David Lammy Quotes

I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor.

I grew up working class in Atlanta.

The thing is with boxers we don't come from Cambridge and places like that, we come from council estates. So in boxing it's very, very hard.

In the neighborhood where I grew up, it was a rough neighborhood - well, not rough, but it certainly wasn't upper class or anything. But I remember hearing things like, 'The little man just can't get ahead.' And if you start to believe that, then you know what? You don't get ahead.

I'm from a working-class background - I had free school meals all my life and then spent six years in art school.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

Class still matters in Britain today.

The rich don't exploit the poor. They just out-compete them.

Joanna points her camera at a section of society unused to having cameras pointed at it. But I don't know about categorizing them in terms of class; I'm a bit wary of that. My dad is the son of a shipbuilder.

I was not from a middle-class family at all. I did not have middle-class possessions and what have you. But I had middle-class parents who gave me what was needed to survive in society.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life.

I was poor. When you're poor you work, and when you're rich you expect somebody to hand it to you. So I think being reasonably poor is very good for people.

I come from a working-class background in Queens, New York.

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

Ignorant people are apt to overrate the value of what is called education. The sons of the poor, having suffered the privations of poverty, think of wealth as the mother of joy.

One of the things I get amused by is when my opponent talks about the middle class.

I grew up with not a lot of money and I definitely shopped at Goodwill. But even in my most unfortunate state, I was really blessed compared to a lot of the rest of the world. I had a really great chance to follow my dreams and have them actually come true.

I just thank God that I didn't grow up with so much money or privilege because you had to create ways to make it happen.

People like me who grew up in a working-class town, who don't have a college education, you don't usually hear from us.

I often think what it was like not to have much money. I don't think it's good for people to be born into money and not know what it is never to have it.

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

I'm tired of people on trust funds telling people on food stamps how to live.

This College system went into practice to draw a line of demarcation between the two classes of society—it separated the children of the rich from the children of the poor.

There are but two families in the world … The haves and the have-nots.