Chuka Umunna Quotes

My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French.

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

I had a very easy middle class upbringing and never had to worry about anything. But my parents came from nothing and from broken homes, and their stories were always very interesting.

I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.

My dad was a labourer and my mum had exactly the same job as Noel Gallagher's mum - she was a dinner lady at our local school. Everyone comes over from Ireland and they get the same jobs.

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.

I'm a daughter of the middle class with a strong sense of social mobility and individualism, like the waves of immigrants, like my Spanish grandparents, who made Argentina.

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

My parents were decent, aspirant first-generation middle class. They read 'Reader's Digest', listened to classical music; my grandparents had a bust of Stalin on the mantelpiece. The kids of that generation were terrified of being below par, class-wise.

We've had a humble upbringing. You know, my father came through as a political refugee; my mother comes from a hard-working-farmers family. We've had humble upbringing.

I'm not Chinese, but both of my parents were born in Iran; my brother and I were the first ones born here. First in our family to go to college, that whole thing.

If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't count.

Both my mother and my father grew up in Asia, in a time of political instability. They'd earned college degrees before setting foot in the States but had to work menial jobs early on in order to make ends meet.

I was born and raised in Essex, just outside London, to a financially comfortable, well-educated Pakistani family.

My mother was actually born in Ohio but raised in West Virginia where her family had a laundry. She has a West Virginian accent. My father was born in China, but he's the son of an American citizen. My paternal grandfather was born in San Francisco in 1867.

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 only honourable work my parents knew was blue-collar. But while my father Robert ran a pawnbroker's shop, and my mother was a waitress, I moved into a middle-class world with a level of security they never knew.

The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.

My father was an immigrant from Russia and my mother was first generation.

My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.

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

My parents emigrated from Poland in 1924 with my brother, who was a few months old. They were from a simple family of Polish Jews. They were looking, I suppose, for a better economic life and were escaping from an anti-Semitic environment.

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

My grandfather worked in a shoe factory - he was an Italian immigrant. My father was the first to go to college in the family.

I come from a family of working people. My parents were Guatemalan immigrants who spent most of their lives in the service industry.