Self Made Man Quotes

Fortune may crowd a man's life with fortunate circumstances and happy opportunities, but they will, as we all know, avail him nothing unless he makes a wise and vigorous use of them.

I don't believe in the myth of the "self made man". Nobody gets through alone.

I'm a self-made man. Who else would help?

We're all self-made men, but not very many of us have stayed on the job.

I always thought Christians were the weak people. When you can't make it in life then you have to ask God. I really prided myself on being a self-made man.

There's no such thing as a self-made man. I've had much help and have found that if you are willing to work, many people are willing to help you.

Everyone is a self-made man. Only the successful admit it.

A self-made man may prefer a self-made name.

When did it become something of shame or ridicule to be a self-made man in America?

The self-made man is often proud of a poor job.

It's just as difficult to live in a self-made hell of privacy as it is to live in a self-made hell of publicity.

We have the kind of self-made-man myth, which says that super-successful people did it themselves.

A self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his son to Oxford.

Long-term success is never achieved on our own. The phrase 'a self-made man' is a myth all along the way we need support.

There is no such thing as a 'self-made' man. We are made up of thousands of others.

When you're a self-made man you start very early in life. In my case it was at nine years old when I started bringing income into the family. You get a drive that's a little different, maybe a little stronger, than somebody who inherited .

My especial object is to help the poor; the rich can help themselves. I believe in self-made men.

I do not think much of the good luck theory of self-made men. It is worth but little attention and has no practical value.

My main goal is to be a self-made man and have control over what's mine.

The man who will get up will be helped up; and the man who will not get up will be allowed to stay down.

Yes, we worship the idea of the "self-made man" - otherwise we'd go on strike against Bill Gates having all that money! We worship that idea.

It is better to be a self-made man,--filled up according to God's original pattern,--than to be half a man, made after some other man's pattern.

We succeed, not alone by the laborious exertions of our faculties, be they small or great, but by the regular, thoughtful and systematic exercise of them.

Opportunity is important but exertion is indispensable.

He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet for the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.

My theory of self-made men is, then, simply this; that they are men of work. Whether or not such men have acquired material, moral or intellectual excellence, honest labor faithfully, steadily and persistently pursued, is the best, if not the only, explanation of their success... All human experience proves over and over again, that any success which comes through meanness, trickery, fraud and dishonour, is but emptiness and will only be a torment to its possessor.

The myth of the self-made man, has to be profoundly hypocritical: it is the self-serving demonstration that a lie is the truth

We are all self-made men and women, but only the successful take credit for it.

Self-made men often worship their creator.

A self-made man? Yes, and one who worships his creator.

Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.

There is no such thing as a self-made man. You will reach your goals only with the help of others.

Harris had the egotistical dogmatism of the self-made man who had painfully educated himself without contact with superior brains.

A self made man is a rarity and hated by the parasites that floated to fame thought their parents, relatives and contacts.

Self-made men are most always apt to be a little too proud of the job.

Gerald Boyd was a classic specimen of the self-made man. Born poor, he worked and studied his way up out of poverty under the guidance of his widowed grandmother.

There is no such thing as a "self-made" man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our success.

Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.

We may explain success mainly by one word and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!!

The American culture ideal of the "self-made-man," of everyone "standing on his own feet" seemed as tragic a picture as the initiative-destroying dependence on a benevolent despot. He felt and perceived clearly that we all need continuous help from each other, and that this type of interdependence is the greatest challenge to maturity of individual and group functioning.

I was an older brother. So I had to do a lot of things first. My father was a self-made man, and he would beat me senseless. But he was a Scotsman, and stubborn. I'm his son, and I'm stubborn, too. I go on being stubborn.

God's designs may be frequent justification for our actions, but it is we, the "self-made men", who take the credit.

The most famous self-made man in the world today is our own Edison. Talk with Mr. Edison and he will tell you he owes much if not most of his success to omnivorous reading. Forbes is one of his favorite publications. How closely he reads it can be gathered from a letter just received from him in which he asks the editor to forward a long analytical letter to the writer of a series of articles which contained two figures Mr. Edison questions, and he wants to know exactly on what authority or investigation they were based. Both letters were the product of Mr. Edison and were signed by him.

Self-Made Men are the men who owe little or nothing to birth, relationship, friendly surroundings; to wealth inherited or to early approved means of education; who are what they are, without the aid of any favoring conditions by which other men usually rise in the world and achieve great results.

Witness the American ideal: the Self-Made Man. But there is no such person. If we can stand on our own two feet, it is because others have raised us up. If, as adults, we can lay claim to competence and compassion, it only means that other human beings have been willing and enabled to commit their competence and compassion to us--through infancy, childhood, and adolescence, right up to this very moment.

There's no one more obnoxious and self-righteous than the self-made man. And no one more admirable.

My father started with nothing and is a self-made man. No matter what I do with my life, I can never match his accomplishments.

There is a great deal of strength in Garfield's life and struggles as a self-made man.... From poverty and obscurity, by labor at all avocations, he became a great scholar, a statesman, a major general, a Senator, a Presidential candidate.... The truth is, no man ever started so low that accomplished so much in all our history. Not Franklin or Lincoln even.

Lincoln is such an iconic figure in American history. He seems to reflect so many elements of American culture that we consider essential, whether it's the self-made man, the frontier hero, the politician who tries to act in a moral way as well as in a political way, Honest Abe. His career raises these questions that are still with us, the power of the federal government vis-à-vis the states, the question of race in American life, can we be a society of equals? There are so many issues central to Lincoln's career that are still part of our society one hundred and fifty years later.