Quotes About Opportunity

life is either a daring adventure, or it is nothing.

Don't get axle-wrapped 'bout what you can't control. You'll get your chance. Your job is to make the most of it when you do.

I will not let the fear of what might be rob me of the promise of what can.

The sad part is that a place's popularity can actually destroy the elements that contribute to happiness. The more we flock to high-status cities for the good life—money, opportunity, novelty—the more crowded, expensive, polluted, and congested those places become. The result? Surveys show that rich, high-status states in the United States are among the least happy in the country.

It's about the realization of talent and potential, and the feeling that you are able to make the most of your abilities in life.

The city is a means to a way of life. It can be a reflection of all our best selves. It can be whatever we want it to be. It can change, and change dramatically.

To live in today's world is not only to have access to all the best that has come before, but also to have a breadth and ease of access that is incomparably greater than that enjoyed even by our parents, let alone earlier generations.

Here's the secret you should remember whenever you hear someone lamenting how tough it is to get ahead in the postindustrial global economy: Few people work nearly as hard as they could. The few who do have it made.

People are unequal in the abilities that lead to economic success in life. To the extent that inequality of wealth is grounded in the way people freely choose to conduct their lives, I do not find it troubling. People

Page 46: Our picture suggests that for every person within the ranks of college graduates, there is another among those without a college degree who has just as high an IQ—or at least almost. And as for the graduates of the dozen top schools, … they too are apparently outnumbered by people with similar IQs who do not graduate from those colleges, or do not graduate from college at all.

Page 321: But after controlling for IQ, the picture reverses. The chance of entering a high-IQ occupation for a black with an IQ of 117 (which was the average IQ of all the people in these occupations in the NLSY sample) was twice the proportion of whites with the same IQ. Latinos with an IQ of 117 had more than a 50% higher chance of entering a high-IQ occupation than whites with the same IQ. This phenomenon applies across a wide range of occupations, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 20.

America's always been a great place to be crazy. It just used to be harder to make a living that way.

Don't be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of.

We certainly want those at the top to do well, but if you base your entire presidency and your entire economic platform on helping them do even better, you're missing what makes the economy tick. Because not everyone has been as fortunate as Mitt Romney, you cannot base your whole approach on a life experience as rarified as his.

The best place to succeed is where you are with what you have.

Johnson well says, "He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything." Life is made up of little things. It is very rarely that an occasion is offered for doing a great deal at once. True greatness consists in being great in little things.

It takes character to sit with all that cash and to do nothing. I didn't get top where I am by going after mediocre opportunities.

It's the work on your desk. Do well with what you already have and more will come in.

The real cost of something is what you must give up in order to get it, which is almost always more than just cash.

Why did the entrepreneur cross the road? Because he could make more money on the other side.

You're here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.

A life is about twenty-five thousand days, and a finding occurs about once every twenty-five thousand days. In other news, once in a lifetime.

You live like this long enough, a life without chances, you lose your bearings. A life without danger. A life without the risk of Now. In any event, what do I need with Now? Now, I think, is overrated. Now hasn't been working out so great for me. Now never has.

because the idea was you came here, your parents and their parents and their parents, and you always seem to have just arrived and yet never seem to have actually arrived. You're here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.