As Jews, their families left Russia to escape the poverty and the antisemitism.

Going to school and working for good marks, indeed working for very good marks, was a serious business.

My parents regarded school teachers as higher beings, as did many immigrants.

As Jews, their families left Russia to escape the poverty and the antisemitism.

My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

Natures' curriculum cannot be changed.

Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants.

I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.

About 1900 my parents came to the United States as children from what was then the Polish area of Russia.

This was good training for research, because large parts of experimental work are sometimes boring or involve the use of skills in which one is not particularly gifted.

The remoteness of my parents from the schools, so unfashionable today, was often painful for me, but I learned early to deal with an outside and sometimes hard world.

It was good fortune to be a child during the Depression years and a youth during the war years.

A parent being called to the school because their child had misbehaved was as serious as a parent being called to the police station because their child had robbed a bank.

Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's.

There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library.

Naturally, I have compensated in my adult years by owning very large numbers of books.

I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.

They wanted me to play more sports because they were acutely sensitive to their children being one hundred percent American, and they believed that all Americans played sports and loved sports.

I was also interested in chemistry, but my parents were not willing to buy me a chemistry set.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

I came from poverty and was part of those circumstances.

The media seems to think only abortion and gay marriage are religious issues. Poverty is a moral issue, it's a faith issue, it's a religious issue.

The United States cannot feed every person, lift every person out of poverty, cure every disease, or stop every conflict. But our power and status have conferred upon us a tremendous responsibility to humanity.

False shame accompanies a man that is poor, shame that either harms a man greatly or profits him; shame is with poverty, but confidence with wealth.

Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life.

By the time this concert ends this evening, 30,000 Africans will have died because of extreme poverty. By this time tomorrow evening, another 30,000. This does not make sense.

We have had virtually unlimited access to abortion for nearly twenty years. Yet during that same period, more and more women and children have slipped into poverty.

Stand-up comedy and poverty. Those were my two main endeavors.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.

You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.

Without Social Security, poverty rates for African American seniors would more than double.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

And I think that after nearly 85 years upon this planet that I have a right after working so hard at showing the desolation and the poverty, to show something beautiful for somebody as well.

Individual effort is almost relatively impossible to cope with the big problem of poverty as we see it.

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.

To be a star is to own the world and all the people in it. After a taste of stardom, everything else is poverty.

The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDs, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of those wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead - everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real.

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.

People never knew we were poor, but out of that poverty came the most incredible inventions - board games, recipes... we never stopped inventing.

As of today, we do not need expert reports by the authoritative analytical institutions to realise that the reasons for such a situation in our community lie in global inequality, poverty and illiteracy.

Poverty wants some, luxury many, and avarice all things.

It wasn't poverty that drove me on.

I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.

While a handful of countries and a small number of people are leading ample life, dozens of countries and billions of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America are being left in absolute poverty.

I write to escape; to escape poverty.

It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as "Soho" poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.

Let me first say that I don't think the millennium target of cutting global poverty in half is an impossible or abstract target. I think it is a real and achievable goal.

My family kinda hit the skids. We were experiencing poverty at that point. We all got a job, where the whole family had to work as security guards and janitors. And I just got angry.