I know a lot of athletes and models are written off as just bodies. I never felt used for my body.

Everything is generated through your own will power.

I really wanted to be a model when I was little. I loved photography, and I loved being on camera. But I was short and chubby, so I couldn’t. Anyway, being an artist is way more interesting than just being a model because it’s about you and what you want to be. You’re not being treated like a clothes hanger.

Women fight for democracy and engage in the world. But they shouldn’t try and be copying men and be masculine; they should anchor on the home and build on those fundamentals.

My body is like breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I don’t think about it, I just have it.

I don’t look at myself as a commodity, but I’m sure a lot of people have.

What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support?

It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.

Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.

Let’s be very clear: Strong men – men who are truly role models – don’t need to put down women to make themselves feel powerful. People who are truly strong lift others up. People who are truly powerful bring others together.

It’s simple, if it jiggles, it’s fat.

I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions they will be moved to act.

Do we not realize that self respect comes with self reliance?

You can choose a future where more Americans have the chance to gain the skills they need to compete, no matter how old they are or how much money they have. Education was the gateway to opportunity for me. It was the gateway for Michelle. And now more than ever, it is the gateway to a middle-class life.

What you have outside you counts less than what you have inside you.

If you were the President of the United States or the Queen of England – you couldn’t have a person who would be more protective than my mother was for me. Which meant really that I could dare to do all sorts of things.

I’ve been talked about by a lot better people than the general public.

We are Divine enough to ask and we are important enough to receive.

A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous.

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

I did go to Wellesley, a women’s college. And I am of a kind of strange generation which is transitional in terms of women who wanted to go out and get jobs.

Bring them on.

Real beauty knocks you a little bit off kilter.

I have some good friends of my own who happen to be gay, and when it comes to gay, straight, or whatever, I’m for anything life-affirmative. I’m for gay power, straight power, male power, female power; everybody should feel empowered without oppressing anyone who’s different.

No woman in my time will be prime minister or chancellor or foreign secretary – not the top jobs. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to be prime minister; you have to give yourself 100 percent.

If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.

I am grateful to be a woman. I must have done something great in another life.

Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

I got my own back.

Do you know the only value life has is what life puts on itself?

Control your own destiny! Control your own destiny!

Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.

Either you’re the one erasing or you’re the one being erased.

Where globalization means, as it so often does, that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker, we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.

No sanction can stand against ignited minds.

My main goal is to be a self-made man and have control over what’s mine.

Women must tell men always that they are the strong ones. They are the big, the strong, the wonderful. In truth, women are the strong ones. It is just my opinion, I am not a professor.

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

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

I am not some goddess that dropped down from the sky to sing pop music; I am not some extra-incredible human person that needs to be told how wonderful they are all day and kissed.

I hated to be treated as a child. I thought it was the worst situation.

We are twice armed if we fight with faith.

I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.

I don’t have to show anything to anyone. There is nothing to prove.

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

I have too many fantasies to be a housewife. I guess I am a fantasy.

I think life is a matter of choices and that wherever we are, good or bad, is because of choices we make.

There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life.

Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that’s real power.

Don’t ever doubt yourselves or waste a second of your life. It’s too short, and you’re too special.

I am not afraid… I was born to do this.

All of us are mentors. You’re mentors right here and now. And one of the things I’ve always done throughout my life, I have always found that person, that group of people that I was going to reach my hand out and help bring them along with me.

Certainly in the next 50 years we shall see a woman president, perhaps sooner than you think. A woman can and should be able to do any political job that a man can do.

I was everything an R&B singer wasn’t. I wasn’t in shape. I wasn’t a pretty boy.

I am so tired of fear. And I don’t want my girls to live in a country, in a world, based on fear.

It’s a great, great experience to finally get the reception that you know you rightfully deserve.

All of these young people have some kind of potential in them. And if we don’t invest in them as a nation, regardless of where they come from or what color they are, if we don’t invest in them, we lose.

I believe that of all the things I have done, exciting though many of them have been, there’s no doubt in my mind that the most worthwhile have been the establishing of schools and hospitals, and the rebuilding of monasteries in the mountains.

Freedom lies in being bold.

I’m not a star. I don’t feel I’m so great. So how can I make you feel great just because you’ve got my signature on a piece of paper?

I encourage people not to be passive consumers of music and of culture in general. And feeling like, yeah, you can enjoy the products of professionals, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to completely give up the reins and give up every connection to music or whatever it happens to be.