Early Life and Education
Stephanopoulos was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, to Greek immigrants, Robert George and Nickolitsa ("Nikki") Gloria (née Chafos) Stephanopoulos. His father is a Greek Orthodox priest and Dean Emeritus of the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in New York City, and his mother was for many years director of the national news service of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. Young George also became a follower of his parents' faith and long considered entering the priesthood himself.
Following some time in Purchase, New York, Stephanopoulos attended suburban Cleveland, Ohio's Orange High School, where he wrestled competitively. In 1982, he received his bachelor of arts degree in political science from Columbia University in New York, where he was a sports broadcaster for WKCR-FM, the university's radio station. Stephanopoulos was the salutatorian of his class and was also awarded a Harry S. Truman Scholarship.
Stephanopoulos's father always wanted his son to become a lawyer, if not a priest. Promising him he would attend law school eventually, George took a job as an aide to Cleveland congressman Ed Feighan in Washington, D.C.. Though he rose to Feighan's chief of staff, Stephanopoulos agreed to cede to his father's wishes and attend law school if he succeeded in a second attempt to earn a Rhodes Scholarship after having been rejected for the Rhodes Scholarship during his senior year at Columbia. He earned a M.A. in Theology at Balliol College. He maintains he spent much of his time trying to root his political leanings in the deeper philosophies that he studied there.
Read more about this topic: George Stephanopoulos
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universal ... that error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All my life long I have been sensible of the injustice constantly done to women. Since I have had to fight the world single-handed, there has not been one day I have not smarted under the wrongs I have had to bear, because I was not only a woman, but a woman doing a man’s work, without any man, husband, son, brother or friend, to stand at my side, and to see some semblance of justice done me. I cannot forget, for injustice is a sixth sense, and rouses all the others.”
—Amelia E. Barr (1831–1919)
“One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)