There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.

I should be a postage stamp, because that’s the only way I’ll ever get licked. I’m beautiful. I’m fast. I’m so mean I make medicine sick. I can’t possibly be beat.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

Glory lies in the attempt to reach one’s goal and not in reaching it.

Let the people on both sides keep their self-possession, and just as other clouds have cleared away in due time, so will this, and this great nation shall continue to prosper as before.

I’m not one icon. I’m every icon. I’m an icon that is made out of all the colors on the palette at every time. I have no restrictions. No restrictions.

If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.

I still have my first paycheck. It was just, I think, a dollar or two that I got when I started as a songwriter with BMI, and I had some songs there that I had through the company, and in the mail I got this big old check for, like, a dollar and a half or something. Somebody had recorded one of my songs.

If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation – and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

My honour was not yielded, but conquered merely.

In the final choice a soldier’s pack is not so heavy as a prisoner’s chains.

The world can criticize me, but l can always criticize it back.

What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes – ah, they have all the necessary leisure.

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.

I have practically no private life. I’m already used to this and ready for it. Yes, sometimes it is hard, but it is the choice I made.

To me, football is so much about mental toughness, it’s digging deep, it’s doing whatever you need to do to help a team win and that comes in a lot of shapes and forms.

He shines in the second rank, who is eclipsed in the first.

What’s real freedom? Real freedom is being able to not have my way and still be just as happy as if I did.

I can’t keep somebody from being a star, and I can’t make somebody a star, and nobody can.

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

Happiness doesn’t come from being rich, nor merely from being successful in your career, nor by self-indulgence. One step towards happiness is to make yourself healthy and strong while you are a boy so that you can be useful and so you can enjoy life when you are a man.

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

No foreign policy – no matter how ingenious – has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.

The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.

Around every corner, always protect the engine that powers you.

Since God had commanded it, it was necessary that I do it. Since God commanded it, even if I had a hundred fathers and mothers, even if I had been a King’s daughter, I would have gone nevertheless.

With drive and a bit of talent, you can move mountains. I know. I’ve done it.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses – behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.

It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution.

Did you know there’s a difference between being busy and being fruitful? Did you ever stop to think that just being busy – running around in circles all day but not accomplishing anything – is the same as wasting your time? It’s frustrating to expend so much energy and time and not have any fruit from your effort!

I believe that one key to success is to accept truth, no matter how it’s spoken.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

I wasn’t born a natural entrepreneur. I had to be trained.

Beware of endeavoring to become a great man in a hurry. One such attempt in ten thousand may succeed. These are fearful odds.

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.

You fail only if you stop writing.

We’re constantly striving for success, fame and comfort when all we really need to be happy is someone or some thing to be enthusiastic about.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

It needs time. Nobody wants to hear it, but that’s the truth: if you want to have success in the future, you have to be ready to work now.

Every man has a right to be conceited until he is successful.

No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his well-being, to risk his body, to risk his life, in a great cause.

Teamwork is so important that it is virtually impossible for you to reach the heights of your capabilities or make the money that you want without becoming very good at it.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.

The fifth freedom is freedom from ignorance.

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.

Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.

Men weren’t always happy for me. It was very challenging to watch a woman be so successful.

There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

It’s never crowded along the extra mile.

Never give in – never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.

Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.