Quotes About Opportunity

Usually life's greatest gifts come wrapped in adversity.

Life has taught me that to fly, you must first accept the possibility of falling.

Your journey will proceed faster with a brief delay.' In other words, don't go off half-cocked, but don't wait until the other fellow shoots you either." A

Sometimes life drives you to do entirely new things, things you never believed you could do.

There's a Chinese saying. 'When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.' " The Chinese engineer smiles. "Good one." " 'When is the next best time? Now.' " "Ah! Okay!" The smile turns real. Until today, he has never planted anything. But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.

And sometimes he thought of a favorite saying, a remark by Louis Pasteur, "Chance favors the prepared mind.

Chance favors the prepared mind.

People in other countries, they all want to come to America. They say, "You can eat twenty-four hours a day in America." I say yeah, they're right. If you have some money, or a pistol, you can get something to eat.

What I am for is justice for everyone, just like it says in the Constitution.

The wisest person is not the one who has the fewest failures but the one who turns failures to best account.

But my argument is not that we should be doing less to attract women into STEM; it is that we should be doing as much to encourage men into HEAL.

This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don't have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier.

The challenge is more difficult because low-income African Americans today confront not only segregation but also the income stagnation and blocked mobility faced by all Americans in families with low or moderate incomes.

For example, many African American World War II veterans did not apply for government-guaranteed mortgages for suburban purchases because they knew that the Veterans Administration would reject them on account of their race, so applications were pointless.

ghetto to describe low-income African American neighborhoods, created by public policy, with a shortage of opportunity, and with barriers to exit. No other term succinctly describes this combination of characteristics, so I use the term as well.†

Parents' economic status is commonly replicated in the next generation, so once government prevented African Americans from fully participating in the mid-twentieth-century free labor market, depressed incomes became, for many, a multigenerational trait.

We don't hesitate to acknowledge that Jews in Eastern Europe were forced to live in ghettos where opportunity was limited and leaving was difficult or impossible. Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as the inner city, yet everyone knows what we mean. (When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don't characterize those whites as inner city families.)

African Americans at Ford had to choose between giving up their good industrial jobs, moving to apartments in a segregated neighborhood of San Jose, or enduring lengthy commutes between North Richmond and Milpitas. Frank Stevenson bought a van, recruited eight others to share the costs, and made the drive daily for the next twenty years until he retired. The trip took more than an hour each way.

And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.

I'm the boy who's going to glom onto this junk—if I'm lucky.

Luck was a luxury, not the basis for a business. Luck had to be a "nice to have," not a "need to have.

A man found a door and hung it on the wall.

Consider the hairpin turn. It is waiting for you like a red door

The best thing is that if you get a lot of mistakes over and done with early on in your life, there will be less to learn the hard way later on. And that's what youth is all about, a chance to make all the mistakes you can and get them out of the way