Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even.

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

I break ground. I trailblaze.

If a leader doesn’t convey passion and intensity then there will be no passion and intensity within the organization and they’ll start to fall down and get depressed.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

Nothing external to you has any power over you.

Boot camp sucks – SEAL training sucks – but you know what? That’s what makes you good.

You not supposed to feel down over whatever happen to you. I mean, you’re supposed to use whatever happen to you as some type of upper, not a downer.

Whenever you give up something, you must replace it with something.

Fighting for one’s freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.

Nobody can hurt me without my permission.

There’s nothing I have to hide or defend. I’m gonna live my life. And there are times when people wanna try to attack me, and I don’t know why, but they will. And that’s okay.

I have a deep, deep belief that if I tell you I’m going to crack you with a clean shot to the chin inside one minute of the first round and you will be unconscious, well, then that’s what will happen.

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

I was brought up as an only child, and we were very close. But when I was 14, we got evicted. We came home to a padlock, and I looked up at my mom and she was crying, and there was nothing to do.

Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth… That’s the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.

It’s like a muscle – if you stop going to the gym or stop running, you get weak. The military teaches you these great values, but we don’t keep up the discipline on our own, and we lose it. So wherever you go, keep that discipline up.

It was really hard for them to intimidate me. They felt I was intimidating. One of the growers had a name for me: I think it was ‚dragon lady‘ or something like it.

If I can be a leader, I will.

Our whole life is set up in the path of least resistance. We don’t want to suffer. We don’t want to feel discomfort. So the whole time, we’re living our lives in a very comfortable area. There’s no growth in that.

There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.

I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.

I don’t believe we are supposed to go through life defeated and not having enough money to pay our bills or send our kids to college.

You’ve got to learn to survive a defeat. That’s when you develop character.

There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can’t move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn’t need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around.

You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.

I am a walking piece of art every day, with my dreams and my ambitions forward at all times in an effort to inspire my fans to lead their life in that way.

I have survivor’s curiosity, I guess.

Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable.

Start wide, expand further, and never look back.

What you don’t do can be a destructive force.

I have the Midas touch, in the way that when I hook up with a project, I feel, not speaking cocky or conceited, but there’s a confidence I have. I learned that from Muhammad Ali; I used to bodyguard him. He taught me about confidence. So when it comes to any job I work, I’m gonna do it good; I’m going to bring it over the top.

We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.

Practice yourself, for heaven’s sake in little things, and then proceed to greater.

I would rather earn 1% off a 100 people’s efforts than 100% of my own efforts.

When your dream is bigger than you are, you only have two choices: give up or get help.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

I don’t like looking back. I’m always constantly looking forward. I’m not the one to sort of sit and cry over spilt milk. I’m too busy looking for the next cow.

No one is so brave that he is not disturbed by something unexpected.

There is no way to prosperity, prosperity is the way.

A dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.

I plan on taking athletics as far as I can.

Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.

One word from the Lord is like a piece of gold to a believer, who is like a jeweler, shaping and hammering out the promise for a number of weeks.

I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.

Must is a hard nut to crack, but it has a sweet kernel.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

It doesn’t matter which side of the fence you get off on sometimes. What matters most is getting off. You cannot make progress without making decisions.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

The sun doesn’t always shine in West Virginia, but the people do.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed… Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

If you have the ability to pick yourself up by the bootstraps and start over, you come out stronger because you learn from whatever mistakes you made.

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

To lead people walk behind them.

One’s only rival is one’s own potentialities. One’s only failure is failing to live up to one’s own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.

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.