One of the things I really learned from my first term is the importance of focusing. In that sense, it is a deliberate effort. What I look at with each vote is that priority of whether it's good for the middle class or not.
Honestly, I was a good kid but I figured out pretty early that I had a gift for making people laugh. I wanted to entertain and when that happens you tend to get yourself in trouble in class.
I worked as a telemarketer for an SAT-prep company. That was the worst of it, because I had to call people in post-Katrina New Orleans and offer them this very, very expensive SAT class. And I'm not even a good salesman.
Having won re-election convincingly and against the economic odds, President Obama quickly made good on his promise of maintaining taxes as they are for the middle class while raising them on the wealthiest Americans.
If you go to an elite school where the other students in your class are all really brilliant, you run the risk of mistakenly believing yourself to not be a good student.
If you want to play the good roles, spend more time in in college and in acting class than you do in the gym, and you'll have the career you want.
There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.
I've wanted to perform my entire life. I found a paper I wrote in kindergarten class about what I wanted to be when I grew up - and I wrote 'a famous singer!'
You know the funny thing, I don't get along with rich people. I get along with the middle class and the poor people better than I get along with the rich people.
As a child, one of my defense mechanisms was to try to be funny. My mom tried to nurture that by putting me in acting class. But I got bored when we stopped pretending to be trees and actually had to work.
Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?
Monotheism makes me grouchy. I don't trust any religion that makes God look like one of the ruling class. I guess I'm a pagan or an animist.
The current leadership of the Labor party react to the idea that working-class students might study the subjects they studied with the same horror that the Earl of Grantham showed when a chauffeur wanted to marry his daughter.
'The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movement in Iraq,' by Hanna Batatu. Few may wish to take on this massive, obscure work, but it changed my life, and I love it.
The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements.
Manufacturing and other unskilled professions that were union jobs, that allowed people to live a middle-class life, are disappearing both because unions are disappearing and because of the global nature of the economy.
Call me an over anxious, middle-class mum, but my eight-and-a-half-year old son looks very much, to me, like he's headed for a life of crime.
I've had people ask me in interviews what it's like to have money, but that's not how it is. I have a middle-class life. I have a room in London but not a house, nor a BMW.
My job in space will be to observe and write a journal. I am also going to be teaching a class for students on earth about life in space and on the space shuttle and conducting experiments.
Harvard has played an important role in my life. I was a student, Class of 1936, and I've been on the board of overseers. My experiences there shaped who I am.
In college, I took an acting class as a lark. I was surprised by how much it interested me. It seemed like something I could do my whole life and always try to get better at.
