Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Harrington

Opportunity, Harrington suggests, is not a door you simply notice and walk through. It is a door you have to believe you deserve to open. The bite in his line is that “clearly offered” opportunities can still function like mirages: visible, technically available, and effectively unusable to anyone whose horizons have been narrowed by poverty, racism, bad schools, precarious work, or plain exhaustion. The prerequisite is not talent but “a certain level of aspiration” - a phrase that sounds almost genteel until you hear the indictment inside it. Aspiration isn’t a personality trait; it’s a social product.

Harrington, best known for The Other America, wrote against the comforting mid-century story that the U.S. was a broad middle class with a few unfortunate exceptions. His larger argument was that deprivation is not only material but psychological and civic: it shrinks the imagination of what’s possible, then punishes people for that shrinkage. In that light, the quote reads as a critique of bootstrap morality. If you need aspiration to “take advantage,” and aspiration itself is unevenly distributed, then meritocracy is rigged at the level of desire.

The sentence also carries a warning for reformers. You can “offer opportunities” - training programs, scholarships, job listings - and still fail if you don’t build the conditions that make ambition feel rational rather than risky. Harrington’s subtext is blunt: society loves to advertise ladders, but it rarely asks who has been taught to look up.