Quotes About Opportunity

When she was in high school she had believed that white people wanted their children to be president of the United States; that most of them worked hard with that goal in mind. And if not president--well, perhaps a cabinet member.

This was, by comparison, a safe, secure, clean world. And looking at it, she thought it must be rather pleasant to be able to live anywhere you wanted to, just so you could pay the rent, instead of having to find out first whether it was a place where colored people were permitted to live.

A good education is another name for happiness.

I just feel like I'm a very lucky person to have a new life outside of politics.

The American idea is as promising, imaginative, and full of the unexpected as the land itself. The land represents freedom - the frontier, the ability to make a new future with your own bare hands.

When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses - it was right after 'Roots ' and for society, not me, it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion, and I was not.

It is this prospect, of something freshly imagined, some new possibility of belief, that America holds out to all comers. — Toller

The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement.

The time I had waited probably made the difference between success and failure.

But if we learn to think of it as anticipation, as learning, as growing, if we think of the time we spend waiting for the big things of life as an opportunity instead of a passing of time, what wonderful horizons open out!

If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children.

Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.

The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.

If you in the morning Throw minutes away, You can't pick them up In the course of a day. You may hurry and scurry, And flurry and worry, You've lost them forever, Forever and aye.

Ali's phone call to me three years ago changed my life and put me on the road to where I am now. For that I will always be grateful.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …' Emma Lazarus New Colossus

It's always about timing. If it's too soon, no one understands. If it's too late, everyone's forgotten.

My last trip to New Orleans was for the fifth anniversary of Katrina, and I had the awesome opportunity to bring my family down. We all worked on a house together and met some of the families.

I grew up with not a lot of money and I definitely shopped at Goodwill. But even in my most unfortunate state, I was really blessed compared to a lot of the rest of the world. I had a really great chance to follow my dreams and have them actually come true.

I wasn't afraid to fail. Something good always comes out of failure.

You always believed we could survive in the outside world. I'm doing everything I can to give at least some of us a chance of not only surviving but truly living.

When it comes to being selected for a thankless job, the man who leaves the room just before the vote is the fool who gets the job.

A woman with an education may be able to spend more time sitting in a chair instead of lying on her back. A sound advantage, I should think.

You cannot create results. You can only create conditions in which something might happen.