Class Background Quotes

For myself, I never thought that I'd ever be able to even buy a house. Sometimes when you don't have it, and you're not surrounded my entrepreneurs, you don't think about it.

It is true that jihadists are often middle class. But that’s because terrorist groups are like other employers: they accept the best candidates who apply.

Practically everyone I know now is from a middle- or upper-middle-class background, and I no longer have the huge chip on my shoulder that I carried around for so many years. I'm not sure it comes out much in the work, but coming from this kind of background is absolutely central to my identity, to my sense of who I am.

If you've been fat, you will always feel and see the world as a fat person; you know how difficult it is... It's the same coming from a working-class background... it never leaves you.

I think that a lot of terrorists have been middle class and, more surprisingly, many of them have been people who were not directly affected by the things they're angry about.

My dad grew up in a working-class Jewish neighbourhood, and I got a scholarship from my dad's union to go to college. I went there to get an education, not as an extension of privilege.

I think Ant and I were ambitious because of where we come from. Both of us are from working-class families on council estates in Newcastle.

I'm not arguing for a return to the grammar school system, but there must be a way of identifying bright kids from ordinary backgrounds and giving them a world-class education.

Character and class are character and class. Either you have it or you don't.

I was an only child. Both my parents came from working-class families in Hackney, east London.

My childhood was as heavily gendered as any you would find in a working-class household in Lincolnshire.

The acting I got into by doing what we call pantomime, when I was sixteen. And, there were loads of very pretty girls in the show. I realized; I found out very early on, that the lead comic gets the girl. So, that was cool. When I went to university, I studied Economic Social History. And drama. That kind of got me into it. My main passion was to make films. It was never to be an actor. At that time, there weren't many opportunities for a working class Scottish actor. It was kind of an English thing. And it required a certain mannered cerebral acting style that I couldn't relate to.

My dad's family were pretty working class, actually.

I don't like to play the macho card, but I grew up in a working-class family and a working-class culture.

For the better part of my life, I was always trying to manufacture somehow what I would consider 'living.' Because I grew up sort of upper-middle class and I didn't relate so much to that as a life, and I wanted to really find 'living.'

In the Communist period, the revolutionaries, the leaders were almost always - Che Guevara, people like that - they were always from the middle class and the educated. And empathy is a very powerful emotion.

I grew up in a very middle-class life. I'm grateful for it - it has given me a lot of stability.

I think the country will get behind someone who comes from a working-class background, who truly epitomizes the American Dream.

Because I came from the working class, I still identify with them. I don't identify with the middle class.

I come from a working class community in eastern Scotland, and I've always been a populist, though not a patronising populist.

As a working-class boy, golf was never really on my radar, and when I was growing up, Irish football was my sporting passion.

I am born and raised in the Bronx. Where I grew up, it is a really working-class neighborhood and it does give you a really good work ethic.

I think BBC3 gave me my first commissions because I wasn't a middle-class, highbrow journalist. I was able to speak to the contributors on a level that perhaps some journalists don't.

We were working class, and you don't lose that. Later on, I bolted on media middle class... and now people like me are in the House of Lords.

I lived in a kind of a middle class home, and I didn't really have a lot of experience with the justice system or prisons or really being aware of that world.