Bob Menendez Quotes

I grew up in a slum neighborhood - rows of tenements, with stoops, and kids all over the street. It was a real neighborhood - we played kick-the-can and ring-a-levio.

I grew up in northwest London on a council estate. My parents are Irish immigrants who came over here when they were very young and worked in menial jobs all their lives, and I'm one of many siblings.

To me, I'm the epitome of what a ghetto child is: I was raised by a single parent; I stayed in apartments my whole life; I don't think I've ever cut the grass.

I'm Cuban. My parents are immigrants.

I grew up in the projects in Queens, and we were really poor.

I come from a poor family, so really, the culture I know best is the street, TV, school.

It was a pretty rough neighborhood where I grew up The really tough places were over around Third Avenue where it ran into the Harlem River, but we weren't far away.

I was born in a poor family, a lower middle class family. My father was a clerk in the forest department. I was very bad at studies. I was not very good at sports, also.

Growing up poor, I didn't even have a lunch to take to school. Lunch was 26 cents, and we didn't even know what 26 cents looked like. I didn't love school because I wanted to disguise that I was poorer than everybody else.

I did not come from an academic background. My father was a smart man, but he had a fifth-grade education. He and all his friends were plumbers. They were all born around 1905 in great poverty in New York City and had to go to work when they were 12 or 13 years old.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

I didn't finish college; my parents didn't graduate college - we didn't have a pot to piss in. I'm from Newark, New Jersey. I had to work. I didn't think it would be possible for me to be an artist without having a job.

Most American Jews came from the lower middle classes, and therefore they brought with them not a lot of Jewish culture. The American Jewish story starts with Ellis Island, and the candy store in the Bronx.

I think my parents were immigrants, you know, so I guess I would be first generation. Growing up in California.

My family in general - they're troubled or poorer people.

I've still got family members living below the poverty line in New York.

Living in the projects helped me with this role.

We had a very normal, sort of ghetto, urban upbringing. My father was a bus driver and my mother was a seamstress and a substitute schoolteacher, off and on. So, that all adds up to no money.

My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college.

If I wrote a memoir, it would be like 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.'

I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.

I've been in many of them and to some extent I would have to say this; if you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

My parents came from the Kyushu Island in the Southern part of Japan to find work in Tokyo. So we could only afford to live downtown, in a low-income area. It was just by the river, and whenever a typhoon came around, we were under water up to, like, here. That's the kind of place we lived in.

When I was young, poverty was so common that it didn’t have a name.

I grew up in the projects with four older brothers.