Eminem Quotes

I am not ashamed to say that I am the son of a washerwoman.

I didn't necessarily grow up in a trailer park, but there is a brief part of that in my life. So I can make fun of it a little bit. I'm not too much of an outsider, where I'm just making fun of someone.

I'm still the little southern girl from the wrong side of the tracks who really didn't feel like she belonged.

It would astonish if not amuse the older citizens to learn that I (a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working at ten dollars per month) have been put down as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.

In my wildest imagination, I never thought that the fifth of six children born to Helen and Buddy Watts - in a poor black neighborhood, in the poor rural community of Eufaula, Oklahoma - would someday be called Congressman.

The ‘poor white’ is actually degraded; the mountain white is a person not yet graded up.

My family wasn't involved in the college. They were more of just your 'white trash' kind of family. And so I have that kind of background, but I always kind of aspired to be something else, and I made a lot of different friends over the years that were passing through.

If you had looked at my life when I was 14 years old and said, 'Well, what's going to happen to this kid?' you would have concluded that I would have struggled with what academics call upward mobility.

I wasn't born with a silver spoon in Beverly Hills, but I was born with a great deal of self-worth.

You can't kid the public. When they see me they see I'm just a kid off a council estate - no more, no less.

When you grow up on the other side of the tracks, you're used to taking a few bumps.

I grew up poor in East Houston. I used to be ashamed of it, but I'm not anymore. It's kind of a badge of courage now.

The endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society.

Class still matters in Britain today.

Pride in the case of a rich man is bad, but pride in the case of a poor man is worse.

Too many people feel that where you start out dictates where you should end up. I was on welfare and just shy of 19 when my first daughter was born, but I was encouraged to take advantage of my ability and drive and remained in school.

Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their status. They didn't mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility in a sense - the idea that anyone can make it.

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.

Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is.

Class is real. It can't be faked.

My mom grew up in poverty in Oklahoma - like Dust Bowl, nine people in one room kind of place - and the way she got out of poverty was through education. My dad grew up without a dad, with very little and he also made his way out through education.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

You're looking at a middle-class guy. I am who I am.

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 don't know what I did in this life to deserve all of this. I'm just a girl from a trailer park who had a dream.