I was raised to be an independent woman, not the victim of anything.

It is my own firm belief that the strength of the soul grows in proportion as you subdue the flesh.

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

Someone said to me, ‚If fifty percent of the experts in Hollywood said you had no talent and should give up, what would you do?‘ My answer was then and still is, ‚If a hundred percent told me that, all one hundred percent would be wrong.‘

If we are not free, no one will respect us.

I just want people to be the best thems and live the happiest lives possible.

‚9 to 5,‘ that little song, that little story, just won’t ever end. Just like ‚I Will Always Love You,‘ it just keeps comin‘ back, popping up its head in one way or another.

My job is to bring out in people what they wouldn’t dare do themselves.

There may sometimes be ungenerous attempts to keep a young man down; and they will succeed, too, if he allows his mind to be diverted from its true channel to brood over the attempted injury.

I want people to draw strength from me.

I know that I came into the world with what I call ‚big dharma‘ – with a blueprint to teach self-reliance and a positive loving approach to large numbers of people all over the globe. I am ever so grateful for the circumstances of my life that allowed me to be pretty much left alone and to develop as I was so intended in this incarnation.

My pride fell with my fortunes.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.

Strength was the virtue of paganism; obedience is the virtue of Christianity.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‚I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.‘

Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition – such as lifting weights – we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity.

A friend doesn’t go on a diet because you are fat.

When my ancestors came from Africa, they were shackled by our neck, our wrists, and our ankles in steel chains. I’ve turned those steel chains into gold to symbolize the fact that I’m still a slave, only my price tag is higher.

Remember, the storm is a good opportunity for the pine and the cypress to show their strength and their stability.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

And I love that even in the toughest moments, when we’re all sweating it – when we’re worried that the bill won’t pass, and it seems like all is lost – Barack never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise. Just like his grandmother, he just keeps getting up and moving forward… with patience and wisdom, and courage and grace.

When your desires are strong enough you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.

I never read one hateful thing said about me by some 12 year old. So I got to live an actual life. And I’ve kept that mentality. Just because there’s a hurricane going on around you doesn’t mean you have to open the window and look at it.

Trials teach us what we are; they dig up the soil, and let us see what we are made of.

You just can’t beat the person who never gives up.

My mother had a saying: ‚Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you’re not the last.‘

I come from – I came from Wales, and it’s a strong, butch society. We were in the war and all that. People didn’t waste time feeling sorry for themselves. You had to get on with it. So my credo is get on with it. I don’t waste time being soft. I’m not cold, but I don’t like being, wasting my time with – life’s too short.

Not one person can make or break what I’m doing, except me or God.

For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is.

For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better.

The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.

Most of my young years were spent under the boots of the military.

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.

I’d rather be a victor than a victim.

You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did – which was to hide.

There will be days when I walk in an arena and people will cheer and then there might be days when I walk in an arena and people might boo, but it all sounds the same to me because it’s all just noise that lets me know that I’m relevant.

A Scout is never taken by surprise; he knows exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens.

I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity.

Here in America, we don’t let our differences tear us apart. Not here. Because we know that our greatness comes from when we appreciate each other’s strengths, when we learn from each other, when we lean on each other, because in this country, it’s never been each person for themselves. No, we’re all in this together. We always have been.

You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise.

If I were a Negro, I’d be fighting, as Martin Luther King fought, for human recognition and justice. I’d rather go down with my flag flying. If you’re weak or crippled, or you can’t speak out or fight back in some way, then people don’t hesitate to treat you badly.

When one door is closed, don’t you know, another is open.

For me, it’s enough that I have the first and last word.

Courage is the greatest of all virtues, because if you haven’t courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.

Don’t grow accustomed to living with less, doing less, and being less to the point that you eventually sit back and accept it.

‚Suffering should not make us bitter people,‘ my mother once said, ‚it should make us better comforters.‘ Young people need to hear this from those who have walked before them, because someday they’ll be walking those same steps, but there may not be anyone following behind.

When a person is going through hell, and she encounters someone who went through hellish hell and survived, then she can say, ‚Mine is not so bad as all that. She came through, and so can I.‘

In crises the most daring course is often safest.

The spirit is there in every boy; it has to be discovered and brought to light.

Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.

The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in the world.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

Great tragedy has come to us, and we are meeting it with the best that is in our country, with courage and concern for others because this is America. This is who we are.

Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.

I got the stern end of the stick. It was kind of that iron fist. I am who I am today because of my mother.

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

Let us ask ourselves, ‚What kind of people do we think we are?‘ And let us answer, ‚Free people, worthy of freedom and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.‘