Sloan Wilson Quotes

My dad never graduated high school. He was a printing salesman. We lived in a two-bedroom, one-bath house in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. We weren't rich - but we felt secure.

My father was a factory worker, and we were really poor. But everything I earned peddling papers and working in stores, he made me put aside for education.

My parents grew up working class, but in that way that working class families do, they spent a fortune on education to better me.

The forgotten man... He works, he votes, generally he prays, but his chief business in life is to pay.

In West Virginia, the most vulnerable people we have are people who get up every morning and go to work.

The American dream begins with the American family.

I appeal to everyone who understands what it is to have kids in school, have a mortgage, to work for a living; to have someone in their family or in their life who is less-abled and who is going to need help from the government.

My parents didn't have much money growing up, but they always had a budget for books.

My family didn't really have newspapers at home or talk about politics - my family are not political. They were too busy getting on with it - working, looking after kids, trying to pay off the mortgage, all that stuff.

Like a lot of you, I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack, my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.

Not all Republicans are rich, dress in three-piece suits, and have $200 haircuts. I'm somebody who's lived from paycheck to paycheck. I'm focusing on my blue-collar roots - I've worked side by side with union people.

Owning your own home is America's unique recipe for avoiding revolution and promoting pseudo-equality at the same time.

American opportunity, the treasure no thief could touch … It was the one thing he [her father] was able to promise us when he sent for us; surer, safer than bread or shelter.

The American home, a steady job, an opportunity for the children to go to school properly nourished is the way to combat communism.

There are people with no high school education who are poor. but there are also university graduates on food bank lines. There are people who are poor because they have made bad choices, gotten addicted to drugs, burned bridges with friends and family — and then there are people who have never taken a drug in their lives, who have huge social networks, and who still can’t make ends meet.

… there are a great many people who not only can make no budget but can barely manage to exist with their families on what they earn from day to day

As the relative pay of women has grown and the relative pay of less-educated, working class men has declined, the latter have been viewed as less and less marriageable…. With less to bring to the table, such men are regarded as less necessary—in part because women can now count on provisions from the welfare state as an additional independent source of income, however meager.

Since the working-class lives from hand to mouth, it buys as long as it has the means to buy.

We were far from rich, but I never remember my parents worrying about money.

My mum and dad had creative jobs, but our family was a working family - so there wasn't an option of, 'Oh, when you're older, you're not going to have to work.'

Both my mother and father worked for everything that they had.

My family was mostly unemployed working class.

A lot of the times, I end up having to do jobs to sort of pay the bills.

I grew up in a family that was working-class, which taught me to be careful with money.

My family was very poor. Strangely, though, my father was an enigma in that he was always working. He was not a ne'er-do-well. He wasn't lazy. He just couldn't hold on to money. It just, it was an enigma for him. He just, his pockets were always empty.