“And I have always told the patients when I talk to them. When they come around and say, “What will you have to drink? Oh that’s right you don’t drink.” Just speak up and say, ‘Of course I drink. But I just don’t drink alcohol.’”

The search for human freedom can never be complete without freedom for women.

My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age. His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country.

A housewife deserves to be honored as much as a woman who earns her living in the marketplace. I consider bringing up children a responsible job. In fact, being a good housewife seems to me a much tougher job than going to the office and getting paid for it.

I think once I made up my mind that I was allergic to alcohol, and that’s what I learned, it made sense to me. And I think it was kind of pointed out that you know if you were allergic to strawberries, you wouldn’t eat strawberries. And that made sense to me.

That’s what we’re here on this Earth for, to help others.

I’ll never forget the day that I was told I would have to have a mastectomy. My reaction to the words was total denial.

Holding these babies in my arms makes me realize the miracle my husband and I began.

Alcohol may pick you up a little bit, but it lets you down in a hurry.

We’re full all the time. And people do have good success and I think one of the programs at the center, the Continuing Care, helps them with their success. Because it’s difficult the first year.

You can make it, but it’s easier if you don’t have to do it alone.

For 14 years, I’d been on medication for the pinched nerve, the arthritis, the muscle spasms in my neck, and I’d lost my tolerance for pills. If I had a single drink, the alcohol, on top of the pills, would make me groggy.

Friends aren’t any more important than breath or blood to a high school senior.

I don’t feel that because I’m First Lady, I’m very different from what I was before. It can happen to anyone. After all, it has happened to anyone.

I had thought I would hate being First Lady… I loved it.

It’s always been my feeling that God lends you your children until they’re about eighteen years old. If you haven’t made your points with them by then, it’s too late.

I really didn’t want to have my name on the center, because it just seemed like it was too much of a personal thing.

the scene where the patient says goodbye to the doctor and she puts a flower in her hair as a kind of thank you to him – and I felt like a cowboy shot from a canyon’s top.

Every physician must be rich in knowledge, and not only of that which is written in books; his patients should be his book, they will never mislead him.

Medicine is not merely a science but an art. The character of the physician may act more powerfully upon the patient than the drugs employed.

The physician must give heed to the region in which the patient lives, that is to say, to its type and peculiarities.

The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.

If the patient has been to more than four physicians, nutrition is probably the medical answer.

They merely reduce the intensity of the symptoms and make life slightly more endurable.

By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.