The soft bigotry of low expectations
I was all-state in four sports in New Jersey, but sometimes I couldn't get served at a restaurant two blocks from my high school. There were no job opportunities then... the only thing a black youth could aspire to be was a bellboy or a pullman or an elevator operator, or, maybe, a teacher. There was a time when all we had was black baseball.
Nobody asked you to flip burgers for the rest of your life.
I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.
In the absence of a great dream, pettiness prevails.
In the second half of the 20th century, people are becoming more limited: Vocabularies are smaller, thoughts are smaller, aspirations are smaller, everything is very scaled down. Everyone is typecast.
It was very different when the masters of science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.
A mind always in contact with children and servants, whose aspirations and ambitions rise no higher than the roof that shelters it, is necessarily dwarfed in its proportions.
It's sad, because he just doesn't have any ambition outside of loving his wife and his daughter — which should be enough but doesn't seem to be enough in this case.
The goal was to work enough to pay my bills and stop going through the couch looking for change. Going way beyond that isn't something I really factored in.
I never dreamed about being an actor, because that was out of reach. Coming from a small town that was big in farming, and also big in clothing factories, you don't dream about being a professional football player or an actor.
You don't want to dream too big in case it doesn't happen.
The very lack of opportunity the group faces creates a self-defeating cycle and puts pressure on members to limit their aspirations.
Black men of our day were never told, The sky's the limit. ... We could aspire to Joe Louis but never Henry Ford.
At 2, I start preparing fish or chicken for dinner. I don't drive. I don't have hobbies. I have no desire to travel.
I set for myself only small goals, goals that are not that far away.
There are none so low but they have their triumphs. Small successes suffice for small souls.
To be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom of men without visions.
I wish you a tolerable Thursday. That's all any of us can hope for.
We're not going to be the fastest-growing or the biggest. I think there's plenty of room for a little old sandwich shop like ours.
He whom common, gross, or stale objects allure, and when obtained, content, is a vulgar being, incapable of greatness in thought or action.
I had no aspirations beyond middle school except to wrestle, no reason to go into high school. This world is all I've known since 15 years of age.
Even the largest of my dreams and ambitions, I realize with increasing dismay, were puny, measly, compared to the object of my dreaming. I would not say my life to date has been built overmuch of compromise, but still, it surrounds me.
Sometimes I wonder if I got lulled into not wanting things because I grew up black in this country.
Like most girls, her imagination carried her just as far as the altar and no further.
