As supportive as my hometown is, in my high school, there are people who would probably walk up to me and punch me in the face. There’s a select few that will never like me. They don’t like what I stand for. They don’t like somebody who stands for being sober, who stands for anything happy. They’re going to be negative no matter what.

There really is no difference between the bully and the victim.

People tend to think that because I’m a performer and I don’t go to a regular high school that I haven’t personally been affected by bullies. But it’s actually quite the contrary.

Throughout my life, I’ve always been really close with girls and made friends with girls. And I’ve always been a really sickly, feminine person anyhow, so I thought I was gay for a while because I didn’t find any of the girls in my high school attractive at all.

Courage is fire, and bullying is smoke.

America thrived in the 20th century because we made high school free. We sent a generation to college. We cultivated the most educated workforce in the world.

The funny thing is, all my friends are short. I wasn’t aware of tall people till I got to high school. I didn’t know they existed. I was sheltered.

All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school – my number one piece of advice is: You should learn how to program.

I was called really horrible, profane names very loudly in front of huge crowds of people, and my schoolwork suffered at one point.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, ‚Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.‘ You have no idea of the competition.

The British nation is unique in this respect. They are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst.

‚They‘ are the people that don’t believe in you, that say that you won’t succeed. We stay away from ‚They.‘

I made a commitment to completely cut out drinking and anything that might hamper me from getting my mind and body together. And the floodgates of goodness have opened upon me – spiritually and financially.

But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.

You never make fun of anybody with a club foot or a withered arm, but it’s open season on anybody who stutters.

It sometimes makes people feel better about themselves, you know, to put other people down, or make fun of them, or maybe make mockery of their work and that doesn’t make me feel good at all.

That’s correct, I flunked out of high school twice because I couldn’t write.

Akron, Ohio, is my home. I will always be here. I’m still working out at my old high school.

I got teased my entire school life. What they were picking on I don’t even understand.

My folks ain’t graduated from high school or nothing like that, so we always had to struggle in the family – and I come from a big family.

‚Mean‘ is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.

I don’t drink at all.

Sometimes, people can be extraordinarily judgmental and closed-minded to anyone different or special, which is why it’s so hard for young people in this day and age to be comfortable enough in their own skin to not listen to the people picking on them.

I was bullied as a boy – lots of kids are, but hopefully most of us get on with our lives and grow up.

When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.

If you are not being bullied all I would say – cause I like to talk about the other side of it as well – is you know, be someone that nurtures, and if there’s someone in your class that maybe doesn’t have a lot of friends, be the person that sits with them in the cafeteria sometimes; be the bigger person.

We live in ugly times.

Watch out for the joy-stealers: gossip, criticism, complaining, faultfinding, and a negative, judgmental attitude.

I cycled when I was at high school, then reconnected with bikes in New York in the late ’70s. It was a good way of getting around the clubs and galleries of the Lower East Side and Soho.

Nothing good ever comes of violence.

I feel that sin and evil are the negative part of you, and I think it’s like a battery: you’ve got to have the negative and the positive in order to be a complete person.

I got a fancy reputation. During high school, every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew.

I started wearing Ugg when I was, like, 13 or 14, in high school, and my mom got me a pair for Christmas one year.

I don’t understand why or how we can bully each other.

I remember when I was in high school I didn’t have a new dress for each special occasion. The girls would bring the fact to my attention, not always too delicately. The boys, however, never bothered with the subject. They were my friends, not because of the size of my wardrobe but because they liked me.

When I went back to my old high school, all these kids looking at me like I’m the real big homie, the same way I look at Jay Z, Nas, or Dr. Dre. You would’ve thought Michael Jackson walked through that joint off the excitement that they had.

My freshman and sophomore years in high school, I spent a lot of time trying to get back on the right track. I was arrested multiple times by the time I was 16, so I had a little harder time trying to adjust like a lot of us do in high school.

By 2018, an estimated 63 percent of all new U.S. jobs will require workers with an education beyond high school. For our young people to get those jobs, they first need to graduate from high school ready to start a postsecondary education.

In high school, I majored in brick masonry. We had the wood shop, the machine shop, so I know about all that. I wanted to build buildings when I graduated from high school. I do know my way around that stuff.

When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that’s not something I could do.

George Carlin’s album, ‚Class Clown,‘ came out when I was in high school. I memorized a lot of that album. I’d come home from school, put it on, and listen over and over. I started memorizing it. I don’t even know why. I loved it so much I memorized it.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

Sometimes negative news does come out, but it is often exaggerated and manipulated to spread scandal. Journalists sometimes risk becoming ill from coprophilia and thus fomenting coprophagia: which is a sin that taints all men and women, that is, the tendency to focus on the negative rather than the positive aspects.

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

I went through a lot of battles in high school.

What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance.

An evil person is like a dirty window, they never let the light shine through.

Let’s face it. No kid in high school feels as though they fit in.

In this outward and physical ceremony we attest once again to the inner and spiritual strength of our Nation. As my high school teacher, Miss Julia Coleman, used to say: ‚We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.‘

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.

I have been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk.

If there’s not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something.

I have good days and bad days.

Every time I hear a politician mention the word ‚stimulus,‘ my mind flashes back to high school biology class, when I touched battery wires to a dead frog to make it twitch.

There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.

I think about the milestones from my childhood and what it will be like to watch our kids go through them. Taking Riley to her first day of school was a whirlwind. I can’t imagine what middle school is going to be like, and high school, and graduation.

An overflow of good converts to bad.

I was called ‚Dumbo,‘ like the elephant, as a child because I couldn’t understand things at school.

I know this sounds strange, but as a kid, I was really shy. Painfully shy. The turning point was freshman year, when I was the biggest geek alive. No one, I mean no one, even talked to me.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It’s the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.