Quotes About Opportunity

You know, God gave me a gift to do other things besides play the game of basketball.

It should be everyone's right in a capitalist system to have some way to take advantage of compound interest.

Just when everything seems to go along just fine, Life comes by and throws you its line.

With every adversity comes a blessing because a shock acts as a reminder to oneself that we must not get stale in routine.

A good martial artist does not become tense, but ready. Not thinking, yet not dreaming. Ready for whatever may come. When the opponent expands, I contract; and when he contracts, I expand. And when there is an opportunity, "I" do not hit, "it" hits all by itself.

I have to warn you. I promised my mother, a long time ago. She said I had to give folks a chance to walk away.

The great man is the man who can get himself made and who will get himself made out of anything he finds at hand.

You don't know how lucky you are to have Hollywood knocking on your door. If someone wanted to make a movie about me, I'd quit this job in a nanosecond, move to Hawaii, and spend my days on the beach.

The most successful businessman is the man who holds onto the old just as long as it is good, and grabs the new just as soon as it is better.

Every business and every product has risks. You can't get around it.

The trick is to make sure you don't die waiting for prosperity to come.

Men are not born equal in either physical or mental capacity. But a socialist believes that society as a whole will benefit, and there will be more happiness for more people, if all are given equal opportunities for education and advancement regardless of class or property.

But it is possible to create a society in which everybody is given not equal rewards, but equal opportunities, and where rewards vary not in accordance with the ownership of property, but with the worth of a person's contribution to that society. In other words, society should make it worth people's while to give their best to the country. This is the way to progress.

The future is as full of promise as it is fraught with uncertainty.

Human beings are created unequal, and no amount of social engineering or government intervention can significantly alter one's lot in life. At most, government policies can help equalise opportunity at the starting point, but they cannot ensure equal outcomes. Society is bound to end up with unequal outcomes

A month before graduation I got an off-Broadway job. Then I did some commercials, including one for MCI. You can only see half of me, but it paid well. Thank God for commercials.

The beauty of this country and what people participate in is the competitive nature that we allow to exist and the fact is that we are better because we have great competitors.

I guess I have realized that we don't live forever, and that the only time to do what we really want to do is now. This is the thing about a parent's death—especially the second parent's death— suddenly there is no other person standing between you and the great beyond, that darkness, the grave. I know I sound morbid, but it has been such an illuminating insight for me that I have to share it with you. Listen: the time is now. We are the next in line.

On a personal level, to think in time is to accept the uncertainty of life as the necessary price of being alive. To rebel against the precariousness of life, to reject uncertainty, to adopt a zero tolerance to risk, to imagine that life can be organized to completely eliminate danger, is to think outside time. To be human is to live suspended between danger and opportunity.

If you have a talented family, you should be shot if you don't use them.

Jack [Kirby] and Joe [Simon] wrote and drew the stories themselves in the beginning and I was just, like, the office boy. But after a while they had more writing than they could handle and I was the only guy around, so they said, "Hey Stan, you think you can write this?" When you're seventeen years old, what do you know? I said, "Sure, I can do it!" And that was it.

When you're poor, you know nothing about the future, you know nothing about the world, nothing that goes on outside 300 yards around you.

The ragman is fate, but you bring him to pass. There's never a rag, but you make it, alas!

Fortunes are wrung from the smallest of things That once were ignored, turning men into kings.