Quotes About Adversity

I want to get to the 'pick your poison' type of situations like James Harden.

Whatever it is that's bothering me - interacting with annoying guy at a restaurant, contemplating my age, or losing friends to illness - I'll start to chip away at it. If you can poke holes in it, it's not as formidable; it's not as scary, and ultimately, it becomes another truth.

My father was raised in an orphanage, and my mother was an immigrant from Poland whose first childhood memory was of hunger. Somehow, despite all of that, I am called a member of the 'elite.' If so, I damned well earned it.

When you come from Poland, you have nothing. Your mother and father are working. You have only a bed for sleep. You have a kitchen, and that's it. You must fight.

My father emigrated from Poland and my mother from Romania. There was no affluence in my family.

The circumstances In which I grew up In Poland were not auspicious for humor.

In Lithuania they had racially abused me, in Poland they hadn't paid me, and I thought: 'I don't need this.' I said to my family: 'I'm not playing football again.'

Pole vaulting is an event of high and lows.

We're not friends - in fact, we pretty much as a rule irritate each other. But we've learnt to embrace it and use it as a strength... the other guy's always seeing something from the opposite pole.

I was knocked down and dragged by a police Land Rover in a hit-and-run.

Growing up, I think I was arrested 20-odd times by the Boston police. The good news is that I've been able to use those experiences in a lot of my roles, and that has been a blessing.

I decided that if the police couldn't catch the gangsters, I'd create a fellow who could.

In life, you don't really know what's coming at you. Like a firefighter, or police officer, or anyone else working in the emergency field, they don't know what's going to come at them. You gotta be ready for anything.

At 25, I had lost my job due to the economy, and my family wanted me to become a policeman or firefighter, but I knew there were other things out there for me. I sent some pictures to New York City and a model agency called and said, 'Where have you been?'

When I was younger, I remember families like mine who had to deal with the disastrous policies of the 1970s.

2005 is highly likely to be a more challenging environment, both for policymakers and investors.

Everybody's saying, you know, 'You're so heroic and so on despite of the polio that you had and so on.' Look, I had polio when I was four. So when you're four years old, you know, you get used to things very, very quickly.

I had a mild case of polio as a child. Not enough to cripple me, but it was polio. I still have an atrophy on the right side of my back.

Because my father was an army officer, I was told to enter the military school during the war. Luckily or unluckily, one month before the entrance examination, I got polio, which made my right arm numb. It's still numb.

Yes, I started piano and classical singing, I wanted to study jazz, but I tried to go to the Polish University of Jazz, but they didn't want me. In Krakow, I wanted to conduct, they didn't want me. And I start to think, 'I have to do something.' In Krakow there was drama and music. I started to study.

You find a lot out about people when they're blowing up, as we say, gasping for air, and if they can still hold conversations and be polite.

If I were running to be somebody, there are a lot of easier sombodies to be. After all, running against the incumbent governor of your own party in your home state is not the next logical step in a political life.

When my mother finally arrived in America in the late 1960s, she attended Swarthmore College and majored in political science.

I had never gone to college. I was not from a politically connected family. I had no money of my own. Who is going to do business with you?