“Maybe that is the best lesson I learned in my first semester at Yale, because if I had gone to a less-demanding school and continued to sail along on the top, I am sure I would never have attained the subsequent achievements in my life.”

I got involved with classical music when I was in high school and it’s followed me throughout my entire life and probably had a profound effect on my life.

The key is to cut out the middleman and empower both doctor and patient with information about what things cost.

Kids have what I call a built-in hypocrisy antenna that comes up and blocks out what you’re saying when you’re being a hypocrite.

You pray for yourself and just ask God to give you strength.

Bullies do whatever they can get away with and keep pushing boundaries until they meet resistance.

White liberals are the most racist people there are, because they put blacks in a box and insist that they think one way – and if they don’t, they attack them as illegitimate, all the while denying that their policies destroy blacks.

Surrendering to fear and allowing ourselves to be paralyzed by peril isn’t something most of us can afford to do.

You have the ability to choose which way you want to go. You have to believe great things are going to happen in your life. Do everything you can – prepare, pray and achieve – to make it happen.

I always say if God didn’t allow any bad things to happen we would already be in heaven, and we are not there.

We recognize that North Korea is in severe financial straits, and they have decided to use their resources to build their military, rather than to feed their people and to take care of the various humanitarian responsibilities that they have.

Obviously, discipline is necessary for children. Training is necessary for children. Just like if you want to train a vine, you have to apply physical manipulation to get it to go where you want it to go, but as it learns, then you don’t have to do that.

I could easily have decided that life was cruel, that being black meant everything was stacked against me.

An important verity about knowledge is that the brain works most effectively with consciously retained information. We more easily remember what we want to recall later.

No matter who you are,no matter what you do-do not be too big for GOD.

If you’re black and you oppose a progressive agenda, and you’re pro life, and you’re pro family, then they do not even know what to call you. You end up on some watch list for extremists.

Ruthless is not necessarily the word I would use, but tough, resolute, understanding what the problems are, and understanding that the job of the president of the United States is to protect the people of this country and to do what is necessary in order to get it done.

Yale is a crucible in American life for the accommodation of intellectual achievement, of wisdom, of refinement, with the democratic ideals of openness, of social justice and of equal opportunity.

I’ve been a professor of mathematics at Harvard and at Yale. At Yale for a long time. But I’m not a mathematician only. I’m a professor of physics, of economics, a long list. Each element of this list is normal. The combination of these elements is very rare at best.

Yale’s greatness carries an urgent need to guard against the fall of excellence into exclusivity, of refinement into preciousness, of elegance into class and convention.

It is, of course, further indication that a fundamentalist right has really taken over much of the Republican Party, People might cite George Bush as proof that you can be totally impervious to the effects of Harvard and Yale education.

I have a master’s from Yale drama, and I auditioned for this.

To go from Yale to the National League is simply to go from one form of management to another.