzan

I have just explained my idea of how a constructive period of reflection, one that would send a clear message to the citizens of Europe: You should now what our priorities are. For Germany this means: Unemployment is one of one of our biggest problems.
Angela Merkel

The shock of unemployment becomes a pathology in its own right.
Robert Farrar Capon

I think it’s hard to know. Feeling fulfilled, because actors face periods of unemployment, there is nothing worse than being at the top of your game; you have so much to give but do not have the platform to do this.
Michael York