Quotes About Opportunity

He will willingly fill the more menial positions, and do the heavy work, at less wages, than the American white man

proper handling of government debt would permit America to borrow at affordable interest rates and would also act as a tonic to the economy. Used as loan collateral, government bonds could function as money—and it was the scarcity of money, Hamilton observed, that had crippled the economy and resulted in severe deflation in the value of land. America was a young country rich in opportunity. It lacked only liquid capital, and government debt could supply that gaping deficiency.

I shudder to think of what I should have been if I had remained in Richford all my life," he later confided.

Coolheaded in the face of such hysteria, Rockefeller saw that he could convert this chaos to advantage.

He preferred to portray his fortune as a pleasant accident, the unsought by-product of hard work.

With $24 million now invested outside the oil and gas business, he held sizable stakes in 16 railroad companies, 9 real-estate firms, 6 steel companies, 6 steamship companies, 9 banks and financial houses, and even 2 orange groves.

He embodied an enduring archetype: the obscure immigrant who comes to America, re-creates himself, and succeeds despite a lack of proper birth and breeding.

There's somethin I learned when I was homeless: Our limitation is God's opportunity. When you get all the way to the end of your rope and there ain't nothin you can do, that's when God takes over. I remember one time I was hunkered down in the hobo jungle with some folks. We was talkin 'bout life, and this fella was talkin, said, 'People think they're in control, but they ain't. The truth is, that which must befall thee must befall thee. And that which must pass the by must pass thee by.

The world lies all before us.

The world is ripe, and we'll pluck it like an apple from a tree.

Pemberton felt something shift inside him, something small but definite, the way a knob's slight twist allowed a door to swing wide open.

Do you think it is sad for people to struggle their entire working life just to get by, only to retire into guaranteed poverty? I know I do. And the reason I feel this way is because we all have so much potential to do better.

America is too great for small dreams.

Never let the things you can't do, stop you from doing what you can.

Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.

Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we've ever known.

If we're free to dare – and we are – if we're free to give – and we are – then we're free to shape the future and have within our grasp all that we dream the future will be.

How can we love our country and not love our countrymen; and loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they're sick, and provide opportunity to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory?

aren't lazy or unwilling to work: they just don't know how to free themselves from the welfare security blanket.

The American dream is not that every man must be level with every other man. The American dream is that every man must be free to become whatever God intends he should become.

IF I'D GOTTEN THE JOB I WANTED at Montgomery Ward, I suppose I would never have left Illinois. I've often wondered at how lives are shaped by what seem like small and inconsequential events, how an apparently random turn in the road can lead you a long way from where you intended to go—and a long way from wherever you expected to go.

Among the things he passed on to me were the belief that all men and women, regardless of their color or religion, are created equal and that individuals determine their own destiny; that is, it's largely their own ambition and hard work that determine their fate in life.

She thought of the last couple of years: the boredom, the narrowness of existence, the dearth of anything to look forward to. Yet now, in a single instant, the curtains had been whipped aside, and the windows been thrown open onto a brillant view that had been there, waiting for her, all the time. A view, moreover, laden with the most marvellous possibilities and opportunities.

He thought back over the extraordinarily coincidental chain of events that had brought him here, at this particular time, and then left him marooned, so that he had no choice but to stay. With hindsight, it seemed as though it had all been carefully mapped out by fate.