Early Life and Background
Spitzer was born on June 10, 1959, in the Bronx, the son of Anne (née Goldhaber), an English literature professor, and Bernard Spitzer, a real estate mogul. His paternal grandparents were Galician Jews born in Tluste, Poland (now Ukraine). His maternal grandparents, born in the 1890s, were Jewish immigrants from Palestine. Spitzer is the youngest of three children. He was raised in the affluent Riverdale section of The Bronx in New York City. His family was not particularly religious, and Spitzer did not have a Bar Mitzvah.
He is a graduate of Horace Mann School. After scoring 1590 out of 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), Spitzer attended Princeton University and majored in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. At Princeton, he was elected chairman of the undergraduate student government, and graduated in 1981. He claims he received a perfect score on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), and went on to attend Harvard Law School, where he met and married Silda Wall. They married on October 17, 1987, and together they have three daughters. Spitzer was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Read more about this topic: Eliot Spitzer
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or background:
“Very early in our children’s lives we will be forced to realize that the “perfect” untroubled life we’d like for them is just a fantasy. In daily living, tears and fights and doing things we don’t want to do are all part of our human ways of developing into adults.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)
“‘Tis of the essence of life here,
Though we choose greatly, still to lack
The lasting memory at all clear,
That life has for us on the wrack
Nothing but what we somehow chose;
Thus are we wholly stripped of pride
In the pain that has but one close,
Bearing it crushed and mystified.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)