Douglass North Quotes

My parents didn't make a lot of money. My dad was not a high school graduate - he didn't have a career as such; he was a printing salesman essentially for most of his working life.

My mom came from such humble beginnings and especially my dad as well. He didn't go to university.

My working-class Italian-American parents didn't go to school, there were no books in the house.

I have a humble background. My dad was a coal miner. My mum worked a receptionist. I was one of the first people in my family to go to university.

I grew up in a household that was a labor household. My dad was a Teamster and a milk truck driver. My mother was a secretary. Neither of them got through high school. But they worked hard and they gave me very, very important opportunities to go to school, get a good education.

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 started life in a poor family and could not even afford a proper tertiary education.

Telly never has any smart, amusing intellectuals living on a council estate.

Mothers, unless they were very poor, didn't work. Both of my parents had to leave education. My mother had to work in a cotton mill until 18 or 19, when she took some training in domestic science.

My folks ain't graduated from high school or nothing like that, so we always had to struggle in the family - and I come from a big family.

My parents grew up working class, but in that way that working class families do, they spent a fortune on education to better me.

My dad's family were pretty working class, actually.

I'm from a lower middle class background; all my family were immigrants.

My father had very little formal education.

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.

For the lower classes it is economic. They need to work and appear proper, so they veil. By contrast, wealthier and more educated families frequently have histories in which mothers and aunts took off the veil more than 80 years ago.

I started school in public housing. My dad had a sixth-grade education.

My parents immigrated to this country from Jamaica with no more than a fifth-grade education.

I have known people who are working class or craftsmen, who happen to be more intellectual than professors.

I would describe myself as having a healthy income, but I sure wouldn't describe the son of a postmaster and an encyclopedia saleswoman as upper class, by any stretch of the imagination. I would describe myself as decidedly middle class. I think I'm extremely fortunate.

I come from a long line of below-stairs maids and gardeners. Good ol' peasant stock. My mother and her sister made a quantum leap out of that life. Then I made another quantum leap.

My parents came from working-class, small-peasant, farm-labourer backgrounds and had made the grade during the fascist years; my father came out of the army as a captain.

I came from a middle-class family. My dad was a professor; my mom was a nurse. I didn't come from money, and I didn't come from circles of power. I didn't come from the country club; I came from the town park.

Church attendance rates among white Americans without a college education have dropped pretty significantly. People with college degrees are more likely to go to church than people without college degrees among the white working class.

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.