John Ross Bowie Quotes

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

My mom grew up in poverty in Oklahoma - like Dust Bowl, nine people in one room kind of place - and the way she got out of poverty was through education. My dad grew up without a dad, with very little and he also made his way out through education.

I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.

I grew up with no money. No money. I always struggled and had the sense that there was this other class of people who went to college - this was when I was younger.

Poor children fare worse than rich children on just about everything that social scientists measure.

Some men will be always able to pay more for their children's education than others; and that those children will, inevitably, win in the struggle of life.

There are people with no high school education who are poor. but there are also university graduates on food bank lines. There are people who are poor because they have made bad choices, gotten addicted to drugs, burned bridges with friends and family — and then there are people who have never taken a drug in their lives, who have huge social networks, and who still can’t make ends meet.

I was the poorest kid in my school, poorest kid in my town, poorest family. That stayed with me forever.

I think there's a certain sense of grounding that comes from not being a rich kid from a media-elite school.

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.

For students today, only 10 percent of children from working-class families graduate from college by the age of 24 as compared to 58 percent of upper-middle-class and wealthy families.

Growing up I always felt like I was living on the other side of the tracks. I knew the people on the other side had more resources, more money, happier families.

I was poor. When you're poor you work, and when you're rich you expect somebody to hand it to you. So I think being reasonably poor is very good for people.

Money can't buy poverty.

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

Other families who are poor do what they can to get out of it. My mother did not. She did not utilise her resources. She had a degree. There was something she could have done, but she actively, purposely refused that so we could have this absolutely authentic experience of the worst of capitalism: 'See? Look how bad capitalism is.'

It is harder for a poor man to be successful than it is for a rich man.

My mother kept the house clean and we ate good. I didn't know we were poor until I started giving interviews.

It isn't the rich people's fault that poor people are poor. Poor people who get an education and work hard in this country will stop being poor. That should be the goal for all poor people everywhere.

I graduated from Bowdoin College and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Then I left and took a job teaching really poor inner-city white kids in Boston. It was interesting to me because I'd never been around poor whites before.

If you read the 'Daily Mail,' you would imagine that the British middle classes lead lives of unremitting misery.

I'm tired of people on trust funds telling people on food stamps how to live.

My kids never had the advantage I had: I was born poor.

They do not easily rise whose abilities are repressed by poverty at home.

If you are poor today, you will always be poor. Only the rich now acquire riches.