Octavia Spencer Quotes

One of the over-riding things for many who grow up in poverty is the simple desire to escape. I think it was sort of obvious to me that escape had to be through education.

Poverty will not be allowed to become a wall in the way of education.

My mom grew up in poverty in Oklahoma - like Dust Bowl, nine people in one room kind of place - and the way she got out of poverty was through education. My dad grew up without a dad, with very little and he also made his way out through education.

Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

We weren't dirt poor, but there was no spare money kicking around. While it was very much understood that the way to a better life was through education, books were a luxury we couldn't afford. But when I was six, we actually moved opposite the central library, and that became my home from home.

Other families who are poor do what they can to get out of it. My mother did not. She did not utilise her resources. She had a degree. There was something she could have done, but she actively, purposely refused that so we could have this absolutely authentic experience of the worst of capitalism: 'See? Look how bad capitalism is.'

I came from a very poor family and my main dream in life was to break out of this poverty.

I think that education is a pathway out of poverty for many people. It was for our family.

When I got outta High School I was driving a truck. I was just a poor boy from Memphis, Memphis.

In my experience, poor people are the world's greatest entrepreneurs. Every day, they must innovate in order to survive. They remain poor because they do not have the opportunities to turn their creativity into sustainable income.

America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college - the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes - the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That's what America is about.

There is no obstacle in the path of young people who are poor or members of minority groups that hard work and preparation cannot cure.

I didn't finish college; my parents didn't graduate college - we didn't have a pot to piss in. I'm from Newark, New Jersey. I had to work. I didn't think it would be possible for me to be an artist without having a job.

As a child I experienced firsthand the severe effects of poverty and illiteracy, especially upon women and children. My parents taught me the importance of education and that it was a key to improving an individual's life.

By providing students in our Nation with such an education, we help save our children from the clutches of poverty, crime, drugs, and hopelessness, and we help safeguard our Nation's prosperity for generations yet unborn.

In the underdeveloped countries, we have young men and women, many of them of capacity but without opportunity to improve themselves. They cannot do so without help.

A lot of kids spent more time out of school than in, but I always loved school and thought it was my way out of Cleveland, and out of poverty.

However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

Poverty and lack of knowledge must be challenged.

I think my thing is I grew up in the ghetto, and I was able to get a second chance. That's what I'm trying to tell kids.

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

Ignorant people are apt to overrate the value of what is called education. The sons of the poor, having suffered the privations of poverty, think of wealth as the mother of joy.

I grew up in this poor place, with very limited circumstances, at about 16 years of age was sent by my family to work, and instead of remaining in the position into which I was sent, I somehow worked my way out of it without any help from anyone, just luck.

Obsession with the market seem to prevent ministers looking at the huge problem and all its ramifications in health, education and employment that come from the housing insecurity that too many face.

I didn't have the welfare. I didn't have the proper education. I didn't have these things. That's why it's almost like a complex in me that I want to explode myself in my films.