Neil Kinnock Quotes

I was the first one in the family, on either side, to go to college - much less graduate school.

My parents were the first in our family to go to grammar school. My grandparents were in service.

My dad got a job as a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. He teaches biology and genetics. My dad has been obsessed with science his whole life. Both my paternal grandparents were illiterate bamboo farmers, so he really worked his way up and then got a Ph.D., full ride and everything, from universities in America.

My older sister, Amy Jo, and I - we are the first generation of my family to stay on at school and do any exams at all.

The childhood poverty of both my parents and their minimal education did much to influence me and my two younger brothers in our education and career choices. One brother became a dentist and the other, a professor of anthropology with a Ph.D. degree.

My brother's got two degrees. He got one for me.

I was the first person to go to university from my family.

My parents came from a poor background and worked their way up because of education. They saw it as a way to succeed. So they cared about me getting straight A grades when I was growing up.

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? … Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.

I have a humble background. My dad was a coal miner. My mum worked a receptionist. I was one of the first people in my family to go to university.

Our family story here is one that we're proud of, and that is that, as the ninth of 10 kids in our family, I was the first who, right out of high school, was able to go to four-year college... it was a big moment in our family's life.

I was raised in inner-city Liverpool, the first in my family to go to university.

My father decided early on to get me the best education money could buy. He wanted me to have the opportunities that were denied to him.

It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor.

John Edwards comes from working folk, just like me. John Edwards worked hard and excelled to get his education, just like me.

I just want to show the world it's never too late to get your diploma, and show kids they should stay in school and not wait until you're old to get it.

My youngest uncle Randy and I were the first members of our entire family to ever go to college.

I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am Puerto Rican, born and raised in the south Bronx. My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale. Not so far off so that I wasn't able to succeed at those institutions.

When I took the SAT, I didn't get accepted into a single white school that I applied to. Now I've got honorary degrees from a lot of those schools that rejected me. Things are different now, but not that much different.

If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself... something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.

Education is an incredibly personal issue for me. If you're the first generation to go to college, sometimes you don't realize your potential until others point it out.

Public schools were designed as the great equalizers of our society - the place where all children could have access to educational opportunities to make something of themselves in adulthood.

My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.

You have to give kids from ordinary families a ladder. You have to show them there's a way out.

For me specifically, it was important to graduate. In my family, I was one of the first graduates. My mom did not have a college degree. My dad did not have a college degree.