Quotes on Opportunity

We stand today on the edge of a new frontier - the frontier of the 1960's - a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils - a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.

If you have the opportunity for your art to meet activism, you shouldn't pass that up when it comes your way.

The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportunities for agriculture, mining, or trade, but only the imagination and initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can transform the possibilities into fact...Man, not the earth, makes civilization.

It takes energy, mental toughness and spiritual reinforcement to successfully deal with life's opportunities, and to reach your objectives.

When I was growing up, I don't remember being told that America was created so that everyone could get rich. I remember being told it was about opportunity and the pursuit of happiness. Not happiness itself, but the pursuit.

Our work has only begun. In our time we have an historic opportunity to shape a global balance of power that favors freedom and that will therefore deepen and extend the peace. And I use the word power broadly, because even more important than military and indeed economic power is the power of ideas, the power of compassion, and the power of hope.

Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung...We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we” I mean society—in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.

In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity.

He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.

Our workforce and our entire economy are strongest when we embrace diversity to its fullest, and that means opening doors of opportunity to everyone and recognizing that the American Dream excludes no one.

We were not just competitors and colleagues, we were friends. We had a lot of opportunities to reflect on this in the last year. It was a competitive brotherhood.

Before we start talking about genetic differences, you gotta come up with a system where there's equal opportunity.

Many think of management as cutting deals and laying people off and hiring people and buying and selling companies. That's not management, that's deal making. Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it's a magnificent profession.

What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day.

You know, I think of the global economy as an inverted triangle, resting on the shoulders of the American consumer. And if the American consumer cannot have enough disposable income in order to maintain a standard of living that creates more opportunities generation after generation, that's bad for everybody.

He believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin while you went out in the world and met the obligations required of you. Certainly he knew (though did not completely understand) that opera wasn't for everyone, but for everyone he hoped there was something. The records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love.

If you can't do great things, do small things in a great way. Don't wait for great opportunities. Seize common, everyday ones and make them great.

Every adversity contains, at the same time, a seed of equivalent opportunity!

On my recent trip to Israel, I had the opportunity to visit Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust memorial, and reaffirm our collective responsibility to confront anti-Semitism, prejudice, and intolerance across the world. On this Yom Hashoah, we must accept the full responsibility of remembrance, as nations and as individuals-not simply to pledge "never again," but to commit ourselves to the understanding, empathy and compassion that is the foundation of peace and human dignity.

I've been lucky. Opportunities don't often come along. So, when they do, you have to grab them.

What, after all, is the public under present conditions? What are the reasons for its eclipse? What hinders it from finding and identifying itself? By what means shall its inchoate and amorphous estate be organized into effective political action relevant to present social needs and opportunities? What has happened to the public in the century and a half since the theory of political democracy was urged with such assurance and hope?