Class
My parents are the last of the middle class. My father worked for the government designing sea mines. My mother was a substitute teacher. Together, they worked really only until they were sixty.
The uniform makes for brotherhood, since when universally adopted it covers up all differences of class and country.
I was born in a middle class Muslim family, in a small town called Myonenningh in a northern part of Bangladesh in 1962. My father is a qualified physician; my mother is a housewife. I have two elder brothers and one younger sister. All of them received a liberal education in schools and colleges.
I had always loved music. I grew up listening to classic country, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard. My dad loved Vern Gosdin and Keith Whitley. So I kept going to class and started getting totally into playing guitar and teaching myself these songs.
You cannot further the Brotherhood of Man by encouraging class hatred.
Class is more than money. Class is also about knowledge.
I've always been really ambitious, whatever I do. At school, I always wanted to be the best in the class — no, it wasn't enough to be the best in the class, I'd want to be the best in the country.
My freshman year at Harrison High School, I saw a journalism class where students were putting out a weekly newspaper. It touched a responsive chord in me.
My father told me when I went to college that I needed to take an accounting class. I enrolled and went the first day. I didn't understand a thing that was being said and dropped the class. I really regret that decision. I should have stuck it out and learned the basics of accounting, but I took the easy way out.
I was pretty sure I lacked the wisdom to be the commencement speaker, but after stewing over the idea for about 48 hours, I decided that if the senior class at the University of Wisconsin wants me to come speak, I'll do whatever they ask me. I love that school.
People gossip. People are insecure, so they talk about other people so that they won't be talked about. They point out flaws in other people to make them feel good about themselves. I think at any age or any social class, that's present.
There is no employing class, no working class, no farming class. You may pigeonhole a man or woman as a farmer or a worker or a professional man or an employer or even a banker. But the son of the farmer will be a doctor or a worker or even a banker, and his daughter a teacher. The son of a worker will be an employer — or maybe president.
An increased push for energy efficiency, renewable energy technology, electric mobility — along with the growing digitalization movement and a universal carbon pricing structure — would speed up the carbon-free future and the rise of a global middle class we desperately need. We can and must all do our part.
The desperately poor may accept handouts, because they feel they have to. For those who consider themselves at least middle class, however, anything that smacks of a handout is not desired. Instead, they want their economic power back.
The physicians of one class feel the patients and go away, merely prescribing medicine. As they leave the room they simply ask the patient to take the medicine. They are the poorest class of physicians.
It seems like I've been writing since birth! I started writing poems before I got to school. I wrote the class musical in first grade — both words and music. It was about a bunch of vegetables who got together in a salad. I played the chief carrot!
There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.
My first real kiss came when I was 10, and it was in an acting class. I had to do a scene from a movie where someone gets kissed under a tree, and I did not want to do it! But my acting partner wanted me to feel comfortable, so he bought a picnic basket with all these snacks. He made such an effort — and it was cute.
I was performing at a New Jersey high school, and I asked a class of 2,000 students, 'How many of you love mathematics?' and only one hand went up. And that was the hand of the maths teacher!
It's — the working class of San Francisco and the Bay Area is being pushed out of its old neighborhoods because of the skyrocketing cost of housing, and there's no real working class left because these are jobs for engineers and managers and designers — very smart people.