Sean Bean Quotes

I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.

To help my mother, I started working as a workshop helper. There I learned welding and other tools.

And that had a powerful appeal, particularly to those who had been denied the choice to stay on at school, to go to university, to be something else, other than going down the pit.

I did my first apprenticeship when I was 15, then joined the union when I was 17. I worked every summer in high school and college.

Initially, I used to cart coke from the West Melbourne Gasworks -12 tonne a day, 150-pound sacks. I'd come home looking like Al Jolson at the end of the day - white teeth, black face... A good hard day's work.

I used to be a longshoreman. I didn't go to college. I have a voice that when I say something, it can sound way meaner than you think it is.

When I was ten years old, my family left a cold, damp prefab in West Fife and moved to Corby, Northamptonshire, where my father quickly found work at what was then the Stewarts & Lloyds steelworks.

I started working for Bethlehem Steel when I was about 16 during the summers.

Being an MP is not a desperately hard life, like going down the pit or working in the steelworks - with which I am all too familiar, having been brought up in the city of Sheffield; and it certainly isn't badly paid compared with any of my constituents.

I just have this deep kind of connection to reality of being like... in a way, I feel like a dock worker. I want to stay in connection with my dock-worker side, 'cause that's how I grew up.

I was never afraid to go back to Pittsburgh and work in the steel mills.

There was a time when you could make a living by the sweat of your brow. Those days are over!

I went to high school in a steel town in Pennsylvania.

I remember a good friend of mine whose father worked at Bethlehem Steel for 40 years with just a high school degree. That was a remarkable pathway to prosperity that sustained generations of working families.

I grew up with a bunch of factory workers.

I grew up in a factory town - Urbana, Ohio.

I got fed up with academia and decided I would rather be a carpenter.

My dad was down the pit and my mother worked in a newsagent.

I think technical education and vocational skills and having a trade mean something.

I was raised here in Logan County, where I was blessed to be in a family that had over 200 years of United Mine Workers of America experience.

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.

We don't want people working in fast-food stands. We want them back in the steel mills.

I am the son of a mine worker.

For many young people on-the-job training and hands-on experience is the real route to employability, not a university education.

If I hadn't made it as a footballer I would have been an electrician. I studied to be an electrician even though I was progressing at football because you never know at that stage if you are going to be there for sure.