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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[O]f all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment.
~Jane Addams, 1910

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

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

An "acceptable" level of unemployment means that the government economist to whom it is acceptable still has a job.
~Author Unknown

Unemployment diminishes people. Leisure enlarges them.
~Mason Cooley

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

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

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

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

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

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

The shock of unemployment becomes a pathology in its own right.
~Robert Farrar Capon, "Being Let Go," New York Times, 5 August 1984