Quotes About Hardship

It was 1939. There was no money or jobs around. I did my parents a favor and joined the Navy.

I'm from Gary, Indiana, and everybody's damn near at the poverty level. It's a rough city to grow up in, and it's a modern-day ghost town.

Necessity has the face of a dog.

What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.

I was from a tough neighborhood, and we didn't have a lot of money, but my dad worked hard, and my mom is good at budgeting things. That made me appreciate things.

Growing up in the rural south, my family didn't look like our neighbors, and we didn't have much. There were times that were tough, but we had each other, and we had the opportunity to do anything, to be anything, as long as we were willing to work for it.

The work ahead will be hard. These times demand the best of us - all of us, but we can do this. Together, we can do this. We can get this country working again. We can get this economy growing again. We can make the safety net safe again. We can do this.

Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness.

I never expect business to be easy.

I will never forget seeing my parents coming home from the strawberry fields, looking through their bags to see if they had any leftover Doritos bags he'd buy.

I was raised poor, in a tenement building in Union City, New Jersey, the son of Cuban immigrants.

I don't know how my parents ever paid for my dance classes when I was little. We even had to line our shoes with newspaper when there were holes in them because we couldn't afford to get them soled.

Teachers have such hard jobs and they don't get paid well. And in order to be a teacher you need a lot of education, so people aren't teachers for any other reason than they want to be, and they want to help educate the next generation of people.

My mom was not able to buy us the expensive Air Jordans, so if I wanted something that was a little bit nicer, my brother and I, we had to go earn money for it.

I feel very lucky that I've been able to carve out any niche at all in this business. It's so hard to get into.

My father used to be away for months at a time, and he'd never leave any money for food, so my brother and I had to go out and nick it.

For many, the American dream has become a nightmare.

I used to spend my nights oversewing dresses for a local dressmaker in order to pay for my school equipment.

I played acoustic guitar so intensely, for so long - for nine hours a day as a 10-year-old, writing songs through the night, on tour constantly from when I was 19 - that I destroyed my arms and shoulders in the process.

When people see what I have now, they have no idea of where I came from and how I didn't have anything growing up.

I remember someone saying to my mom that it must be so glamorous to have a child acting in movies. They had no idea how hard it was for her.

Growing up, I had no idea just how hard my dad worked to make it all work.

It's not the easiest life in the world, but then no life is easy.

I have no problem talking about how hard it's been, how broke I've been, and how broke I was not even that long ago.