Quotes About Adversity

Jon Stewart says that he was a little kid with a big head. He had very little athletic ability. He went out to the soccer field, and it was awful.

My very first sport was soccer. I used to play in goal, but after I was hit the face with the ball a couple of times, I was done with soccer.

After high school, I earned a scholarship to play Division I soccer at a small school in North Carolina, but I didn't get much playing time, which forced me to determine who I was beyond the field, something I had previously never had to do.

People told me I was more of a soccer player, not a football player.

I started playing soccer first and then basketball. I had a leg injury when I was young and my mom said, 'come on, try to choose a different sport.'

The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary.

I am neither dejected nor depressed because every one has a bad phase in one's life. I realized it the hard way because the momentum of my social life too slowed down.

You learn the hard way. That's the thing with social media. Nobody knows what they're doing.

People are always telling you you're done. Someone's always telling you that, especially now in the day of social media.

My father was into politics. After his death things got slow. We were meeting different parties and everywhere I heard people grumbling and cursing politics and the state of the nation. I made an effort and I am trying to fulfill my social responsibility.

I was a socially awkward 8-year-old kid who fell in love with wrestling when he felt like the whole world was against him. That's the key word: love. I don't do this for revenge; I do this because I love it. That's Johnny Wrestling.

It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced.

History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices.

The only school that let me in was U.C. Santa Cruz, which is where I went. They didn't have a journalism program, so I took sociology, which is the closest thing to journalism.

Me and my brother lived in kind of a shed behind our house, and it was cold. We really lived kind of a dirty existence. It was tough to move away from my father and grandfather in California. I wore socks that were so dirty they were hard and black, and I would go into the lost and found box at school and look for clothes.

My first ballet class was on a basketball court. I'm in my gym clothes and my socks trying to do this thing called ballet. I didn't know anything about it.

As an actor you pull your socks up and look for the next job.

I had to fight to put my socks on. That's why I'm a great fighter. My brothers and sisters didn't realize they were creating a monster. And then that monster made it to the Hall of Fame.

My fibula was cracked in half to where it was a clean break, and it was poking at the skin, to where it could have been a compound fracture. My Achilles tendon was crushed like a soda can, the whole top of my foot was ripped off the bone, and the ankle was lodged up into my shin, on both sides.

I was working with the fire service in a job that should have been a job for life, with career progression, with a pension and promotion, and within a year I was sleeping on a sofa under a section 21 notice being evicted from my home and not eating or four days.

But hey, when you live in Watts, you need a little smack to get by, you know what I mean? You need something soft and comfortable in your life, 'cause you're not going to get it from what's around you. And society isn't going to give it to you.

You always have to challenge yourself or else you get soft. Right?

People think I'm soft and bailed out on basketball. But it was five knee surgeries.

Don't forget, I was the soft, pudgy kid in school that everyone made fun of.