Jimmy Barnes Quotes

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 from a poor Jewish family in the South Bronx. My father was a plumber, but when I was 16, he got sick and I had to take over. Being a plumber in the South Bronx wasn't fun.

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

Red-hot songs were born on the black streets of Baltimore, where I delivered five-gallon cans of kerosene and ten-pound bags of coal.

I mean, when you grow up in the inner city and you grow up in a single-parent household, that's - those are humbling times, you know?

Let's start off with my father being a mailman. So I understand the concerns of all the folks across this country, some of whom having trouble, you know, making ends meet.

My father was an urchin that lived in Hell's Kitchen. He was part of a family of nine. I mean, there were times that were better and worse, but mostly, by the time we got to L.A., they'd lost whatever they had. And it was a sad time. And both he and I became truck drivers for different companies.

Growing up in a particular neighborhood, growing up in a working-class family, not having much money, all of those things fire you and can give you an edge, can give you an anger.

I come from the rougher side of Sydney. I don't know whether you can compare them to the projects, but in Australia, it definitely is the rougher side.

We were kinda rebels. From the wrong side of the tracks. Down where we were raised, it was a tough town.

I was brought up on a council estate. I know what it's like to be poor.

At the working man’s house, hunger looks in but dares not enter.

Leaders of the business community ... have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in this country - a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old. .

The English proletariat lives under such wretched conditions that a few extra privations will not cause it much discomfort.

The extreme profligacy, improvidence, and misery which are so prevalent among the laboring classes in many countries are chiefly to be ascribed to the want of education.

If class warfare isn’t the richest of the rich fighting tooth and nail against unions and any tax increases while record numbers of people lose their homes, what is?

There’s been an economic war going on in this country and the middle class and the poor have been losing..

Class warfare is being waged in America, and the wrong side is winning.

Going to a therapist is not something you do when you're growing up as a street kid in Toronto.

I was raised poor, in a tenement building in Union City, New Jersey, the son of Cuban immigrants.

I didn't come from the elites. I didn't come from the Northeast or from San Francisco. I came from a southern Ohio steel town, and it's a town that's really struggling in a lot of ways, ways that are indicative of the broader struggles of America's working class.

I am a coolie and the son of a coolie. I was born with the poor, and I am still poor. My sympathies have always been with the struggling mass.

Working class people and lower income people we have to help more.

My experience growing up in London and growing up in a working class background is that when people are down and out, that's when they're probably the funniest. They have to be. That's what they do to cope, to find joy, 'cause they don't feel the joy inside. Or they use humor to keep people out.

I didn't live the lifestyle of the rich and famous. My diapers were nappy cloth. I didn't live in a big house.