Edward Hirsch Quotes

In my family, education was something you endured. My parents weren't educated past high school, and the only book in our house was a 'Reader's Digest' condensed book. Can you imagine?

When I grew up, my house contained only two books: the Bible and the 'Edmonds' cookbook. We were a working-class household. Books were a poor second to the television, which was always on, usually with me in front of it.

You mustn't forget the circumstances I have been brought up in, the little education I have had.

We are from the very middle class family. We have not come from the English medium school. We came from our regional languages school.

My upbringing was so middle-class and repressed. It wasn't until I was placed in Lunghua that I met anyone from any other social strata. When I did, I found them colossally vital.

When I was growing up, my house was filled with books. My mother was an educator, and my father was a history buff, so our home was a virtual library, covering every author from Beverly Cleary to James Michener.

The best students come from homes where education is revered: where there are books, and children see their parents reading them.

A country so rich that it can send people to the moon still has hundreds of thousands of its citizens who can't read. That's terribly troubling to me.

I came to accept during my freshman year that many of the gaps in my knowledge and understanding were simply limits of class and cultural background, not lack of aptitude or application as I'd feared.

I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn't have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water.

Who is more in touch with the problems of this country? One of those guys who goes off to Oxford or to University of Yale, or someone who has lived in buses, in the Metro, in the street?

My family supported me. I wasn't hot-housed at all as a young child; I didn't go to any kind of gifted school. They didn't exist in the very poor parts of England when I grew up in the 1980s. I had a great time to learn, had access to libraries and teachers who were patient and enthusiastic when I showed ability in some subjects.

My working-class Italian-American parents didn't go to school, there were no books in the house.

Better educated than wealthy

I have not the advantage of a classical education, and no man should, in my judgement, accept a degree he cannot read.

The education of the common people requires, perhaps, in a civilized and commercial society, the attention of the public more than that of people of some rank and fortune.

What good is telling America's children that they will have equal opportunity for education if they don't have the skills that will even get them to the point of benefiting from education, because they didn't have the child care, the health care that would enable them to grow as strong and constructive human beings?

I am a middle-class black, a college professor, far from wealthy, but also well removed from the kind of deprivation that would qualify my children for the label 'disadvantaged.'

My parents were bookish, very musical, but otherwise uninvolved in the arts or the academic world.

Coming from a middle-class background of Northern Karnataka, where good education was the only insurance policy, I started reading and writing very early.

I am the son of an illiterate father and mother.

The difference between people who can read and write and those who can't is just absolutely astronomical.

read thousands of books and I will power myself with knowledge. Pens and books are the weapons that defeat terrorism.

Read a lot. Reading really helps. Read anything you can get your hands on.

People who don't read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn't it?