Quotes About Hardship

My dad was a baggage handler at Heathrow and careful with money. He worked hard and had three jobs when I was young. I wish I'd inherited his care for money. Sadly, I've grown up to be rather scatty when it comes to finances.

Please remember that my great grandmother was a slave. My grandmother was a sharecropper. My mother was a factory worker.

As a son of Jamaican immigrants whose father cut sugarcane as a contract farm worker for over a decade and whose mother was a cook who fed those migrant workers out in the fields, the odds have always been against me growing up in rural South Bay, Fla.

I worked offshore as an oil worker for a couple of years.

I grew up in Southern Oregon. My father was a sawmill worker and a logger, and his job put food on the table.

My grandfather was a really, really tough no-nonsense factory worker who emigrated from Ireland in about 1900 to Bridgeport, Conn. He had a big effect on me. Those guys who took a great leap out into what they knew not were the ones who were the real stars, the real heroes.

My parents never went to college. My dad started as an hourly worker.

I am the son of a mine worker.

My grandmother worked as a front-line service worker in the hospitals of Toronto Centre and broke her back doing it in the process.

As a low-income worker, my take-home pay, at best, was about $200 a week.

You don't know what hard times are, daddy. Hard times are when the textile workers around this country are out of work, they got 4 or 5 kids and can't pay their wages, can't buy their food. Hard times are when the autoworkers are out of work, and they tell 'em to go home.

As long as they are working, they should be legalized. I admire so much each and every migrant. They are the most loyal workers in the U.S. economy. They build the homes of those who are attacking them.

I remember as a little girl going down to the beet fields in the Dakotas and in Nebraska and Wyoming as migrant workers when I was very, very small, like, I was, like, 5 years old, I believe. And I remember going out there, you know, traveling to these states and living in these little tarpaper shacks that they had in Wyoming.

I never had a childhood. I started working when I was 7 years old. I got $1 a day getting water for the workers at the sugar cane plant.

Whenever I write about immigration, I hear heart-wrenching stories of computer workers who are unemployed and facing severe hardship.

In prosperous times, the marginal workers get by. But in tough times, they get the shaft.

Full-time workers earning the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 only earn about $14,500 a year in wages - below the poverty line for a family of two. That's unacceptable.

In our economic structure, the people who work the hardest oftentimes make the least. I know migrant farm workers who do back-breaking labor every day, or Uber drivers and Lyft drivers who drive 10 to 12 hours a day in traffic. You can't be lazy doing that kind of work.

I grew up with a bunch of factory workers.

New Yorkers would be shocked to learn of the conditions some construction workers in our city toil under.

It hasn't always been easy. There's a lot of hard moments. Sometimes you learn from the end of the bench. Sometimes you learn from injuries. Sometimes you learn the most through the hard things. If you can keep a good attitude and keep on working, eventually situations change, and you can put those things to use.

I struggled with being a broke college graduate, and while all my friends were getting career jobs, I was working horrible part-time jobs. That's why now, even when I get tired, I think, 'This is what I asked for.'

I came from a poor family, so working and going to school at the same time was natural. It taught me multi-tasking, although we didn't call it that back then. I learned I could never be idle, I need to be doing many things at once.

My father was a factory worker, and we were really poor. But everything I earned peddling papers and working in stores, he made me put aside for education.