Ted Knight Quotes

My dad, he was a construction worker. He was a butcher. He was a deep sea fisherman.

People I grew up with, my family, work in the oil fields. Everyone works a labor job - construction, concrete. All we know is work. It's a physical culture.

I think a lot of blue collar people related to me because a lot of people work for their money.

My dad had this rock hard body and would work 12- to 13-hour days. The guys he worked with were scrap-iron guys. Nobody on that road crew had read a book in 10 years, but there was something about the way they lived I really admired.

I grew up working on farms. You'd do anything for money. You'd pick blueberries in the summertime for weeks; you'd cut down, like, spruce and fir trees for pulp.

I started out printing silk screen t-shirts. I sold ink pens. I worked construction. I worked at a gas station. I pumped gas. I was a mechanic for a little bit. I went into sewers, down into sewer lines. I had a lot of somewhat unpleasant gigs for a time there.

I have so much respect for people who do blue-collar work because I come from that background myself.

People say writing is really hard. That's very unfair to those who are doing real jobs. People who work in the fields or fix roofs, engineers, or car mechanics. I think lying on your back working under an oily car, that's a job.

I'm a Detroit kid who grew up with that assembly line mentality: You go to work to make money.

I class myself as a manual laborer.

A lot of what we do at Fox is blue-collar stuff.

I worked a lot of non-acting jobs for a really long time. They ranged from auto mechanic to landscaper to manual labor to working in a factory that made airplane parts. I even tried to go to school as a paramedic and ended up being an orderly in a hospital.

I was in the cement end of the construction business, as a laborer. I was pouring concrete, and stripping forms off of set concrete, and pulling nails, and stacking plywood, and doing that kind of thing. I was in peak condition in those days.

My dad started off in scrap metal, real men doing men's jobs.

I worked in factories, slaughterhouses, as an upholsterer. I did demolition work, was a postman, was a tiler, a plasterer. I even sold double-glazing door-to-door. But I always dreamed of being a world champion, first of all as a boxer.

When I was young, they used to call me 'foreman,' not because I was in charge, but because I did the work of four men.

I represent a blue-collar district: people who work at petrochemical plants and machine shops.

He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted - and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.

The travels before and after the tour are what add up to what you're doing. You are really called into service - and it's the service industry man, it's blue collar man, I'm sweating by the second song. It's construction work from that second song on.

My own father held down two jobs, barely affording the little rented house I grew up in. My dad worked hard, lifted heavy things, and got his hands dirty. The only soap we had at my house was Lava. Heck, I was in college before I found out it wasn't supposed to hurt to take a shower.

I'm a working man in my prime cleaning windows.

When you work with your hands, you learn to appreciate how easy it is to earn money talking.

Each of us, with money, gets further and further away from those moments where the hand pulls the beet root from the soil, shakes the fish from the net into the basket -- not to mention the way it separates us from one another, so that when enough money comes between people, they lie apart like parts of a chicken hacked up for stewing.

My father announced early on that he didn't want his sons to be "country club bums." And for a number of reasons, I bore the brunt of that - I have an older brother and two younger brothers. So he had me work in all my spare time. I started out picking dandelions, shoveling stalls, milking cows, building a fence - whatever dirty job was out there. That's a big deal, because you learn things working that you don't learn in school.

Work is the province of cattle.