Irving Berlin Quotes

When I was growing up, my family was so poor we couldn't afford to pay attention.

My mother kept the house clean and we ate good. I didn't know we were poor until I started giving interviews.

I was just a regular kid in poverty, struggling.

When I was a kid in Houston, we were so poor we couldn't afford the last 2 letters, so we called ourselves po'.

I don't come from a rich family - it's not like we lived in a cardboard box, but we didn't have a ton of money.

Poverty makes you wise but it's a curse.

I've seen poverty up close until I was four or five.

I come from a humble background, where my family was struggling to be called middle class.

My parents weren't rich at all.

Poverty is relative, and the lack of food and of the necessities of life is not necessarily a hardship. Spiritual and social ostracism, the invasion of your privacy, are what constitute the pain of poverty.

Like everyone, I am formed by my background, and mine was - well, we didn't have a lot of money. I didn't live in a cardboard box, but I did live in a place where, at the end of the week, the money was gone.

My poverty is not complete: it lacks me.

Poverty was the greatest motivating factor in my life.

I grew up in poverty. For 25 years I was fed on aid.

I did grow up poor. My mom managed to get a job as a custodian at our church, and it was really just a favor for her, and my dad's an electrician - just a blue-collar family, and the house was usually falling apart.

I've never experienced chronic poverty, but I know what it's like to live on £3 a week.

My grandma forbid us from describing ourselves as poor. She said, 'we're broke.' Because broke is temporary.

I have always had a horror and detestation of poverty.

Show me a man with very little money and I will show you a bum.

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.

My parents didn't have any money.

To be poor and independent is very nearly an impossibility.

I don't come from a lot of money. In fact, I don't come from any money.

When I was a kid, our family was not that rich.

We were poor, but we didn't know it. There were no government bureaus in those days presuming to determine where poorness begins and ends, but I don't remember ever being hungry.