Oliver Goldsmith Quotes

I think, and I mean this sincerely, I was raised humbly. We were a lower middle income family and a household that was scrimping by at times. We were watching the dollar, stretching the dollar, and coupons. It was all those things.

I don't come from a lot of money.

I don't drive an Escalade; I've never lived on a mansion; I live in a townhouse. Even with my internet business, when I was making just shy of a million and a half a year, I lived in the same house.

I play so many villains and strange, troubled people. I don't have that kind of life. I live in the country. I've been married nearly 50 years. I have a cat.

I wasn't rich.

I grew up very poor in rural Alabama.

We were poor, but we didn't know it. There were no government bureaus in those days presuming to determine where poorness begins and ends, but I don't remember ever being hungry.

I am from a poor background in Portugal. We were medium-down, not down-and-out. My parents felt problems around food in the past but they made sure I did not miss anything. But there was nothing extra, no luxuries.

I grew up in a mud house, in a small village.

I come from very humble beginnings.

I don't come from a well-off family. We're very middle-class, lower-middle-class, so that's something I cherish.

I grew up in a really small town.

I didn't grow up in a wealthy family at all. Being at home all day and watching movies, that was a luxury.

Let's just shatter the illusion. I am not wealthy. I've lived in the same house for the past 30 years.

This is not a family of privilege by any stretch of the imagination. Our family is very low key.

I may have been in financial difficulties, but I'm not a pauper.

I'm the sole provider for my child, I don't get any help. I'm not saying we're poverty stricken, but it does mean I have to work hard.

My parents weren't rich at all.

I wouldn't say we were middle class. There was not lots of money for nice things. But we never wanted for the things we needed.

Who dare to love their country, and be poor.

A man must be of a very quiet and happy nature, who can long endure the country; and, moreover, very well contented with his own insignificant person.

We still have a great amount of work to do in social development, including resolving one of the biggest challenges we face in this area, namely, reducing the gap between high-income earners and people, citizens of our country, who are still living on very modest means indeed. But we cannot, of course, adopt the solution used 80 years ago and simply confiscate the riches of some to redistribute among others. We will use completely different means to resolve this problem, namely, we will ensure good economic growth.

[My father] didn't make much money, and I tell a lot of people, you know, I was a vegetarian before people knew what a vegetarian was. That's all I ate was vegetables.

On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.

Folks out in the country couldn't afford to pay for anybody else to make music. They had to make their own. So the peasantry had their music, and it was about a hundred years ago given the name "Folk music".