I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.

If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.

Passions are the gales of life.

It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own.

The Lord gets his best soldiers out of the highlands of affliction.

Standing as I do, with my hand upon this staff, and under the folds of the American flag, I ask you to stand by me so long as I stand by it.

Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.

I am confident that when the facts and policies have been examined, when the record of performances have been reviewed, Barack Obama and Joe Biden will once again be elected to lead our beloved country to a better future.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions. There are a good many points about which I may be diffident, but when it comes to questions of Truth and intellectual independence, there is no holding me – I can envisage no finer end than to sacrifice oneself for a conviction.

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.

You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.

You do the policy, I’ll do the politics.

We must think and act like a nation of a billion people and not like that of a million people. Dream, dream, dream!

The wicked leader is he who the people despise. The good leader is he who the people revere. The great leader is he who the people say, ‚We did it ourselves.‘

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

How can any man be weak who dares to be at all?

You don’t need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

I was a very shy character, always feeling uncomfortable because everybody was stronger than I, and always afraid I would look like a sissy. Everybody else played baseball; everybody else did all kinds of athletic things.

No man was ever wise by chance.

No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.

Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, it’s at the end of your arm, as you get older, remember you have another hand: The first is to help yourself, the second is to help others.

My own eight children all march to the beat of their inner music, and in some cases, it is definitely far away from what I hear. I’ve had to honor their instincts and their choices, and merely guided them out of harm’s way until they could be their own guides.

How I love David Bowie.

Everything is generated through your own will power.

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

A President’s hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.

Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel.

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right- for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

If I made a commitment, I stood by that commitment – and try to make it real. Because when you become leaders, the most important thing you have is your word, your trust. That’s where respect comes from.

Surveys show our standing around the world is higher than when I was elected to this office, and when it comes to every important international issue, people of the world do not look to Beijing or Moscow to lead – they call us.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

Faith Hill is a big role model.

We don’t have to let extremists define us.

When I say to you, there is nobody like me, and there never was, that is a statement I want every woman to feel and make about themselves.

We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.

We can’t allow the world’s worst leaders to blackmail, threaten, hold freedom-loving nations hostage with the world’s worst weapons.

Our brand of democracy is hard. But I can promise that a year from now, when I no longer hold this office, I’ll be right there with you as a citizen – inspired by those voices of fairness and vision, of grit and good humor and kindness that have helped America travel so far.

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

If you have fear, you are bound by tradition, you follow some leader or guru. When you are bound by tradition, when you are afraid of your husband or your wife, you lose your dignity as an individual human being.

I think that a president needs to have a variety of views presented. But also, there has to be a team effort, because otherwise, I think it creates a dissonance and difficulty.

When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.

I can’t say this enough – the food that you put into your bodies can actually help you get better grades. And it can also affect your performance in sports and other activities too. You see, when you give your body the best possible fuel, you have more energy, you’re stronger, you think more quickly.

Instead of worrying about what people say of you, why not spend time trying to accomplish something they will admire.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

When I started Virgin from a basement in west London, there was no great plan or strategy. I didn’t set out to build a business empire… For me, building a business is all about doing something to be proud of, bringing talented people together and creating something that’s going to make a real difference to other people’s lives.

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

I think Clinton, after getting into office and into Washington, was shocked at being bludgeoned. So he spent time trying to be all things to all people – one way guaranteed not to be successful or respected in a lion’s den. You can’t just play around with all those big cats – you’ve got to take somebody on.

If you’re in this business and you are scared, then you better do something else.

Our lives are a sum total of the choices we have made.

Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.

I want to make something that is breathtaking. Of course, you can’t make something that is always breathtaking, or you would never be able to breathe. You would collapse.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.