Ben Carson Quotes

You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that." To a divorced mother of three, Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005

Gerald Boyd was a classic specimen of the self-made man. Born poor, he worked and studied his way up out of poverty under the guidance of his widowed grandmother.

Pennies do not come from heaven. They have to be earned here on earth.

I've always been a workhorse, and I've been supporting myself since I was 15.

If you work, you should not be poor.

Independence feels like a luxury, where the reality is that it's hard to survive financially for so many people out there.

Both my mother and father worked for everything that they had.

I come from a simple background, so I couldn't call my father and say, 'Come pay my bills,' so I had to get out there and work.

I'm happy to have nothing, so long as I'm sure I've been working.

My parents had to work hard, and I was always looking for a way to make it big - for their sakes as well as my own.

I don't believe in handouts, I believe in working hard for what you want.

My father worked three jobs, my mother worked two, seven days a week sometimes. And they wouldn't take welfare or social assistance, they were too proud.

I don't want no handouts. I want to get it out the mud.

If we are industrious, we shall never starve; for, at the workingman's house hunger looks in, but dares not enter. Nor will the bailiff or the constable enter, for industry pays debts, while despair increaseth them.

My mother worked in a cookie factory. My father worked in a factory. So anyone that dares begrudge what I have, just better get off their duff and do something about it to do something for themselves as well as their country. I feel that I have a perfect right to spend my money the way I damn please.

I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn't worked hard enough. I knew this was a lite, about my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and politicians, harder than anybody if you accept that when you work at an unpleasant job that makes it very hard work indeed.

My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.

People that trust wholly to other's charity, and without industry of their own, will always be poor.

If I had been literate, I wouldn't have sold drugs. I just wanted a job. I would have worked at McDonald's. And I would have put the same effort into the fries and mopping the floor that I would have put into drugs. I'm the kind of person that always wants to do a job the best I can. I don't believe in half-doing jobs.

I grew up on a farm and I always learned when you work you go forward, you don't stop and say, well, I'll take a break. You always go forward and get the job done.

The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. At four o'clock in the morning, when the promise of a new day still lingered over French lands, he got up from his pallet and left for the fields, taking to pasture the half-dozen pigs whose fertility nourished him and his wife.

Poverty often hides her charms under an ugly mask; yet thousands have been forced into greatness by their very struggle to keep the wolf from the door.

When you got a job to do, you got to do it well. You gotta give the other fellow hell.

People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.

No matter if I have a job for one weekend or for the next year, or three years, I'm going to drive the same way. That's the way I am. I'm going to give it everything I have.