Quotes About Opportunity

Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.

The world is more malleable than you think, and it's waiting for you to hammer it into shape.

If you stop taking chances, you'll stay where you sit. You won't live any longer, but it'll feel like it.

When you're open, a hitchhiker—a "randomer," as my daughter Eve calls them—can become an angel.

Whenever you see darkness, there is extraordinary opportunity for the light to burn brighter.

It's a beautiful day... Don't let it get away.

The world is more malleable than you think and it's waiting for you to hammer it into shape.

Where you live should not decide whether you live or whether you die.

At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.

If you can't read, it's going to be hard to realize dreams.

I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise.

In a word, the Negro youth starts out with the presumption against him.

The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States of America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily.

The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of race.

With few exceptions, the Negro youth must work harder and must perform his tasks even better than a with youth in order to secure recognition. But out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one missed whose pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of brith and race.

I said that any individual who learned to do something better than anybody else—learned to do a common thing in an uncommon manner—had solved his problem, regardless of the colour of his skin, and that in proportion as the Negro learned to produce what other people wanted and must have, in the same proportion would he be respected.

I had no schooling whatever while I was a slave, though I remember on several occasions I went as far as the schoolhouse door with one of my young mistresses to carry her books. The picture of several dozen boys and girls in a schoolroom engaged in study made a deep impression upon me, and I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise.

It is pretty hard, however, to help a young man who has started wrong. Once he gets the idea that — because he has crammed his head full with mere book knowledge — the world owes him a living, it is hard for him to change.

There are those among the white race and those among the black race who assert, with a good deal of earnestness, that there is no difference between the white man and the black man in this country. This sounds very pleasant and tickles the fancy; but, when the test of hard, cold logic is applied to it, it must be acknowledged that there is a difference,—not an inherent one, not a racial one, but a difference growing out of unequal opportunities in the past.

It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges. The

Cast down your bucket where you are

My experience is that there is something in human nature which always makes an individual recognize and reward merit, no matter under what colour of skin merit is found. I have found, too, that it is the visible, the tangible, that goes a long ways in softening prejudices. The actual sight of a first-class house that a Negro has built is ten times more potent than pages of discussion about a house that he ought to build, or perhaps could build.

When a Negro girl learns to cook, to wash dishes, to sew, or write a book, or a Negro boy learns to groom horses, or to grow sweet potatoes, or to produce butter, or to build a house, or to be able to practise medicine, as well or better than some one else, they will be rewarded regardless of race or colour. In the long run, the world is going to have the best, and any difference in race, religion, or previous history will not long keep the world from what it wants.

In the earlier days of freedom almost every coloured man who learned to read would receive "a call to preach" within a few days after he began reading.