Put your leaders in stressful scenarios. Make them figure out solutions under pressure. See if you can make them frustrated, angry, and flustered, and then demand decisive leadership from them. They will be challenged at first, but they will get better over time.

Show me someone who has done something worthwhile, and I’ll show you someone who has overcome adversity.

We have the tendency to run away from suffering and to look for happiness. But, in fact, if you have not suffered, you have no chance to experience real happiness.

My reputation grows with every failure.

At one point, I didn’t care. Now I want as many people to hear my music as possible.

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires great strength to decide on what to do.

What I admire most about Hillary is that she never buckles under pressure. She never takes the easy way out. And Hillary Clinton has never quit on anything in her life. And when I think about the kind of president that I want for my girls and all our children, that’s what I want.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

A people free to choose will always choose peace.

I never do anything that I don’t want to do.

With patient and firm determination, I am going to press on for jobs. I’m going to press on for equality. I’m going to press on for the sake of our children. I’m going to press on for the sake of all those families who are struggling right now. I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I am going to press on.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

I can make more generals, but horses cost money.

We should learn to accept that change is truly the only thing that’s going on always, and learn to ride with it and enjoy it.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

What I admire most about Hillary is that she never buckles under pressure. She never takes the easy way out. And Hillary Clinton has never quit on anything in her life.

But for me to have the opportunity to stand in front of a bunch of executives and present myself, I had to hustle in my own way. I can’t tell you how frustrating it was that they didn’t get that. No joke – I’d leave meetings crying all the time.

Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes, boredom remains.

I came up from a difficult background.

A leader who doesn’t hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader.

‚Mean‘ is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.

That is why, no matter how desperate the predicament is, I am always very much in earnest about clutching my cane, straightening my derby hat and fixing my tie, even though I have just landed on my head.

We’re not a fragile people. We’re not a frightful people. Our power doesn’t come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order as long as we do things his way. We don’t look to be ruled.

The issues a president faces are not black and white, and cannot be boiled down into 140 characters. Because when you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military at your command, you can’t make snap decisions. You can’t have a thin skin or the tendency to lash out.

When it all got taken away, I was becoming a young man. So I had to sacrifice to leave my family… Sleeping in my car, getting an apartment for a month and getting evicted the next month. Staying in the $25, $50 hotels.

He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.

Didn’t get promoted? Good. More time to get better.

If you gonna wear the mohawk, you stick with it. You don’t just be dibby-dabbing. You make up your mind.

Everything in the world may be endured except continual prosperity.

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

I am fearful, or suspicious, of generalizations… They cannot guide me reliably in making decisions about particular individuals.

Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.

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.

With Benghazi, I don’t see anyone saying, ‚Hey look, I am overall responsible for this and therefore, I take responsibility for what happened. It’s my fault.‘ I haven’t heard that yet. Meanwhile, the other side of the coin, the Osama bin Laden raid, it seems everyone made that decision, and that’s just unbelievable to me.

I can handle pain.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

Don’t swap horses in crossing a stream.

I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not. I’m really confused now.

A family shares hardships and a connected history.

As president, you can get all kinds of advice from all kinds of people. But 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.

Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed.

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.

Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worse kind of suffering.

Unless a president can protect the privacy of the advice he gets, he cannot get the advice he needs.

Difficulties are things that show a person what they are.

I get very little sleep when the court is sitting.

Sometimes if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up.

We may stumble and fall but shall rise again; it should be enough if we did not run away from the battle.

You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win.

When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.

In doubtful cases the more liberal interpretation must always be preferred.

If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business.

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

There is probably a perverse pride in my administration… that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions – for the fun of it – then one day you’ll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

The risk for me would be in not taking one – that’s the only thing that’s really risky for me.