I’d go to, like, six different schools in one year. We were on welfare, and my mom never ever worked.

When we look back on all the perils through which we have passed and at the mighty foes that we have laid low and all the dark and deadly designs that we have frustrated, why should we fear for our future? We have come safely through the worst.

I am prepared to resort to anything, to submit to anything, for the sake of the commonwealth.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

The worst part of success is, to me, adapting to it. It’s scary.

There is a tendency for things to right themselves.

I’m gonna go hard no matter what because I gotta feed my family, and I gotta feed myself.

As fire when thrown into water is cooled down and put out, so also a false accusation when brought against a man of the purest and holiest character, boils over and is at once dissipated, and vanishes and threats of heaven and sea, himself standing unmoved.

In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people – and to hate those other people.

And I saw the sax line-up that he had behind him and I thought, I’m going to learn the saxophone. When I grow up, I’m going to play in his band. So I sort of persuaded my dad to get me a kind of a plastic saxophone on the hire purchase plan.

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

In a lot of ways, success is much harder than I thought it would be. I figured that you’d get here and then everything would be happily ever after. But, it’s hard work, almost harder once you’re successful because you’ve got to maintain it.

The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

Christmas is the perfect time to celebrate the love of God and family and to create memories that will last forever. Jesus is God’s perfect, indescribable gift. The amazing thing is that not only are we able to receive this gift, but we are able to share it with others on Christmas and every other day of the year.

If you give a person a fish, they’ll fish for a day. But if you train a person to fish, they’ll fish for a lifetime.

I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.

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

Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.

Unemployment rates among Americans who never went to college are about double that of those who have a postsecondary education.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

The truth is, I have absolutely no professional credentials – literally, which is why I’m teaching at MIT.

Being a kid’s not easy. You’re transforming and becoming a human being. At some point, you have everyone taking care of you, and then, all of a sudden, you’re out in the world.

When I was writing ‚Kitchen Confidential,‘ I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.

Whoever does not have a good father should procure one.

Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity.

It would have been difficult to have an ugly daughter.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

I’ve dreamed about doing music since I was three or four years old.

Of all nature’s gifts to the human race, what is sweeter to a man than his children?

Because of our sacred regard for each human intellect, we consider the obtaining of an education to be a religious responsibility.

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

I’ve been through natural disasters. I lived down in Miami and was down there for Hurricane Andrew which was a Category 5. There were members of my family that thought they were going to die. Everyone was in the bathtub.

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.

Everyone goes through adversity in life, but what matters is how you learn from it.

Some folks believe that hardship breeds artistic creativity. I don’t buy it. One can put up with poverty for a while when one is young, but it will inevitably wear a person down.

As a father, safety is always a top of mind issue for me.

I cannot remember a moment in my life when I have not felt the love of my family. We were a family that would have killed for each other – and we still are.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

What interests me in life is curiosity, challenges, the good fight with its victories and defeats.

When you look at how much we spend on social programs in our country, it separates us from a lot of countries. In our country, if you’re hungry, we’ll feed you. If you’re homeless, we’ll house you. If you’re too poor to be sick, we’ll pay for your doctor. But all of that comes at a cost.

These days there is a lot of poverty in the world, and that’s a scandal when we have so many riches and resources to give to everyone. We all have to think about how we can become a little poorer.

Cambridge is one of the best universities in the world, especially in my field.

Neil Young is my hero, and such a great example. You know what that guy has been doing for the past 40 years? Making music. That’s what that guy does. Sometimes you pay attention, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes he hands it to you, sometimes he keeps it to himself. He’s a good man with a beautiful family and wonderful life.

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.

Probably because I’m from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don’t get too excited with big things.

Let’s not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

I go to sleep thinking about my kids being spoiled and I wake up thinking about it.

I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.

I’ve played with IVs before, during and after games. I’ve played with a broken hand, a sprained ankle, a torn shoulder, a fractured tooth, a severed lip, and a knee the size of a softball. I don’t miss 15 games because of a toe injury that everybody knows wasn’t that serious in the first place.

Remember that life’s big changes rarely give advance warning.

I left school to concentrate on racing. It was a family decision between my mum, dad and myself.

When I’m around the kids I feel like I act the most grown-up just because you’re supposed to. And I say things, like every other day, that remind me of my own parents.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

I’ve never been a hands-on dad. I’m not ashamed to admit it, but you can’t run a restaurant and be home for tea at 4:30 and bath and change nappies.

When I was a child I asked my mother what homosexuality was about and she said – and this was 100 years ago in Germany and she was very open-minded – ‚It’s like hair color. It’s nothing. Some people are blond and some people have dark hair. It’s not a subject.‘ This was a very healthy attitude.

The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

Nowadays, manners are easy and life is hard.

My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment – my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.

There is no education like adversity.