John Ruskin Quotes

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.

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

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.

Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don't respect his work?

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.

My family were really hard-working, blue-collar people, and I didn't know the idea or concept of working and having fun. I thought you just worked and made money to support your family.

Initially, I used to cart coke from the West Melbourne Gasworks -12 tonne a day, 150-pound sacks. I'd come home looking like Al Jolson at the end of the day - white teeth, black face... A good hard day's work.

Meat workers may have been looked down upon socially, but at least they were well-paid and were a fit and lively bunch as a result of hard, honest physical work.

I class myself as a manual laborer.

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.

My family is blue-collar - coal miners and steelworkers. My father was an automobile mechanic, and us boys were brought up to work. I used to pump gasoline at 11 cents a gallon. I thought I would like to be a first-rate mechanic; a respected, hard-working man.

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

Only by the sweat of my own brow. I am a totally working man.

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 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.

I think of being an actor as a blue-collar profession.

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.

I haven't been familiar with hard work. It was no problem for me. But first I hitchhiked to Pontiac, Mich. and got a job working in Fisher Body making those 1951 Pontiacs.

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.

The manual worker does not have to sell his personality. He doesn't have to sell his smile.

Don't call me 'gentleman'. I work for a livin'.

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

But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constantand imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result.

I love being around people who work with their hands, who do the hard things to keep our country going. They're just my kind of people.