Opposition
- Adversity creates heroes.--Picabo Street
- Adversity is an opportunity for self-discovery.--John C. Maxwell ( Sometimes you Win - Sometimes you Learn)
- Adversity is the first path to truth.--Lord Byron
- Adversity weakens the weak and strengthens the strong.--Anonymous
- As you go along your own road in life, you will, if you aim high enough, also meet resistance…. But no matter how tough the opposition may seem, have courage still--and persevere.--Madeleine Albright
- Break the anger habit. It is a waste of valuable energy to rail against adverse events. Stuff happens. Get over it and move on.--Sibyl McLendon ("Do You Have a Solid Foundation?" in The Power to Endure)
- The breakfast of champions is not cereal, it's opposition.--Nick Seitz
- Comfort and prosperity have never enriched the world as much as adversity has. Out of pain and problems have come the sweetest songs, and the most gripping stories.--Billy Graham
- The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny.--William Ellery Channing (Life, 1848)
- The difference between obstacles and opportunity is your outlook.--Mark Sanborn ( Up, Down, or Sideways)
- Dissent and dissenters have no monopoly on freedom. They must tolerate opposition. They must accept dissent from their dissent.--Abe Fortas (Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience)
- Don't be afraid of opposition. Remember, a kite rises against--not with--the wind.--Hamilton Mabie
- Don't be distracted by criticism. Remember--the only taste of success some people have is when they take a bite out of you.--Zig Ziglar (Zig Ziglar's Little Book of Big Quotes)
- Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter mush. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.--Justice Robert Jackson (West Virginia State Board V. Barnette, 1943)
- Given a sufficient number of people and an adequate amount of time you can create insurmountable opposition to the most inconsequential idea.--Unknown
- Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.--Albert Einstein
- The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it.--Epicurus
- The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.--Moliere
- Have you learned lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who rejected you, and braced themselves against you, or disputed the passage with you?--Walt Whitman
- He that struggles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.-Edmund Burke (The Revolution in Freance)
- I have learnt that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.--Booker T. Washington
- I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.--Eleanor Roosevelt (Eleanor : the Years Alone by Lash)
- I have to look at how much I too need my enemies to stay my enemies, like it’s hard to know who I am if I don’t know who I’m against. ... But maybe our need for enemies is so that we can neatly avoid the ways in which we too are enemies – enemies of grace, enemies of forgiveness, enemies of those we harm. ... Showing up with a bullhorn to cry out against someone else is seriously the best way for me to avoid being the one being cried out against.--Nadia Bolz Weber ("Enemies, Retribution and Women Giving Birth – a Sermon on Jonah")
- I respect only those who resist me, but I cannot tolerate them.--Charles de Gaulle (New York Times Magazine 5/12/68)
- If you stand up and be counted, form time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good.--Thomas J. Watson, Jr.
- In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.--John Kenneth Galbraith
- It cannot be too often repeated that it is not helps, but obstacles, not facilities, but difficulties that make men.--William Mathews
- Leaders exhibit two essential characteristics, the willingness to confront adversity and a clearly articulated future preference.--Martin O'Malley
- The likelihood of one individual being right increases in direct ratio to the intensity with which other try to prove him wrong.--Leonore Fleischer (Heaven Can Wait, the novelization. Originally written by Elaine May and Warren Beatty in the movie of the same name)
- The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.--Woodrow Wilson ("The New Freedom")
- Men naturally despise those who court them, but respect those who do not give way to them.--Thucydides (The Peloponnesian War)
- Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.--Alexander Hamilton
- The miracle is, in fact, that given the overwhelming odds against women, or blacks, that so many of both have managed to achieve so much sheer excellence in those bailiwicks of white masculine prerogatives like science, politics or the arts.--Linda Nochlin
- New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.--John Locke
- Obstacles are necessary for success because in selling, as in all careers of importance, victory comes only after many struggles and countless defeats. Yet, each struggle, each defeat, sharpens your skills and strengths, your courage and your endurance, your ability and your confidence and thus each obstacle is a comrade-in-arms forcing you to become better or quit. Each rebuff is an opportunity to move forward. Turn away from them, avoid them, and you throw away your future.--Og Mandino
- Obstacles are like wild animals. They are cowards but they will bluff you if they can. If they see you are afraid of them... they are liable to spring upon you; but if you look them squarely in the eye, they will slink out of sight.--Orison Swett Marden
- Obstacles often are not personal attacks; they are muscle builders.--Anne Wilson Schaef
- Openly questioning the way the world works and challenging the power of the powerful is not an activity customarily rewarded.--Dale Spender (Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them)
- Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.--Heraclitus (Fragments)
- Opposition is a natural part of life. Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition such as lifting weights, we develop our character muscles by over-coming challenges and adversity.--Stephen R. Covey (First Things First)
- The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters.--Walter Lippmann (Atlantic Monthly, August 1939)
- Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.--George Eliot (Janet's Repentance)
- Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.--Joseph Sobran
- The pressure of adversity does not affect the mind of the brave man... It is more powerful than external circumstances.--Seneca
- Prosperity discovers vice, adversity discovers virtue.--Francis Bacon
- Religion, if we’re not careful, can accentuate the opposition at the expense of the mystery so we can end up believing that God’s role is just to side with "us" against "them," and keep the sun shining on us.--Brian Draper ("Thought for the Day," Oct. 24, 2015)
- So the better my partner or my opposition, however you like to think about it, the better my game.--Jeremy Irons
- Successful people see adversity as a stepping stone rather than a stumbling block.--Shawn Achor
- To fly, we have to have resistance.--Maya Lin
- To oppose something is to maintain it.--Ursula K. LeGuin (The Left Hand of Darkness)
- To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence.--Arthur Schopenhauer
- We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.--E. M Forster (Two Cheers for Democracy)
- We become wiser by adversity; prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right.--Seneca the Younger
- We encounter the grinding wheels that sharpen our mental blades many places in life. Adversity, school, parents, spiritual guides, books, experience are all sharpening teachers. As we grow older, to stay sharp we must find new grindstones to whet and sharpen our potential and keep us at our brightest, most penetrating best.--Robert Kall
- What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance?--Thomas Jefferson
- What we resist persists.--Sonia Johnson (Going Out of Our Minds)
- When you struggle, that's when you realize what you're made of, and that's when you realize what the people around you can do. You learn who you'd want to take with you to a war, and who you'd only want to take to lunch.--Chamique Holdsclaw
- The wise man always throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point.--Ralph Waldo Emerson ("Compensation" Essays: First Series)
- A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.-- Baltasar Gracián y Morales
- You will face your greatest opposition when you are closest to your biggest miracle.--Shannon L. Alder
Quote of the Day Home Page
Created and maintained by quotelady@quotelady.com. All pages of this site copyright © 1998-2017.
This page last updated April 1, 2017.