John Barrasso Quotes

I've lived the American dream. I was born and raised on the farm, first in my family to graduate from college. I spent 13 years working in our family business.

My dad worked three jobs and was a teacher. My mother was a teacher's aid, making, like, $3 an hour. My father went on to get his master's and became active in all these minority engineering programs. And my mother started running for public office. All that happened after the kids were adults. But I'm insanely proud of them.

I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old, in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon, cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms.

If anybody accuses me of being rich, I give it back to them because I had a poor economical background. I worked my way up, and I am an exemplary citizen, and I always do what is good for my nation.

My earliest memories are of my father explaining to me the American Dream and how he expected me to do better than he did.

I started out mopping floors, waiting tables, and tending bar at my dad's tavern. I put myself through school working odd jobs and night shifts. I poured my heart and soul into a small business. And when I saw how out-of-touch Washington had become with the core values of this great nation, I put my name forward and ran for office.

A white boy that makes C's in college can make it to the White House.

I came up poor. My mother only had a fourth-grade education. My dad didn't have any education at all. But they were very structured. They worked hard. You know, they didn't complain. They didn't murmur. And they believe in the Christ.

To work hard. To open new doors for our kids, for our grandkids. To renew our spirit. That's what America is about.

I was the first person to go to university from my family.

My dad was a bartender. My mom was a cashier, a maid and a stock clerk at K-Mart. They never made it big. They were never rich. And yet they were successful. Because just a few decades removed from hopelessness, they made possible for us all the things that had been impossible for them.

I'm living proof you can excel regardless of where you come from.

I did pretty good for a guy who never finished high school and used to yodel at square dances.

I come from a family of scholars who got their Master's degrees. To my grandma - and to a lot of people - an education was a way of making it out of the worst parts of their life.

I come from a very working class background. My dad worked in a factory for 40 years. We all put ourselves through school.

The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of his race.

...little has changed in our New York neighborhoods except the faces, the names, and the languages spoken. The same decent values of hard work and accomplishment and service to city and nation still exist.

The state does not possess trade or industry. Its wealth is the wealth of the people and the people’s wealth is not possible without the spread of these sciences amongst them so that they may know the ways for acquiring wealth.

My parents were just as smart as I am, just as hard working if not harder; I think my father and grandfather were probably better men, yet I've been able to accomplish things professionally that they were not able to.

I come from a council estate in Tower Hamlets, and by no means am I the only person who has done well - one of my friends is head of year in a great school in Twickenham. Another is a writer; another is an artist, a musician.

I try to use my experience and the fact that I grew up in the ghetto - I tell people you don't have to rob or steal to get out of the ghetto.

I was the first one in the family, on either side, to go to college - much less graduate school.

My father was raised in an orphanage, and my mother was an immigrant from Poland whose first childhood memory was of hunger. Somehow, despite all of that, I am called a member of the 'elite.' If so, I damned well earned it.

I went to a prep school in Chicago, and my dad and mom worked really hard - even though we lived in the ghetto - to get me to there. A lot of it had to do with 'Stand and Deliver' and 'Dead Poet's Society.' It does help you. It inspires you. It definitely did for me.

America is still the land of opportunity, and hard work is still a pathway to success.