Barbara Castle Quotes

I realized that I would have some very tough sledding, and I was very discouraged because I didn't see much hope of getting into the field I wanted to get into with no college education.

I know that if I had got educated, I might have ended up as a call-center employee.

In Britain, the idea one could go from blue-collar beginnings to the university was so far out, it was quite unthinkable. I took a variety of jobs to pay for tuition - from ice-cream salesman to night-club bouncer. Whatever earned the most money in the least time.

High school dropouts are forfeiting their opportunity to pursue the American Dream.

I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old, in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon, cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms.

In America today, a young person needs more education after high school just to have a chance to make it in the middle class. Not a guarantee, just a chance to make it.

Where I'm from, you focus on finishing school. Even finishing college is seen as a stretch - you just get a job after school, and that's it.

The best escalator to opportunity in America is education.

It was depressing, very depressing. I worried about how I would make a living. I didn't want to stay on the farm. It didn't offer the challenge I wanted and yet, without a college education, I felt that I was really out of luck.

I didn't go to college, I went straight from high school to working on I'll Fly Away, I was very, very lucky.

I do want to finish my education. I just don't think that Boston has a big enough market for what I want to do.

My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.

I didn't have any qualifications when I left school - I had three O-levels.

Most of the people that I went to school with - I went to secondary school - we were educated to go and work in the line at Ford's, and if we were lucky, technical skilled labor. I sort of rejected that, and thought I wanted to do something else.

I wasn't going to be an actor. I was going to be a lawyer. I came from a family just above working class, just below middle class, a great family of wonderful values. The idea of me having a chance for a law degree was enticing. Enticing to me but also very enticing to my family.

My parents were the first in our family to go to grammar school. My grandparents were in service.

Without an education, you won't have a future.

I don't think that's a fair representation of life, that you have to go to college and do well to get anywhere.

The opportunities of America opened out to me the public schools. They carried me to the professional training of an American university. I began by working with my own hands for my daily bread.

When I left school I went onto the shop floor, working 12-hour shifts in a TV factory. My workmates were sharp, skilled and all capable of enjoying higher education - but they didn't have that opportunity.

Acting is not a thing where I'm from. Finishing school is a big thing. Not a lot of people finish school.

If that is your route, to go to university and get a job that way, that is fantastic.

When I swapped studying for a wage and a proper job, Mam and Dad were devastated. I was rejecting an opportunity they never had. But their eldest son, at 16, wanted only to follow his father down the pit. It was to be the biggest education of my life.

It's difficult to say what I would be doing if I wasn't a footballer, but I probably would have sold coal like my father. Studying was never my thing, and I would surely have ended up working with my dad.

I didn't have the luxury of going to the four year school for acting.