Bobby Orr Quotes

Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity.

It's not a meritocracy until everyone starts with the same opportunities, is it?

I'm aware of the fact that a lot of talented people out there will never get this chance.

This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It's time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers.

I want nothing to do with privilege.

I don't think anybody can claim success at any part of our lives, private or professional, if there are others that don't enjoy the same opportunities.

You are exacerbating inequality rather than opening up opportunity.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy - I don't disparage envy, but I don't accept it as legitimately my master.

I never came into life with any favours or privileges.

Most people don't get a fair crack of the whip.

I am from the class that has, in a sense, benefited from the status quo, but everyone still gets victimized.

My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.

Conservatives often say that we should care not about equality of outcomes but about equality of opportunity.

These days, it seems that if you're not already in place, you can't get there from here.

As you would expect when individualism is based only on opportunity, no one asks what happens to those who have neither the financial nor the political clout to exercise their tiny portion of that opportunity.

… the great equalizer.

When people are educated, class distinction disappears.

You can’t be a minority in this society without having someone express disapproval of affirmative action.… We have to prove ourselves and we have to work hard doing it.

The inequality that exists today, … derives less from the unequal availability of opportunity than from the unequal ability to exploit opportunity …

All inequality that has no special utility to justify it is injustice.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others”, and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through the those gates.

The Ledbetter Act is aimed at equality. But individuals are not equal. We all have different talents, resources, interests, abilities, educations, and backgrounds.

I think this country is genuinely a meritocracy.

It's kind of almost not fair that certain people don't get the opportunities that others get just because of where they are born or where they were brought up.

If you have the talent, you should have the opportunity.