Poverty Overcoming Quotes

I came from a middle class family hence I had to struggle hard for success.

Although they arrived in New York penniless, my parents scraped together enough savings to establish the first of several small businesses just after I was born.

[My mother] worked at thrift stores and she didn't have a high school education. She sacrificed everything she had for me and my brothers. I never went without. She showed me that she could put food on the table, buy us Jordans, we had the best clothes and she worked two-three odd jobs.

My mom struggled for a long time growing up poor, and then we were on welfare when I was a kid. So to see her kids, not just me, be successful and making money and happy and healthy and in good relationships - it means so much to her after all that she's been through.

My dad's side of the family was very poor while growing up, but my dadi raised three kids, got my dad through medical school, sent my uncle to America where he wanted to work and helped my aunt become an accountant, because that's what she wanted to do.

The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.

My father bought three ramshackle houses, rebuilt them, rented them out, kept clawing his way up the ladder. A man with a third grade education from the south.

My mum was working as a cleaner at some hotels to make extra money so she could pay for her degree. I'll never forget waking up at five in the morning before school and helping her clean the toilets at the hotel in Stonebridge.

My father grew up quite poor actually in a small farming village in South India. His grandfather was a farmer, his father was a farmer, and he was expected to be a farmer as well - his life took a different path.