Quotes About Opportunity

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

I think the reason working-class people don't write books is because they are encouraged to believe that only certain people are permitted to write books.

My working-class Italian-American parents didn't go to school, there were no books in the house.

As a working-class girl, receiving free school dinners, I studied art history. Having never had the chance to visit art galleries, I devoured the knowledge, and it has served me well as a practising artist.

As a boy, I was never interested in theater because I came from a working-class Scottish home. I thought, 'I want to do movies.' Then it was finding the means to do it.

I had so many offers after 'True Blood' for things that were someone in the same vein, but nowhere near Alan Ball's vision. Or something that was over-the-top and fantastical. And I've always wanted to play the regular, working-class mom, and I've never really had the chance to do that.

I'm a great candidate for why arts funding shouldn't be cut, because I had no experience other than what was at school, I'm from a working-class town, there were no theaters, and the cinema closed when I was a kid. Anything that gave me a voice or a way to express myself I went running headlong toward.

There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different - from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one.

I came from a working-class family, but I was supported by a grant system and had my fees paid, so I came out of Oxford with a debt of something like £200.

I'm a working-class former apprentice electrician; at the age of 14, if you'd told me I would one day be standing on a stage with Mel Brooks, I'd have thought you were off your head. But these things can happen.

People like me who grew up in a working-class town, who don't have a college education, you don't usually hear from us.

People say I've 'retained' my Cockney accent. I can do any accent, but I wanted other working-class boys to know that they could become actors.

I suppose I don't have to work, but I do love working. I class myself as a working-class girl, and I've never stopped working. When I'm offered shows here, there and the other, I do an awful lot because I feel other people would love to be offered what I'm offered; who am I to say no? I'm definitely working class, and I always will be.

I come from a working-class background, and I thought I had to be studying something that would get me a job.

We need a brand as a party that says we're the party that are going to help working-class people, white people, black people, brown people, gay people, straight people, improve opportunity for them to grow their wages, to have security, economic security.

I wish that positions of power dependent on education were as open to abused children, poor children, working-class children as they are to the children of the rich and successful. I really wish that were true.

I reckoned my accent and class would count against me; I didn't see actresses as being working-class.

I believe that if we are going to create jobs in this country, then let's create jobs that will absolutely put the working-class people at work to the point where they have one job. They don't have to work three because they have to work Wendy's, McDonald's, and Walmart to survive.

The Margaret Thatchers of this country made it through - like I did - because of the grammar school system, which gave the opportunity of a lifetime to working-class kids. It put them on a level playing field with the privately educated kids, and opened up the top universities to them.

We concentrate too much on ethnic diversity and not enough on class. It's dead important to represent loads of different cultures. But what the BBC doesn't do enough of is thinking about getting people from more working-class backgrounds.

Our admissions system should be a vehicle for justice, but it is failing working-class students, especially those who are the first in their family to go to university.

Undoubtedly there is a difference between people with money having access to the arts that people from working-class backgrounds don't have, but that's not their fault. I'm not taking anything away from these brilliant actors who are doing great stuff in Hollywood. A lot of them are my friends.

In Britain, we need to start presenting the option of being a writer in front of black women. We need to present the idea of being a writer into poorer communities because the majority of black people in this country are working class. We need to let working-class people know that their voices are important.

There is a lot more opportunity now, and I welcome all the conversations we are having about diversity, about women and about class... I come from a very working-class background, and I think the class thing is still probably more tricky.