If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't count.
Normally, when I write a tour show, it's got a title that means something - a beginning, a middle and an end - and some kind of storyline and ideas going through it over two hours.
Doing nothing while the middle class is hurting. That's not leadership. Loose regulations and lax enforcement. That's not leadership. That's abandoning our middle class.
We all have a role to play - the President, Congress, parents, students and schools - in making college affordable and keeping the middle class dream alive.
Today's global landscape is increasingly interconnected. China and the Middle East play critical roles towards international peace and security.
For some reason, I wrote about the bed we slept in when I was a kid. It was a half-acre of misery, that bed, sagging in the middle, red hair sticking out of the mattress, the spring gone and the fleas leaping all over the place.
Conservative statesmen from Alexander Hamilton to Ronald Reagan sometimes supported protectionism, and at other times, they leaned toward lowering barriers. But they always understood that trade policy was merely a tool for building a strong and independent country with a prosperous middle class.
If we wait for the U.S. to do something, we will be waiting for a very long time. It's Europe, it's Australia, it's the other developed and middle developing countries that have got to do the job.
In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri - where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions.
Whether you're a Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, it is clear that we've got big problems that we need to address, starting with making our economy more competitive so that we can create more good-paying jobs for the middle class.
Another challenge? Getting up at 6:30 in the morning to go act. It's not fun acting that early in the morning or acting at 4 A.M in the middle of the night or in the morning when you're really tired. That's a challenge. What a luxurious problem to have.
Well, we lost a lot of our independence already. We are dependent on China for credit. We are dependent on Middle Eastern countries for energy supplies. And many Americans are dependent on the government for their income, health care, education of their children, food stamps.
The main concern was making sure the kids didn't get caught in the middle.
On the global scale, if there's a shaky Middle East, there's a shaky world.
Soaring prices for crude oil, falling production surpluses, wild speculation in commodities, a rush into the precious metals, turmoil in the Middle East, assertive oil producers: it is 1973-74 all over again, and at dictation speed.
Our armed forces will fight for peace in Iraq, a peace built on more secure foundations than are found today in the Middle East. Even more important, they will fight for two human conditions of even greater value than peace: liberty and justice.
Our happiness is certainly mixed in with the tragedies of life. You have to find the lemonade. You have to find the silver lining in the middle of everything that happens in life.
It's well known that many girls have a tendency to dumb down when they're in middle school.
I did a 'Last Comic Standing' audition in 2006, where you're just performing for three people in a comedy club, in a big comedy club, and I remember them cutting me off, asking about my name in the middle of one of my jokes. Yeah, it's just real weird when you're doing stand-up in that type of sterile, unnatural setting.
I grew up in Middle America and I don't think my family was very funny, but I watched 'The Princess Bride.' I always wanted to be an actor. I didn't know anything about it. I'd never seen any plays or anything and I watched that movie over and over and over again.
Contemplation is a luxury of the middle class, the very rich.
I get involved in the beginning, less in the middle, and very much at the end.
And I believe we should strengthen unions which have formed the bedrock of a strong middle class. It should be easier to bargain collectively. That's not only fair, it makes workers more productive, it strengthens our economy.
Obama's middle name differs from my last name by only two vowels. Does the McCain-Palin campaign view me as a pariah, too? Do McCain and Palin think there's something wrong with my name?
In the middle of a recession, where we're just climbing out of it, where the economy -unemployment is still at 9.7 percent, the idea of raising taxes and reducing spending is a prescription for disaster.
Once your kid reaches middle school, parents are really supposed to fade out of the social picture. Kids are supposed to make their own plans, keep up with sophisticatedly crude discussions, and be able to go out on their own without supervision.
My love of horses began in College Park, with me and 10 friends on two couches and a keg of beer in the back of a truck, heading to Pimlico at 6 A.M. to mark our place in the middle of the Preakness infield, where we never saw a horse run.
I always wrote stories, but I do remember a particular moment in middle school where I became passionate about essay writing.
The controversies between the proletariat and the middle class had to be smoothed out and bridged over by each getting to know and understand the other.
Bankruptcy exposes the economic vulnerability and insecurity of middle class women.
The idea that more taxes and more government spending is the best way to help hardworking middle class taxpayers - that's an old idea that's failed every time it's been tried.
Let's restore sanity and fairness to the tax cut conversation. We simply cannot afford to hand over the bank vault to our nation's millionaires and billionaires while the middle class picks up spare change.
As a runner on a film, you are the lowest of the low, and yet you have incredible access to everyone. I can totally imagine that for actors in the middle of a Hollywood bubble, all they really want is a sense of normality, and that gopher can be a tap for that.
We cannot escape that Hollywood is in the middle of a wave of technological change. The current angst over all the implications of new entertainment technology is nothing new.
It's a massive compliment to me to be known in Asia because Asia is the way forward in football, along with the Middle East. I believe that strongly.
It is no secret that many Islamic movements in the Middle East tend to be authoritarian, and some of the so-called 'Islamic regimes' such as Saudi Arabia, Iran - and the worst case was the Taliban in Afghanistan - they are pretty authoritarian. No doubt about that.
