Jo Cox Quotes

The first job I ever had was at a pool-liner-manufacturing plant. Minimum wage was $4.25, and that's what I was making. It was this huge, hot, un-air-conditioned factory staffed with all women and me. This is in Georgia, during the summertime, so it was pretty ridiculous.

I was a garbage man in New Jersey in summers during college at Yale. Everybody else got to go to Switzerland and I got to go to the dump.

My family owned a furniture/appliance store near Kingston, Jamaica. I worked there all summer but lived in a very structured environment the rest of the year at an all-girl Catholic boarding school.

I was a paper boy, beginning the summer between my fourth-grade and fifth-grade years.

There was never any pressure on me to go into the business, but I was always aware of it. I'd go on the set with my father and he and my mother would always be singing.

I was the night foreman of a galvanizing factory, which is hot and smelly and dirty and miserable.

Before playing football, I didn't fit in anywhere. My parents didn't have a lot of money, which they spent on our education to send us to Catholic private school in Oakland, mostly black. The other kids had more money than I did. I started school early; I was young. So I'd come back to my hood and read.

My grandma had a kids' clothing store for over 30 years called Shannon and Company, and my sisters and I used to go and work there in the summers.

When I was in Chicago, I was working as a carpenter while I was doing plays. I thought it'd be a fun set construction job, but it turned up to just be a straight-up factory.

My first job entailed spending a summer working in a cornfield in Nebraska.

I come from a very big family, and I grew up in restaurants.

I was not very keen on joining the family business... there were 14 family members working together, and it worried me that I would not have enough individuality.

As soon as I left school at 16, I worked in a factory making aircraft components.

My high school job was putting insulation in attics - in Louisiana in the summer. It must have been 95 degrees every day, and the insulation used to get all over me. It was not fun. But I didn't know any different. It wasn't like I was spending summers on Cape Cod.

A lot of what we do at Fox is blue-collar stuff.

I don't think I've had a job since I worked for my father's construction company.

My paternal grandfather worked in the mill all his life. My father worked in the mill almost his whole life. I worked in the mill while I was going to college in the summers. And then, for one stretch, I quit school and worked one year.

When I was 17, I had to peel 100 kg of tomatoes every day.

As a young girl, I plowed the fields of our family farm. I worked construction with my dad. To save for college, I worked the morning biscuit line at Hardees.

I graduated college and moved back home, started helping my dad, did landscaping for a living.

When I was 16 I got a school holiday job at Minton's pottery factory in Staffordshire, packing plates. For a month's work, I was paid £44. Everything I now know about the birds and the bees, I learnt there.

The storm that bends the birch trees Is held to be violent But how about the storm That bends the backs of the roadworkers?

I think that growing up very poor in a very wealthy town gave me a sense of being an outsider, and I hated it when I was growing up.

If a man who is born to a fortune cannot make himself easier and freer than those who are not, he gains nothing.

The sin and the shame and the sorrow, The crime and the want and the woe That are born there in your workshop, No hand can paint, you know.