I think success is a relative term. If you're a caveman, success is capturing an elephant. Success is achieving better than the norm. Success is being exceptional. It's exceptional reputation, exceptional income, and exceptional respect.
Of course there are exceptional circumstances, and there is exceptional talent; but, unhappily, exceptional talent does not always win its reward unless favoured by exceptional circumstances.
Exceptional results arrive only when exceptional people put in exceptional effort. It never arises by accident or good fortune.
America's exceptional nature confers upon us responsibilities. We are not exceptional because we say so; we are exceptional because, over and over, we do exceptional things - things like what Generals Marshall and MacArthur accomplished putting Europe and Japan back on their feet after World War II.
I’m “exceptional”- a democratic term used to avoid the damning labels of “gifted” and “deprived” (which used to mean “bright” and “retarded”) and as soon as “exceptional” begins to mean anything to anyone they’ll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression as long as it doesn’t mean anything to anybody. “Exceptional” refers to both ends of the spectrum, so all my life I’ve been exceptional.
American exceptionalism? Exceptional at what? Waging wars against innocent people for fake reasons? Exceptional at what? Being addicted to pharmaceutical drugs that have people's minds wasted? Exceptional at what? Eating more junk food and becoming the most obese nation on Earth?
Our higher education system is one of the things that makes America exceptional. There's no place else that has the assets we do when it comes to higher education. People from all over the world aspire to come here and study here. And that is a good thing.
The destructive fixation of the envious English-Canadian mind requires that the highest, happiest most agile flyers be laid low. [It is] a sadistic desire corroded by soul-destroying envy, to intimidate all those who might aspire to anything the slightest exceptional.
I think the problem is, exceptional women will always succeed. But there are plenty of less-exceptional men who succeed. Until we get the less-exceptional women succeeding equally, we do not have full equality.
You can't aspire to have heightened senses, whereas you can aspire to tell the truth, every single second, and you can aspire to be dogged and just never let anything be enough, never give in, and never give up.
You always have to aspire to everything; winning titles is what I've been missing. And I will give my life and everything I have in order to achieve it.
Growing up, you'd see Michael Jordan on everything from Gatorade to shoes - everything. Obviously, that's something pretty cool for an athlete to aspire to.
I love 'I'm British But...' It's such a sweet, innocent, open-hearted film, and it has the sort of openness that I still aspire to with everything I do. It wears its heart, head, everything on its sleeve.
In France, we have a geographic situation that is very exceptional, and it creates produce that is completely exceptional.
Life's so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Dramabegins where there's freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That's why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who's Who.
One thing that America is objectively exceptional at is overreacting whenever anyone accuses them of not being exceptional.