People are getting smarter nowadays; they are letting lawyers, instead of their conscience, be their guide.

If you were to ask me to choose between democratic values and wealth, power, prosperity and fame, I will very easily and without any doubt choose democratic values.

I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone – and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward.

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

We shouldn’t have to be burdened with all the technicalities that come up from time to time with shrewd, smart lawyers interpreting what the laws or what the Constitution may or may not say.

Wisdom stands at the turn in the road and calls upon us publicly, but we consider it false and despise its adherents.

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

I would hear stories about Steve Jobs and feel like he was at 100 percent exactly what he wanted to do, but I’m sure even a Steve Jobs has compromised. Even a Rick Owens has compromised. You know, even a Kanye West has compromised. Sometimes you don’t even know when you’re being compromised till after the fact, and that’s what you regret.

If you want to deal with an epidemic – crime or health – the smartest and most effective and cheapest way to deal with it is prevention first.

Doing what’s right isn’t the problem. It is knowing what’s right.

If you would take, you must first give, this is the beginning of intelligence.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.

I don’t think I’m bad for people. If I did think I was bad for people, I would go back to driving a truck, and I really mean this.

I always like to take my time and examine the two candidates, see not only the two candidates but the policies they will bring in, the people they will bring in, who they might appoint to the Supreme Court, and look at the whole range of issues before making a decision.

The fact is, I was never too bright in school. I ain’t ashamed of it, though. I mean, how much do school principals make a month?

The men who have succeeded are men who have chosen one line and stuck to it.

We do need women in civic life. We do need women to run for office, to be in political office. We need a feminist to be at the table when decisions are being made so that the right decisions will be made.

Never have we stolen the intelligences of other peoples. On the contrary, in Cuba we have trained tens of thousands of doctors and other top-level professionals, for free, in order to send them back to their own countries.

If you judge, investigate.

I never make conscious decisions.

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.

Everything God tells us to do is for our good. Whether it’s direction you get in His Word or something He’s specifically put in your heart for your situation in life, the absolute best thing you can ever do is obey Him promptly and completely.

My one big regret is that I didn’t play on for ten more years.

I base a lot of decisions on my gut, and going with an independent label was a good one.

I understood that with the swipe of my pen as a prosecutor, I would have the decision in my pen to make a decision about someone’s life.

I can never say ‚why‘ about anything I do. I suppose I can say ‚how‘ and ‚when‘ and ‚what.‘ But ‚why‘ is impenetrable to me.

One aspect of appellate judging is we have to give reasons for all of our decisions. And when you sit down and try to write it out, sometimes you find that your first judgment wasn’t the right one.

Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.

I always believe that there should come a time when your energy, speed, stamina should combine well with your brains.

The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It’s not that there’s something new in our way of thinking – it’s that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.

If I have the chance to say something, I will say it – but that doesn’t obligate me to always say something, or to shed light on every problem, as if I were a lawmaker.

All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.

There were the questions of what kind of First Lady I would be, what issues would I focus on. Those were the questions that were being pounded on me through the campaign. A lot of times, I wondered what in the world Barack was even getting us into.

The more a person seeks security, the more that person gives up control over their life.

Action is the real measure of intelligence.

I’m a mentor to anybody who’s interested.

All of us knows, not what is expedient, not what is going to make us popular, not what the policy is, or the company policy – but in truth each of us knows what is the right thing to do. And that’s how I am guided.

I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist, but I don’t like girls pretending to be stupid because it’s easier.

In too much of the West, everyone wants the guarantee of safety, and never having to make any decisions.

Inability to make decisions is one of the principal reasons executives fail. Deficiency in decision-making ranks much higher than lack of specific knowledge or technical know-how as an indicator of leadership failure.

To see what is right and not to do it is want of courage, or of principle.

It’s getting harder to make decisions to just want to do something to work… I’m trying to find things that are extremely challenging or mean something to me deeply.

At the end of the day, when it comes time to make that decision, as president, all you have to guide you are your values, and your vision, and the life experiences that make you who you are.

In the ’50s, too many women, even though they were very smart, they tried to make the man feel that he was brainier. It was a sad thing.

One of the more difficult tasks for me as president was to decide on the issue of confirming capital punishment awarded by courts… to my surprise… almost all cases which were pending had a social and economic bias.

There’s a reason why the Foo Fighters don’t blast out Nirvana songs every night: because we have a lot of respect for them. You know, that’s hallowed ground. We have to be careful. We have to tread lightly. We have talked about it before, but the opportunity hasn’t really come up, or it just hasn’t felt right.

No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.

We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals.

I was in my thirteenth year when I heard a voice from God to help me govern my conduct. And the first time I was very much afraid.

Before you start some work, always ask yourself three questions – Why am I doing it, What the results might be and Will I be successful. Only when you think deeply and find satisfactory answers to these questions, go ahead.

In countries where innocent people are dying, the leaders are following their blood rather than their brains.

If you’re a quarterback, you want everything on your shoulders. You want to be the one to make the decisions.

If I think too hard about a relationship, I’ll talk myself out of it.

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.

My philosophy in life is, Decide what you want to do. You have to have something to hope for.

Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

I’ve turned down shows offering large amounts of money.