Quotes About Opportunity In America

#1. The best escalator to opportunity in America is education.

Nicholas Kristof

#2. The entrepreneurial opportunity in America is alive and well.

Howard Schultz

#3. The 1957 crisis in Little Rock, brought about by the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, was a huge part of the march toward freedom and opportunity in America.

Vic Snyder

#4. Middle America believes in fair play, an equal opportunity to succeed or to fail.

Mark McKinnon

#5. As a prosecutor, I've been in prisons. I've had the opportunity to see what they're like in America.

Tom Rooney

#6. I have found a unique opportunity to distinguish myself and to learn my trade. I am a general officer in the army of the United States of America. My zeal in their cause and my frankness have won their trust.

Marquis De Lafayette

#7. I still believe we wasted a golden opportunity to make significant changes in our country. I think people in America would have been ready and willing to do it, but the [George W.] Bush administration took a kind of simplistic, almost moronic approach to it, all because people were so afraid.

Paul Auster

#8. Although I was born into the America that experiences and believes in opportunity, my trips to Ferguson, Detroit, Atlanta, and Chicago have revealed that there is an undercurrent of unease.

Rand Paul

#9. Since taking office, President Obama has worked to restore a positive vision of American leadership in the world - leadership defined, not by the threats and dangers that we will oppose, but by the security, opportunity and dignity that America advances in partnership with people around the world.

John O. Brennan

#10. The United States exists as a sovereign nation. 'America,' in contrast, exists as a myth of democracy and equal opportunity to live by, or as an ideal goal to reach.

Bharati Mukherjee

#11. Fairness is not the end result, it's the opportunity. And everybody in America today has the opportunity to get ahead.

Tim Huelskamp

#12. In America, they shoot budgets and schedules, and they don't shoot films any more. There's more opportunity in Europe to make films that at least have a purity of intent.

Paul Bettany

#13. The Martha Stewart trial makes clear how far women have risen in the business world. America can be proud of our equal-opportunity prosecution and conviction.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

#14. I'm honestly so incredibly grateful for every opportunity I get in film industry. Don't forget! I was born in a tiny little country in a small town and here I am working in Canada and America and it's incredible.

Famke Janssen

#15. America gave me the opportunity to open successful restaurants, start a TV show, and write books. I can even fill an auditorium when I give a speech, which in America is rare for a chef.

Jose Andres

#16. Progress will march if we hold an abiding faith in the intelligence, the initiative, the character, the courage, and the divine touch in the individual. We can safeguard these ends if we give to each individual that opportunity for which the spirit of America stands.

Herbert Hoover

#17. I saw an opportunity to use a restaurant to identify a lot of my issues and concerns with being an immigrant in America, and Asian in America, and a young person in America.

Eddie Huang

#18. Every decent man in America ought to swoon with joy for the opportunity to crush with his heel the woolly head of this black lizard, to keep him from scuttling on his belly farther over the earth and spitting forth his venom of death!

Richard Wright

#19. We live in America where each and every person has the equal opportunity to take their iPhone or a smartphone and create something and put it online and have the equal ability to blow up and be successful. It's a tool I hope we inspire tons of people to pick up and go after their dreams.

Todrick Hall

#20. For many years, I believed racism in America was dead and that opportunity existed for all. My beliefs were shaken when the Rodney King officers were acquitted.

John Hope Bryant

#21. You grow up in America and you're told from day one, 'This is the land of opportunity.' That everybody has an equal chance to make it in this country. And then you look at places like Harlem, and you say, 'That is absolutely a lie.'

Geoffrey Canada

#22. People don't expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all. They know we can do better.

Barack Obama

#23. Hubert Humphrey with kids"Be clear where America stands. Human brotherhood and equal opportunity for every man, woman, and child, we are committed to it, in America and around the world."

Hubert H. Humphrey

#24. For the pageants, it was my mother who got me involved in Miss America. It really gave me the opportunity to sing all around New Hampshire. And it was great when I was young, but looking back, it was also unbelievably stressful.

Jane Badler

#25. Movies give me an opportunity to go places. I'm not only a Swede but an American, not just a man of my time, but I've been living 2,000 years ago-and not just in a new country, America, but in the Holy Land, too.

Max Von Sydow

#26. A lot of British actors will look at America as such a land of opportunity. In England, there's such a small pool of working actors of color. There's such a small amount of work that is actually produced in the first place.

Aml Ameen

#27. I am convinced that all this poverty in Mexico and in Latin America, like it's happening in China is the opportunity to grow. It's an opportunity for investment; it's an economic activity and to take out poverty is the best investment any person or a person can do in any place.

Carlos Slim

#28. You know, I love all kinds of activism. I certainly think blacks deserve to have something whether it is affirmative action or an opportunity that should be opened up to them. But at the same time I believe that people of color are not the only poor people in America and all over the world.

Russell Simmons

#29. In America, only opportunity is assured, not outcomes. Anyone who promises otherwise is acting contrary to the values upon which our Republic was founded.

Brad Thor

#30. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity, until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country.

Barack Obama

#31. Like other important immigrant communities, the Jewish experience in the United States represents the ideal of freedom and the promise and opportunity of America.

Jan Schakowsky

#32. I believe that America has the opportunity to once again live by our values, live up to our values in the 21st century, but I think that America can only do that if Americans can succeed. And there are lots of reasons why Americans today are feeling left out and left behind.

Hillary Clinton

#33. Now they were satisfied to express their individuality through which Rogers they preferred at the Saturday matinee: Ginger or Roy or Buck. America may be the land of opportunity, but in New York it's the shot at conformity that pulls them through the door

Amor Towles

#34. O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

Langston Hughes

#35. America is still the land of opportunity for most, but it is not a land of opportunity for all. If we are to remain an exceptional nation, we must close this gap in opportunity.

Marco Rubio

#36. America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world, and no one will keep that light from shining.

George W. Bush

#37. I ... now see a rare opportunity to push across the goal line much of the unfinished business of America: investing in our infrastructure and workers, universal healthcare, comprehensive immigration reform and scrubbing a tax code that's out of shape and behind the times.

Xavier Becerra

#38. Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#39. There are times when words seem empty and only actions seem great. Such a time has come, and in the Providence of God America will once more have an opportunity to show the world that she was born to save mankind.

Woodrow Wilson

#40. Like other parents in this country, we want to give our children the best opportunities, to shower them with love, to teach them respect and a love for the rich and diverse traditions America has to offer them.

Jennifer Chrisler

#41. As legal residents, immigrants would contribute more in taxes, spend more at our businesses, start companies of their own and create more jobs. Immigration is not a problem for us to solve but an opportunity for America to seize.

Jose Andres

#42. Broad access to opportunity is the key to a truly equitable America. No matter who you are or where you grew up, Black Faces in White Places provides a blueprint to seizing opportunities at hand - and expanding opportunity for your entire community.

Angela Glover Blackwell

#43. When I came into boxing, when it was more out of control, no fighters got an opportunity to fight. I came in: everybody got an opportunity to make a living in America.

Don King

#44. I got married at 19 and graduated from a commuter college in Texas that cost $50 a semester. The way I see it, I'm a janitor's daughter who became a public school teacher, a professor, and a United States Senator. America is truly a country of opportunity!

Elizabeth Warren

#45. America's 'social contract' is equal opportunity ... yet we have failed in achieving that seminal goal.

George Kaiser

#46. As my family story shows, Latinos have been a blessing for USA for many generations. The future of America depends in part on the success of the Latino community, and this opportunity is just one more signifier of that.

Julian Castro

#47. In the coming year, I believe we can make sure America lives up to its legacy as a land of opportunity if the President is willing to back up his rhetoric with substance.

Ron Kind

#48. There's no doubt that when the Republican Party took over in 1994, the 'Contract with America' was an opportunity to implement some things - like welfare reform and some of the other initiatives. Then, it kind of lost its steam.

Marco Rubio

#49. This is what America is about when it comes to understanding that it is equal opportunity versus equal achievement. Each and every one of us has the opportunity for greatness in this country.

Allen West

#50. I remember when I got my first opportunity to work in America, I didn't speak a lot of English, so I only really knew my lines for the movie I was doing.

Penelope Cruz

#51. We are honored to have had the opportunity to serve our country under difficult circumstances. We are profoundly grateful to our Commander-in-Chief and to our nation for this day. God bless America.

Jeremiah Denton

#52. Whether people are in America or in Africa, people want to work. They want to have purpose. They want to provide for themselves and their families. They don't want handouts. They don't want to be completely dependent on their governments - even though there's usually no opportunity for that anyway.

Scarlett Johansson

#53. Money will always flow toward opportunity, and there is an abundance of that in America.

Warren Buffett

#54. Around my eighth or ninth year I became interested in the world's religions. I was mathematically retarded but theologically precocious. I began to correspond with seikhs in India. After about the third letter they would ask about job opportunities in America.

Jean Houston

#55. I think America offers a dream that cannot be fulfilled as easily anywhere else in the world as it could be fulfilled here. Although oppression was common to all of us, those styles of oppression gave us the opportunity to see the world in dimensions we didn't quite see growing up in any one place.

Harry Belafonte

#56. Small business in America is what fuels the American economy. We need more small business to assist us in creating a great nation and in creating more jobs. It's this frontier that is endless in terms of opportunity and potential.

Debbi Fields

#57. We live in the land of opportunities. People come from all over the world to hustle and work their way up to places that they could only imagine or dream of.

Farshad Asl

#58. I think the older that I'm getting, the more I'm understand what a privileged job I have, and what an opportunity I have. Now I'm directing films and I'm getting my first movie in America off the ground, and you start to understand how the system really works.

Paddy Considine

#59. I think I'm very fortunate to be born in America. And lucky to be able to have lived and had the opportunity to do what I want to do.

Ralph Lauren

#60. My parents immigrated to the United States with $10 in their pocket and a belief that the America they had heard about really did exist as the land of opportunity.

Mia Love

#61. People who work full-time in America should not have to live in poverty - simple as that. Too many jobs don't pay enough to get by, let alone get ahead. Too many people are finding the rungs on the ladder of opportunity further and further apart.

Thomas Perez

#62. I believe strongly that the opportunity is here for us in America to finally have a healthcare system that we can really be proud of. But it's got to be one where everybody is involved. Everybody: consumers, employers, providers, health-insurance companies, everybody.

Max Baucus

#63. What has made America great have been the opportunities given to everyone in this country. Since our founding, individuals and families have come to America to seek freedom, opportunity and the choice for a better life.

Cathy McMorris Rodgers

#64. I believe in America because we have great dreams, and because we have the opportunity to make those dreams come true.

Wendell Willkie

#65. As Secretary of State I had the chance to make the world a little safer and life a little better for children in America and across the globe, including in China. I viewed it as the opportunity and the responsibility of a lifetime. That

Hillary Rodham Clinton

#66. The dynamic ideal we call democracy, gradually growing up in the human heart for two-thousand five hundred years, at least, has now every opportunity to found the natural democratic state in these United States of America by way of natural economic order and a natural, or organic, architecture.

Frank Lloyd Wright

#67. In America we have the greatest chance for opportunity than anyone else in the past six and a half thousand years. Never in recorded history have so many different gifts from all over the world been deposited in one country.

Jim Rohn

#68. I started a lecture series that was inspired by my reporting on race in America. The 'Black in America' series launched on CNN in 2007 as an opportunity to freshen the national conversation on race.

Soledad O'Brien

#69. We have a big opportunity in China. We think the number of stores here can rival the number in North America.

Howard Schultz

#70. We should be proud that so many want to come to America, that it is still seen as the land of opportunity. Let's make it a land of legal work, not black-market jobs. Let's make it a land of work, not welfare. Our land should be one of assimilation, not hiding in the shadows.

Rand Paul

#71. The crisis in America that we barely notice anymore is that we've become two nations - divided by poverty, opportunity, and race. It's like a neighbor's car alarm that we don't hear anymore because it rings so often.

Arianna Huffington

#72. Well, if you look at all of the cultures in America, this is a great opportunity for us to really get acquainted with the rest of the world. America is the only place you can do that, but we don't have sense enough to take advantage of that.

Erykah Badu

#73. The thing is, I grew up in L.A., so I had this unique opportunity to live in both communist Russia and see that life, and then move to America as a young girl and experience a completely different life.

Dasha Zhukova

#74. I love what I do, and for me, acting can be anything. It could be in America. It could be in India. It could be in England. It could be anything. As long as it's an interesting part and an interesting opportunity, I would love to do it.

Priyanka Chopra

#75. Before I started Code for America, I spent my career around startups. First it was game developers, small teams trying to make hits in a tough business. Then, when I started working on the Web 2.0 events, it was web startups during times of enormous opportunity and investment.

Jennifer Pahlka

#76. Our challenge, our opportunity is to pass common-sense solutions ... that repeal ObamaCare and replace it with patient-centered reforms that will help our constituents have better access to high-quality health care in America.

John Boehner

#77. Government doesn't have to be the enemy, but too much government has produced a new kind of inequality in America: opportunity inequality.

Marco Rubio

#78. They say football is America's greatest game, but it's not. The greatest game in America is called opportunity. Football is merely a great expression of it.

Joe Kapp

#79. When I was in the 9th grade I was flunking out of high school. And that's why I'm so encouraged by the fact that America is the place where opportunity and American exceptionalism is alive and well.

Tim Scott

#80. The door of opportunity swings wide open in our country. Through it, in constant flow, go those who toil. America recognizes no aristocracy save those who work. The badge of service is the sole requirement for admission to the ranks of our nobility.

Calvin Coolidge

#81. But the whole history of America is quite different from Europe. People went there to get away from the intolerance and constraints of life in Europe. They sought liberty and opportunity; and their strong sense of purpose has over two centuries, helped create a new unity and pride in being American.

Margaret Thatcher

#82. In my view, America has never had the opportunity to enter paradise. Europe enjoys the paradise it enjoys, in part because the United States provides the overall security that allows Europe to live in a system where military power is not a major issue.

Robert Kagan

#83. That is the American experiment. An ethnic group arriving on America's shores, to be reviled and hazed, living in squalor, or if they are lucky Squalor Heights, working hard to give their children or grandchildren the opportunity to sh*t on the next group landing on our shores.

Jon Stewart

#84. I think you'd change Alabama fundamentally if in six years someone said, 'If you want the best education in America, you've got to live in Alabama.' you'd change economic development, change the image of this state, you'd offer these kids an opportunity they otherwise would never have had.

Bob Riley

#85. Just to have the opportunity to play an American in America is a dream come true for me.

Andrew Lincoln

#86. They think America is like a major league in entertainment. For me personally being here for the past year-and-a-half, I know some of the arguments and discrepancies African American actors have with the opportunities here.

Aml Ameen

#87. To the European immigrant - that is, to the aliens who have been converted into Americans by the advantages of American life - the Promise of America has consisted largely in the opportunity which it offered of economic independence and prosperity.

Herbert Croly

#88. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to represent you in the United States House of Representatives. Together, we will continue fighting to protect our Texas conservative values and the preservation of the America we know and love for future generations to come.

Mike Conaway

#89. Detroit is a metaphor for America, for America's challenges and America's opportunities. It is a hothouse for new innovation, for ingenuity and risk taking. That doesn't happen in a lot of American cities. We need to be in Detroit because of that.

Darren Walker

#90. Islam is one of the fastest-growing faiths within America, and America needs to show that we're not anti-Islam. We are for, for people being free and having opportunity everywhere, that ... We did that in Bosnia, we did that in Kosovo, we did that in numerous other places in the world.

William J. Clinton

#91. We will invest in our people, quality education, job opportunity, family, neighborhood, and yes, a thing we call America.

Dan Quayle

#92. We still believe in the America that is a land of opportunity and a beacon of freedom. We believe in the America that challenges each of us to be better and bigger than ourselves.

Mitt Romney

#93. America faces an enemy who believes in enforced ignorance. And all that we stand for is the open mind, the generous spirit, the ideal of tolerance, freedom, education, opportunity.

David McCullough

#94. Mitt Romney has never been resigned to what someone else said was possible. He cut his own path. That's why he believes in his heart that America has a future full of opportunity and hope. And that's why when Mitt Romney looks down the road, he sees a country that's ready for a comeback.

Mitch McConnell

#95. God has opened many doors of opportunity throughout my lifetime, but I believe the greatest of those doors was allowing me to be born in the United States of America.

Ben Carson

#96. Mr. Lincoln's elevation shows that in America every station in life may be honorable; that there is no barrier against the humblest; but that merit, wherever it exists, has the opportunity to be known.

Matthew Simpson

#97. For me, Barack Obama's election was a milestone of the most extraordinary kind. On the day he was elected I felt such hope in my heart. I thought we were seeing the beginning of a new era of equal opportunity across race and gender such as America had never known before.

Jesse Jackson

#98. In order for America to remain a global leader in innovation and opportunity, we must give our children a solid foundation in math and science.

Kenny Marchant

#99. Tennis legend Bjorn Borg appeared in a Swedish TV ad urging Swedes to have more sex to solve the country's falling birth rate. America can help. This is a perfect opportunity to name Jesse Jackson ambassador to Sweden.

Argus Hamilton

#100. My view is the less the government can do and the more freedom and opportunity you give people, that trusting people and free people and free enterprise - that America has built the greatest country in the history of the world.

Rick Santorum