I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?
Why is it that my wife, who is sitting out there in the audience, is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I'm the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?
[Of his Irish ancestors] Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse? Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours? No, it's not because they weren't as smart. It’s not because they didn’t work as hard. It’s because they didn’t have a platform upon which to stand.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?
Why is it that my wife, who is sitting out there in the audience, is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I'm the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?
[Of his Irish ancestors] Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse? Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours? No, it's not because they weren't as smart. It’s not because they didn’t work as hard. It’s because they didn’t have a platform upon which to stand." in the context of "Quoted in "No Time to Cite Source, He Says : Biden Stirs Row by Using Lines From Briton’s Talk" Los Angeles Times (September 13, 1987)
• Speech plagiarized from a speech delivered by British Labor leader Neil Kinnock in May 1987. Biden explained to the Los Angeles Times: "It was a two-minute closing [...] There wasn’t a single thing wrong with what I did. The only thing that made it happen was time--the absolute two minutes. . . . If I'd have thought, I would have attributed it to him." On September 24, Biden withdrew from the presidential campaign: "And I am no less frustrated for the environment of Presidential politics that makes it so difficult to let the American people measure the whole Joe Biden and not just misstatements I have made." See "Biden Withdraws Bid for Presidency in Wake of Furor" The New York Times (September 24, 1987)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.