Blue Collar Quotes

#1. Dan gave chase with his big, blue-collar hands grasping at my shirttail.

Bobby Adair

#2. Growing up training, I use to get up so early I would wave to the garbage men going by. So, I had this relationship with Blue Collar America and I really liked it. I felt that lots of those people looked forward to me winning.

Gerry Cooney

#3. The workplace revolution that transformed the lives of blue-collar workers in the 1970s and 1980s is finally reaching the offices and cubicles of the white-collar workers.

Tom Peters

#4. I think of being an actor as a blue-collar profession.

Joe Mantegna

#5. I also have always liked the monster within idea. I like the zombies being us. Zombies are the blue-collar monsters.

George A. Romero

#6. America needs football. It's a real blue-collar sport; it's played with a blue-collar mentality, a mentality that's the backbone of this country.

Troy Polamalu

#7. Conservatives like to talk about 'the strivers' who share what they like to think of as Conservative values. But as I found in my Blue Collar Tories research in 2012, such people no longer see the party as their natural ally.

Michael Ashcroft

#8. The travels before and after the tour are what add up to what you're doing. You are really called into service - and it's the service industry man, it's blue collar man, I'm sweating by the second song. It's construction work from that second song on.

David Lee Roth

#9. I come from a blue-collar family, and I'm just glad for the work.

Wes Craven

#10. I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood and was raised by a man who did not emote, ever ... I always cry at movies, and when I was a kid, I would try to hide it. It wasn't something a kid in Oaklyn, N.J., did. So I have these weird hang-ups about emotions.

Matthew Quick

#11. It's not that blue-collar philosophy is misunderstood, it's that blue-collar philosophy shouldn't exist in the first place. The ultimate question is not the justification of ones existence when your belly screams for sustenance? People are hungry god damn it!

Mick Lexington

#12. Many blue-collar families struggling to pay rent would be happy to skip paying optional union dues.

Kevin O'Leary

#13. Once Michigan stood proud. In addition to GM, Ford and Chrysler, it was home base for the United Auto Workers, a powerful escalator transporting hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers into America's middle class.

Kevin O'Leary

#14. I was raised in a very blue-collar family.

Jamie Moyer

#15. I think a lot of people see, obviously, the business side of my father. But, I mean, he's just a great guy. We enjoyed the holidays so much. To be able to spend time with him when he's not necessarily working or not doing the political thing, I mean, he's much more of a blue collar American.

Donald Trump Jr.

#16. In the 1960s, if you were a blue collar worker or uneducated, and you had an injury on the job, the company basically dismissed you.

Howard Schultz

#17. I did grow up poor. My mom managed to get a job as a custodian at our church, and it was really just a favor for her, and my dad's an electrician - just a blue-collar family, and the house was usually falling apart.

Crystal Bowersox

#18. Now Mitt is not a perfect candidate. He has a number of problems. It's hard for him, for blue collar families like mine to identify with him. It's hard for economic conservatives to identify with him. He needs to do more to reach out to Latinos ...

George Pataki

#19. To me, the responsibility of an actor is to recreate humanity honestly. I never feel like an actor, I always look at it from a blue collar perspective.

Michael Jai White

#20. 'Detroit 1-8-7' - the numbers are police slang for murder - is filmed in that blue-collar Michigan city, providing a flavor of authenticity. Detroit offers a unique visual landscape that tells the story of the city and what it's been through.

Michael Imperioli

#21. It was a source of shame for my family that I was in rock and roll, which is so blue-collar. It just isn't done. And I felt it, too.

Liz Phair

#22. There's so much built-up camaraderie and sacrifice, and football is such a tough man's game. I think that's why it's so popular. That's why so many blue-collar communities and people can really feel attracted to this because it is a blue-collar struggle that football players go through.

Troy Polamalu

#23. As much as I'd like to think and as much as people mistakenly think my audience is blue collar people in the heart of America, my audience is basically, in the States, an NPR audience. I play college towns in the summer because that's who comes to see me.

Steve Earle

#24. My mom was the picture of the blue-collar mom: Two and three and four jobs to make sure that me and my sister never needed, that was her thing.

Ne-Yo

#25. I'll tell ya this: I come from an educated family. My father was an attorney representing blue collar workers, and my uncle was a chemical engineer ... on my mom's side, all my uncles were engineers - all ten of them.

Joe Piscopo

#26. I think a lot of blue collar people related to me because a lot of people work for their money.

Larry Bird

#27. I'll always have this blue-collar connection. For every guy, there is an opportunity to be a lot better than he thought he could be. We can't all be the star of the team, but we can be a star in our life.

Sylvester Stallone

#28. I'm not the least bit polished, I come from a blue collar background and I never thought I could feel comfortable around the English.

Paul Walker

#29. I did a bunch of blue-collar jobs, because I knew I'd wind up with a white-collar job at some point, and I wanted to, I don't know, I just wanted to taste life. I dug graves for a while, I worked as a stock boy in a big department store, I worked in a bank.

Graydon Carter

#30. I grew up in a modest neighborhood just outside of Los Angeles. It was an industrial community of blue-collar, working people ... some of the hardest-working people I've ever met.

Hilda Solis

#31. Poor kids often dressed up. It was rich kids who dressed down, carefully assembling a blue-collar costume: eighty-dollar designer jeans that had been professionally faded and tattered and worn-out

Joe Hill

#32. Joe Frazier was the epitome of a champion. I mean, here is a guy who was total old school, blue collar, who would fight anybody. You know, he didn't tell you he was the best fighter pound for pound.

Sugar Ray Leonard

#33. I understand a lot of celebrities lose weight because they have the opportunity to get in shape and become healthier, but when you get so polished, you can't tell the story of a blue-collar family anymore.

Cristela Alonzo

#34. Getting a group of rowdy, blue-collar workers together in one room and putting in a tape that shows a guy in a leisure suit putting his hand on his secretary's ass and you've got complete and total anarchy, ladies and gentleman.

Tara Sivec

#35. My father's family came from Virginia and Philadelphia. He wasn't a brother who talked a lot. He was a workingman, a quiet, blue-collar dude.

Ice-T

#36. I have so much respect for people who do blue-collar work because I come from that background myself.

Cynthia Kadohata

#37. Really, you just play football; that's all I can do ... I don't change. I'm going to always play tough, hard - that's the way I was brought up at Nebraska, where I really learned football from the Pelinis and that staff and continue to play hard, play blue-collar football.

Ndamukong Suh

#38. The citizens of Love Canal provided an example of how a blue-collar community with few resources can win against great odds (a multi-billion-dollar international corporation and an unresponsive government), using the power of the people in our democratic system.

Lois Gibbs

#39. I grew up on a pig farm in southeast Nebraska. When I started doing the Blue Collar Tour, I thought it was kind of funny because I faked my accent, so everybody thought I lived in an apartment somewhere. But I grew up on a pig farm.

Larry The Cable Guy

#40. The flaw in our character is our insistence on separating blue-collar jobs from white-collar jobs, and encouraging one form of education over another.

Mike Rowe

#41. Jeff built a culture that was defined by a blue-collar work ethic (symbolized by a hard hat), as well as selflessness, teamwork, relentless effort, and continuous improvement.

Jon Gordon

#42. The base has chosen or is choosing a candidate that the establishment says is absolutely unacceptable. And what that means is this marriage of an elite, big business-backed establishment and a blue-collar, downwardly mobile base has really come to a divorce.

Mara Liasson

#43. Vernon Reis opened the world to me through books. He taught me that while I was physically firmly planted in blue-collar Auburn, Washington in the 50s and early 60s, intellectually I could go anywhere, explore anything, and sample exciting new ideas simply by opening a book.

Christine Gregoire

#44. Kinsey was never a lawyer. She's strictly blue collar.

Sue Grafton

#45. What is the biggest public forum in the United States? We were told it's the Super Bowl. The ad shows kids working at blue-collar jobs, and the final statement is just written text: Who's going to pay for the trillion dollar deficit?

Joan Blades

#46. I don't know what to think of the money. It's kind of mind-boggling. I come from a middle-class, blue-collar family. We've never really had money.

Pat Burrell

#47. The only honourable work my parents knew was blue-collar. But while my father Robert ran a pawnbroker's shop, and my mother was a waitress, I moved into a middle-class world with a level of security they never knew.

Norman Foster

#48. We never understood the concept of people going onstage and giving anything less than 100 percent. Maybe that's a blue-collar work ethic, but I call it just ethics.

Steven Van Zandt

#49. The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone's drunk and ugly and they're going to pass out in a few minutes.

Leon Wieseltier

#50. In Britain, the idea one could go from blue-collar beginnings to the university was so far out, it was quite unthinkable. I took a variety of jobs to pay for tuition - from ice-cream salesman to night-club bouncer. Whatever earned the most money in the least time.

Norman Foster

#51. I didn't have to go all the way to India for spiritual enlightenment. The blue-collar spirituality of everyday life was right in front of me, it was in every nook and cranny if I wanted to seek it, but I had chosen to ignore it.

Anthony Kiedis

#52. Not all Republicans are rich, dress in three-piece suits, and have $200 haircuts. I'm somebody who's lived from paycheck to paycheck. I'm focusing on my blue-collar roots - I've worked side by side with union people.

Joe Wurzelbacher

#53. When you strip the bark off of Donald Trump, I think he's a very practical person. I think he's a very smart person. He's got an analytical mind. I think he's tapped into something. His son said he's the "blue collar billionaire."

Anthony Scaramucci

#54. Having parents who were hard working, blue collar, and staunchly independent, neither political party's positioning really impressed me.

Kurt Bills

#55. When I hit my 20s, I struggled to make it. I got married at 19, and my daughter, Je'Niece, was born a year later. I worked blue collar jobs during the day and comedy clubs at night, and I was earning about $25 a year doing stand-up.

Bernie Mac

#56. I much prefer the company of the crew, the sort of 'blue-collar working person.' I much more have that sensibility than what the public perceives as what a typical actor would have.

Michael Cudlitz

#57. In some circles Stalin has in fact been making a comeback. His portrait hangs above the dashboard of trucks, a symbol of blue- collar nostalgia for a tough leader.

Serge Schmemann

#58. Now this is the first rule of fight club: There is nothing a blue collar Nobody in Oregon with a public school education can imagine that a million-billion people haven't already done ...

Chuck Palahniuk

#59. But it's much more exciting to make Die Hard. One of the reasons that I think that movie is so successful is it deals with those very important blue-collar relationship themes. But it's more visually beautiful to show things blowing up. It just gives you more on the screen.

Penn Jillette

#60. My personality is that I'm a human being like everybody else, just a citizen and a blue collar guy.

Lee Greenwood

#61. In the theater we're like blue-collar workers: It's a physical job, you don't make a lot of money, and you're on the road all the time. It's worth it in that it's the best job in the world, but you have to negotiate living in cities that don't always accommodate you.

Randy Harrison

#62. I don't aim it at anybody specific, I don't aim my characters to make old people laugh or young people or professionals or blue collar, just whatever I think is going to be funny and it just so happens that.

Jeff Dunham

#63. I'm a blue collar guy.

Bill Engvall

#64. That's what I play - blue-collar Italian-Americans. You got to be typecast in order to work. I've been blessed.

Michael Rispoli

#65. I'm entirely uneducated. I went to public school - public in the American sense - a blue-collar, working-class school. I never got a scholarship, I left when I was 15, never did any exams.

Rupert Graves

#66. When I was five or six, I asked to sing at a big family party, and ever since I got up there in front of everyone in my suit - it had a blue collar, like in 'Scarface' - I had the bug.

Jencarlos Canela

#67. Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security.

Christopher Lasch

#68. I'm like a blue-collar writer. I just sit down every day and I write.

Philip Kan Gotanda

#69. My family were really hard-working, blue-collar people, and I didn't know the idea or concept of working and having fun. I thought you just worked and made money to support your family.

Debra Monk

#70. What's odd is that nobody in my family is an artist. My cousins are, like, secretaries at law firms or nurses or just more blue collar. And I was in a baseball team. I used to be, like, a really big tomboy.

Melonie Diaz

#71. My experience growing up in a rough and tumble town in the blue-collar world of Western Pennsylvania in the 1970s was that anything a man did was always more important than anything a woman did.

Tawni O'Dell

#72. I say that in jest a little bit, but Donald Trump is a blue collar guy with a balance sheet. That's the way he likes to have fun.

Donald Trump Jr.

#73. Carl Barks was born in Merrill, Oregon, in 1901, grew up in a farming family, and eventually held a number of blue-collar jobs. He knew what it was to be poor and to work hard for a living.

Michael Dirda

#74. I'm a doofus from the Valley, a blue-collar guy.

Adam Carolla

#75. I think fans cling to me because I'm a blue-collar guy in a blue-collar city.

Hines Ward

#76. Part of the reason that women go to college is to get out of the food service, clerical, pink-collar ghetto and into a more white-collar job. That does not necessarily mean they are being paid more than the blue-collar jobs men have.

Gloria Steinem

#77. The beauty of 'Parenthood' is that it's a blue-collar working family, and it reflects attitudinal shifts that occur within people and families.

Craig T. Nelson

#78. I've tried not to get sucked into the Hollywood hierarchy system. Personally, I don't like it when people are deferential to me because I'm an established filmmaker. It's a blue-collar sensibility.

James Cameron

#79. I go home at the end of the day and I rarely talk about what I did that day. So my wife's experience is just like that of anybody else whose husband goes away to a blue collar job and comes home bruised and dirty and often proud of the work that they're doing.

Adam Savage

#80. If blue collar jobs are leaving and white collar jobs are outsourced what color collar jobs are left?

Bob Edwards

#81. The NBA is a big family, and I think of all these rookies as my brothers. I still believe I am blue collar among the All-Stars.

Yao Ming

#82. I come from a blue-collar town - and being from that place, you learn not to let anybody take advantage of you. You don't let people mistreat you. You stand up for what's right.

Mo'Nique

#83. I always relate respectfully with blue-collar people.

Jayson Williams

#84. Women's work, like much blue-collar work and agrarian work, is often invisible and uncredited, the work that holds the world together - maintenance work as the great feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles called it in her Maintenance Art manifesto.

Rebecca Solnit

#85. Reporters used to be blue-collar; at the Globe now, it's practically required that you have a trust fund.

Howie Carr

#86. A picture of me as this super affable sales guy gets painted, but in actuality, I'm pretty driven by hard work and love working with teams. What people discount is, I grew up in a very small blue-collar town in Massachusetts and have basically scrapped my way career wise.

Tim Armstrong

#87. We didn't do anything fancy. We just played blue-collar baseball.

Lou Piniella

#88. If you watch the 'Blue Collar Tour,' I was probably the least redneck of everybody.

Bill Engvall

#89. And I come here as a daughter, raised on the South Side of Chicago - by a father who was a blue-collar city worker and a mother who stayed at home with my brother and me.

Michelle Obama

#90. To me, country music's about life. It's about Monday through Friday. It's the blue-collar, 40-hour week, songs about life. It used to have more of a sound, but I think the heart of that's still the same. It's still American music.

Gary Allan

#91. The blue collar milieu was something that I really understood and resonated with me and I thought was underrepresented in American cinema.

Christian Bale

#92. Most people recognize that many blue-collar jobs pay more than white-collar jobs. Few act on that recognition.

Venkatesh G. Rao

#93. My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French.

Lorraine Bracco

#94. I consider myself a blue-collar actor, just chugging away.

Aaron Stanford

#95. I wanted to finish my career as a Steeler. I felt I just fit the mold as far as a blue-collar guy. I may not be the flashiest, most flamboyant wide receiver out there. But I get the job done for my team.

Hines Ward

#96. I'm a working-class kid from a blue-collar New England family.

R.A. Salvatore

#97. When I'm back home in Chicago, since 'Roseanne' was such a Midwestern, blue-collar show, that's what sticks out in people's minds.

Johnny Galecki

#98. Montreal is a great town. There's equal parts blue-collar town.

Jay Baruchel

#99. I was the adoring son of a Welsh-Irish father, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a Catholic Knight of Columbus who was a blue-collar, trade union organizer and, not surprisingly, a fervid Nixon-hater.

Bob Gunton

#100. When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.

Barbara Ehrenreich