Florence Griffith Joyner Quotes

Growing up, I didn't dream of being nothing, of living in the ghetto my whole life. I wanted to get out.

My father came from nothing, so he believed that people could do anything if they worked hard enough. I think he liked that I chose to be an actor. Both he and my mom were totally supportive.

I had a pursuit different from others because they all came from downtown areas with money, but I didn't have any. All I wanted is to change my destiny with my own efforts.

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.

My mother's passion for something more, to write a different destiny for a dirt-poor farmer's daughter, was to shape my entire life.

One of the over-riding things for many who grow up in poverty is the simple desire to escape. I think it was sort of obvious to me that escape had to be through education.

I think my thing is I grew up in the ghetto, and I was able to get a second chance. That's what I'm trying to tell kids.

I'm living proof that you can make it out of the ghetto.

My father came from a very poor background, but I was very fortunate in the sense that we were never in need. My dad was determined to make sure that we didn't want for things. He wanted to give us more opportunity than he had, a better shot at a better life.

I might have been born in a hovel but I am determined to travel with the wind and the stars.

As a Southerner and as a Mormon you approach life in this aspirational way: 'I will rise above my station.'

I try to use my experience and the fact that I grew up in the ghetto - I tell people you don't have to rob or steal to get out of the ghetto.

I came from a middle class family hence I had to struggle hard for success.

England is still a place where a naughty boy who comes from nothing can live his dream.

I broke the cycle of poverty thanks to education.

All I would say is it doesn't matter where you come from. Like, Jim Sheridan comes from the inner city, and he's one of the top ones, a top lad.

When I was nine years, growing up on the south side of Chicago, in the ghetto. The Robert Taylor Projects. I came home from school, I showed my mother a picture and said "Momma, that's you in the rocking chair. There's daddy over there." I said, "Momma, one of these days, I'm gonna be big and strong. I'm gonna be a football player. I'm gonna be a boxer. I'm gonna buy you a beautiful house and I'm gonna buy you pretty dresses." That's all I want to do in life.

When you come from nothing, you're basically just trying to get escape velocity, which means you and your family don't have to worry about being broke and that's all I ever cared about.

When you come from where I come from, if anyone in the family makes it out, the others kind of come with you.

I come from a council estate in Tower Hamlets, and by no means am I the only person who has done well - one of my friends is head of year in a great school in Twickenham. Another is a writer; another is an artist, a musician.

As a kid, I remember wondering why we lived in an apartment, not in a brownstone, and why we drove an LTD, not a Cadillac. Even now, I'm like that. If I'm on the 5th floor, I will wonder why I'm not on the 6th floor. But that was my drive. I was obsessed with my family having a better life.

Both my parents are first-generation success stories.

If any one idea can justly be called the American idea, it is that a child's circumstances at birth should not determine the station in life that that child will occupy as an adult.

My dad wanted me to have a better life than he had ever had. He wanted us to succeed so badly. And I never wanted to let him down.

We would not have been a successful family without my father and stepfather, who were working-class men with better dreams for their children. We just wore them out.