Disadvantaged Background Quotes

It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence, and that sentence you will find in Gray's Elegy : "The short and simple annals of the poor." That's my life, and that's all you or anyone can make out of it.

I was poor white trash, no glitter, no glamour, but I'm not ashamed of anything.

My dad grew up really poor in Mississippi. I paid attention to that because I thought that's a healthier thing to pay attention to than, like, some statue of a great-great-great grandfather who has no connection to my life.

In my wildest imagination, I never thought that the fifth of six children born to Helen and Buddy Watts - in a poor black neighborhood, in the poor rural community of Eufaula, Oklahoma - would someday be called Congressman.

I come from where Mike Tyson came from. I come from right across the street from Jay-Z. I didn't have a pond in my backyard. I saw violence.

I grew up originally in Rochester. It was where I was born and a very tough neighbourhood with a lot of violence. I consider myself lucky. When I was aged 11, in 1998, Dad moved us to a suburban area from what was a ghetto area. It gave me a chance of survival.

When you come from an under-privileged background, oftentimes, you feel a little overwhelmed by your education or your lack of.

I grew up poor. I never had any money. I was a hobo, you know, ride the freights.

When you grow up on the other side of the tracks, you're used to taking a few bumps.

For some people, it's like I can't be a good actress because I grew up with a silver spoon.

I am from the ghetto.

I grew up in one of the most deprived parts of Britain. I know the problems which inner-city children face.

I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Sweden, which, during my teens, gentrified and is now completely middle class and even upper middle class.

I'd go to, like, six different schools in one year. We were on welfare, and my mom never ever worked.

I grew up in Chillum Heights in the Washington, D.C. area., and it was never a garden spot. When guys go, 'Hey, when I grew up, my neighborhood was tough, and it was this and that'... the reality is that it was just a terribly sad place. And thank God, I was able to escape it.

I didn't have life that good coming up. I wasn't born with a lot of money. We weren't dirt poor, but we weren't rich. All I knew was struggle.

If you had looked at my life when I was 14 years old and said, 'Well, what's going to happen to this kid?' you would have concluded that I would have struggled with what academics call upward mobility.

Growing up, we didn't have anything. My mum wasn't well, so I was in three care homes then foster homes before me and my little brother went back to her. I was passed from pillar to post.

I think a kid from the inner city, if I had to recruit, is the ideal person for MMA. They'd be less likely to be affected by hard work. They'd be less likely to not appreciate something when someone is helping them out, because they probably don't have a ton of stuff.

I was born on a plantation, and things weren't so good. We didn't have any money. I never thought of the word 'poor' 'til I got to be a man, but when you live in a house that you can always peek out of and see what kind of day it is, you're not doing so well. And your rest room is not inside the house.

Poverty makes you wise but it's a curse.

Besides being a slum kid with no great education in anything except how to fight and stay alive and steal, I also had this temper.

In Sweden, I went to an English school, where there was a mishmash of people from all over the world. Some were diplomatic kids with a lot of money, some were ghetto kids who came up from the suburbs, and I grew up in between. There's a community of second generation immigrants, and I became part of that because I had an American father.

It wasn't as if I was simply some guy who had never seen the other side of the tracks.

I came from poverty and was part of those circumstances.