Quotes About Family Background

#1. Los Angeles is such a great meritocracy. Where can someone with my background - don't have the right family background, the right religion, the right provenance or whatever you want to call it - I come here and I'm accepted. The city's been good to me. And I want to give back.

Eli Broad

#2. Anger rose in me. Didn't they know how hard I'd been working to overcome my family background? Now all my efforts were wasted.

Ji-li Jiang

#3. My family background was deeply Christian.

Abbe Pierre

#4. The revolution is carried out by means of one's thought, not through one's family background.

Kim Jong Il

#5. Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocean. They say, 'My great-grandparents came from wherever ... this is why we have this last name, why we do this thing at Christmas.' All the details get watered down but don't quite disappear.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#6. I believe God takes the things in our lives - family, background, education - and uses them as part of his calling. It might not be to become a pastor. But I don't think God wastes anything.

Eugene H. Peterson

#7. I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.

Anne Tyler

#8. I really don't know what makes a comedian. I think it's a family background and environment. Yet if you put the same ingredients in another person, he may never utter a funny line.

Bob Newhart

#9. The job of the school is to teach so well that family background is no longer an issue.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#10. Further Education should be about the ability to learn, not the ability to pay - everyone who is able should have the opportunity, regardless of their family background. I don't want to see students struggling with huge debts or frightened off even going to university in the first place.

Charles Kennedy

#11. Where success is concerned, people are not measured in inches, or pounds, or college degrees, or family background; they are measured by the size of their thinking.

John C. Maxwell

#12. Being rich and coming from a distinguished family background doesn't guarantee happiness, Abby. In fact, it might make happiness harder to find because you have to live up to akk that expectation.

V.C. Andrews

#13. My family background has always been very supportive. They're going to be there for me no matter what.

Mark Sanchez

#14. When it comes to work - hurry, hurry, hurry. When it comes to payment - delay, delay, delay. Caste, religion, family background nothing. Talent everything.

Aravind Adiga

#15. You have to set big goals for yourself. And you have to put aside all the negativity in your life that tells you that if you came from a certain education or a certain family background that you can't achieve big goals. That's one of the things that America has.

Brian Tracy

#16. My family background is Mexican, and I was born in Chicago. It's pretty much family tradition every time we get together for Christmas and major holidays to sing. Our family time is centered around the food and a little bit of performing for one another.

Ailyn Perez

#17. Children from a given family background, when put in schools of different social compositions, will achieve at quite different levels.

James S. Coleman

#18. I came from a folk-family background. Although we weren't really the all-singing, all-dancing-around-the-piano folkies or anything like that, there is that idea of singing and playing with your parents and your family and your cousins.

Teddy Thompson

#19. My family background was heavily slanted toward business and seafaring matters.

William Standish Knowles

#20. Seriously, I wanted to be an artist because I saw that it meant endless possibilities. I came from a badly managed family background, so art was a way of reinventing myself.

Sam Taylor-Wood

#21. I don't come from money or an educated family background or any sort of supportive family life, so all of my choices are made on my own.

Cat Power

#22. With my family background - my parents were both activists - writing about culture and politics came naturally.

Alexander Chee

#23. I come from a very big family from every economic background. Some of the streets I talk about, I've actually walked on because I have family from there. Jamaica has so many contradictions.

Marlon James

#24. I'm of Russian-Jewish background. Like many Soviet Jews, my parents were engineers. My family migrated from Ukraine to Israel when I was six. They arrived in Israel with very little ... Within a year of arriving in Israel, the Yom Kippur War happened.

Sasha Roiz

#25. My family making music was like a folk background, really: banging on tabletops, playing banjo and all kinds of things.

Dave Davies

#26. Coming from an African background, obviously the foundation of the family home is education, probably because my parents had to work a lot harder for everything that they've got in this country.

Tinie Tempah

#27. No one in my family had a retail or marketing background. They were professionals. They didn't understand just what I was doing by going into retailing. After I started, though, it got into my blood. I knew this was what I wanted.

Andrea Jung

#28. I came from a very poor background. I came from children's homes; I came from a violent family, and against all the odds, I succeeded.

DeObia Oparei

#29. A liberal education ... frees a man from the prison-house of his class, race, time, place, background, family and even his nation.

Robert M. Hutchins

#30. My father was a teacher and my mother also worked in the school, so the family has a background in education.

Nick Cave

#31. Bin Laden comes out of a business background - he studied public administration and economics at university, and he worked for his family company, which was obviously a rather successful enterprise.

Peter L. Bergen

#32. I could give him business cards...multi-camoflauge background. David, woodworker, amateur computer coder, and decoder extraordinaire," Lily daydreamed.

"Coder and decoder," Anna chuckled.

Kate Willis

#33. My background is that I came from a middle class family, and I think those values stay where ever you go.

Nita Ambani

#34. I was born in a family with a strong military background, so I chose to be a soldier.

Wang Jianlin

#35. We talked about politics constantly in my family growing up in North Carolina. There were always debates. Being of Greek background, it's in our blood to drink coffee and talk politics.

Zach Galifianakis

#36. I'm from a lower middle class background; all my family were immigrants.

Billy Corgan

#37. Hers was the kind of family that commissioned painters to immortalize its young: a background utterly alien to Strike, and one he had come to know like a dangerous foreign country.

Robert Galbraith

#38. My mother's background was Scottish. She came from an old family, some of whom lived in upper New York State and some of whom had come over from Scotland.

Alan Hovhaness

#39. My background is not typical hip-hop. I didn't grow up in the projects. I grew up in a single family home in a middle-class suburb. That doesn't mean I didn't experience hardship, but to me it's not about that, it's about the future and where we are trying to take it.

Kid Cudi

#40. I didn't want to be the best at anything; I just wanted to blend in. And that was kind of my existence throughout my family experiences at home of just kind of blending in in the background through my other siblings, which was easy to do.

Misty Copeland

#41. Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won't be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It'll be because people have changed. They'll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It's healthy.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#42. My family is my biggest critic. Since they come from a non-filmi background, they give me an audience's point of view. They have been very supportive of me.

Randeep Hooda

#43. The results indicate that heterogeneity of race and heterogeneity of family educational background can increase the achievement of children from weak educational backgrounds with no adverse effect on children from strong educational backgrounds.

James S. Coleman

#44. Mom was always doing something for somebody. She came from a Czech background, one that made her a devout Catholic and gave her a strong belief in the family.

Eugene Cernan

#45. Using the Africanist model, each generation should take the family name to a higher place. My father's folks were sharecroppers in South Carolina. He went to Harlem. They were still poor, but they moved up. If my parents didn't do this and offer me this background, I wouldn't be here.

Ving Rhames

#46. perhaps we are not as free as we might think in the first place. Given your background, your friends, your family, the books you read, and the movies you watch, how surprising is your vote in a federal election?

Tyler Cowen

#47. I feel like I grew up being babysat by a television, and all I ever wanted to do was be in movies, direct movies, make movies, but it took me a really long time to be honest with myself about it because my background is that my family was very poor.

Noel Wells

#48. Hitler was highly secretive - not least about his personal life, his background, and his family.

Ian Kershaw

#49. My background is in biology. Before getting into the family business, I worked at the Predatory Bird Research Group at the University of California at Santa Cruz, fundraising for them.

Nell Newman

#50. I use myself as a template for my comedy. So first my background as a Muslim man, my being a doctor, I talk about my family quite a lot, my kids. Anything that resonates with me I talk about. The important thing is it should be able to work in a family setting.

Riaad Moosa

#51. I think that the American people are curious about who a candidate is, what their background is, who their family is, what their faith experience has been, their education, their work experience. All of those are factors that voters look at because they want to take a measure of the individual.

Michele Bachmann

#52. Most people might think that I've come from a musical background, but nobody in my family was in any kind of band or played anything. I just picked up music from breakdancing really, that's what got me to listen to music, and in general I was just a creative guy.

Lunice

#53. I was aware of it, but I grew up in a very a-religious family. My mother never went to church, she never had any religious training or background. It was never a part of our social interaction.

Donald Johanson

#54. When an individual from underprivileged background gets higher education, he/she uplifts the entire family. 90% of students at Namal college are from underprivileged backgrounds. I look forward for your support in this noble cause

Imran Khan

#55. I like the fact that this kind of family has been seen in a movie a million times: teenage kids, the family is a bit strained and they don't have enough money, but in the background the guy used to be a Gene Simmons type.

Gary Cole

#56. Life is a series of family photos in which you keep moving to the rear until finally you're a portrait in the background.

Robert Breault

#57. She had listened to him, partly sympathetic, partly horrified. For it was one thing for her to reject her background, to be critical of her family's heritage, another to hear it from him.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#58. Head Start is designed to ensure that all children - regardless of their family's income, race, or ethnic background - are able to enter kindergarten ready to learn.

Lucille Roybal-Allard

#59. To play June, I had an immediate connect with her background and culture. We grew up with the same religion and shared a lot of the same values of family and spirituality. But I was really so inspired by what a modern woman she was.

Reese Witherspoon

#60. My filmmaking background has really just been making movies with my friends since I was 12 years old. That's how I feel I learned how to tell a story visually, by just going out with a video camera and making movies with my friends and family.

Rian Johnson

#61. Religion is so much more than the god you pray to. The religion that you associate with, it's culture, it is family, it is background. That is something that I have always grown up with.

Aasif Mandvi

#62. When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.

Samuel Alito

#63. My family is a Jewish Iranian family, but I was born in Turkey and raised in Italy. So it's a very mixed background.

Nouriel Roubini

#64. I was raised on a family farm in western Minnesota. So I didn't have the background to prepare me for this business life.

Glen Taylor

#65. I come from a very working-class background, so my family would have been downstairs in the past, as opposed to upstairs. People are often quite surprised to hear that, that I'm not actually posh.

Michelle Dockery

#66. I come from the slums; I come from a hard background; I come from a poor family; and I was a soldier.

Michael Caine

#67. As a regent, I hope to bring that important perspective of a typical family visitor in combination with my background as a Member of Congress and a proponent of the Smithsonian's efforts to reach all Americans.

Xavier Becerra