Roger Miller Quotes

More people work at Walmart than anywhere else in the United States, but you wouldn't know that from our literature. I'm trying to get at the reality of this country by portraying the lives of many of my friends who I left behind in Pittsburgh.

When I got outta High School I was driving a truck. I was just a poor boy from Memphis, Memphis.

I come from a very working-class background.

I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.

I come from a very working-class background.

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.

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.

It sounds like something from a Woody Guthrie song, but it's true; I was raised in a freight car.

I grew up in a modest neighborhood just outside of Los Angeles. It was an industrial community of blue-collar, working people... some of the hardest-working people I've ever met.

We come from a tough, working class background, so we're very tight.

My dad was an autoworker, my mom was a clerk. Until I was thirty-five, I never made more than fifteen thousand dollars a year.

My dad was just a little trailer trash white dude that worked his tail off, didn't have a dad. He started working at 14, didn't get to play sports. He dedicated his life to his kids to let us live our dreams.

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.

Hey, hey, the working man, the working man like me. I ain't never been on welfare, that's one place I won't be.

I'm not pessimistic, because poor people tend to bounce back. We've been through worse than this - working people been through worse than this. We've got slavery and Jim Crow. We've got workers with no rights up until '35. We're going to bounce back. We are resilient, resisting people. So, it's not pessimism, but it is blues-like. It's not optimistic. We're just prisoners of hope, that's all.

When you get hit by a car sometimes your shoes will fly off, sometimes your pants will come off, but I was not fortunate enough to see the pants portion.

To constrain the brute force of the people, the European governments deem it necessary to keep them down by hard labor, poverty and ignorance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings, as that unremitting labor shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus to sustain a scanty and miserable life.

Environmentalism is a luxury. Just like being a vegetarian is a luxury. When you have to worry about eating - you're not going to be worried about where the food's coming from, or who made your shoes. Poverty, whether planned or not planned, is a way of making environmentalism moot.

It's no secret that my family was very, very poor, and I don't want that for my life or my children's life certainly. But some might say I could relax a bit more and know that that's not going to happen to me. I'm not going to end up in a car.

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

I am for the small man who has not forgotten, for the man who loves his beer and his women and his sunlight

The working-class folks and the poor, and those normal people living their lives out in the world without the glitter and the fanfare. There is a lot to learn from them.

You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that." To a divorced mother of three, Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005

Mama's in the factory, she ain't got no shoes. Daddy's in the alley, he's looking for food.

I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking.