Bootstraps Quotes

“It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.”
― George Monbiot

“SJ: Ah, okay... so you're saying people just need to pull themselves up by their boostraps?
Jared: Exactly.
SJ: In order to do that, they have to be able to afford boots.”
― Nic Stone, Dear Martin

“Everybody's entitled to that forty acres and a mule. You're going to do the work, but you have to have something to work with. If you don't have a job, where do you go from there? You hear people say Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you don't even have shoes. You're barefooted. What are you going to pull yourself up by? Our country owes every citizen of the United States of America a means of livelihood. Not a handout, but a way to make it.”
― Studs Terkel

“A man can't pull himself up by his own bootstraps no matter how hard he tries, Cort had lectured when Roland, Cuthbert, Alain and Jamie had been little more than toddlers.”
― Stephen King, The Dark Tower

“A sunny disposition is worth more than fortune.
Young people should know that it can be cultivated; that the mind like the body can be moved from the shade into sunshine.”
― Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie

“Diana had always hated when people said this about her family. The bosses who made her dad list a payroll company as his employer, they gamed the system. The assholes who convinced her parents to take out both a second mortgage and a HELOC in 2006 gamed the system. The employers who would never give Edith enough hours for benefits gamed the system. But ask a lot of people, and they'd tell you it's people like her grandma who game the system. They'd tell you that an old woman who's worked hard every day of her life and still struggles to get by is a malignant vacuum for their personal tax dollars, and a blight on their lives as free Americans.”
― J. Ryan Stradal, The Lager Queen of Minnesota

“Sometimes you need a hero; most times you are one.”
― Johnnie Dent Jr.