“At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child, or a parent.”

I really loved living in the White House, but I don’t miss it at all.

I’m a great believer that the most important years are the sort of early years but the preschool years and then into the first and second grades. If you get a good base in the first and second grade and you can read, you can do anything.

I think the country has had enough Bushes.

I want to still be able to garden while I can bend over.

But why should we hear about body bags and deaths, and how many, what day it’s gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it’s not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?

The home is the child’s first school, the parent is the child’s first teacher, and reading is the child’s first subject.

There are a lot of ways to serve, and being president is not the only one, and I would hope that someone else would run.

If human beings are perceived as potentials rather than problems, as possessing strengths instead of weaknesses, as unlimited rather that dull and unresponsive, then they thrive and grow to their capabilities.

I really feel very strongly that the person who runs for office is the courageous one, and the one who everybody has to know.

Raising five boys is a handful, trust me.

Well, look at what people are doing for returned veterans now. The wounded warriors. They’re working hard to make the wounded veterans feel that they are loved and welcomed home, unlike Vietnam. It was not a very kind, gentle world then. I think we are kinder and gentler.

And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.

Some people give time, some money, some their skills and connections, some literally give their life’s blood . . . but everyone has something to give.

Believe in something larger than yourself … to get involved in some of the big ideas of our time.

The personal things should be left out of platforms at conventions. You can argue yourself blue in the face, and you’re not going to change each other’s minds. It’s a waste of your time and my time.

Raising George Walker was not easy.

When I talk to audiences about the size and age of the cosmos, people often say, “It makes me feel so insignificant.” I answer, “The bigger and more impersonal the universe is, the more meaningful you are, because this vast.

life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it; … it is up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something it’s as though you aren’t there.

the world is neither meaningful, nor absurd. it quite simply is, and that, in any case, is what is so remarkable about it.

I have not been part of an active counterculture movement, as it is not the approach that I have personally pursued to create a qualitatively beneficial and meaningful impact on society.

Competition in its best form is a test of self. It has nothing to do with medals.

When a company is able to establish a dominant market position, consumers lose meaningful choices.

I don’t discuss my family with the press; I discuss my family with my family. If you notice, when you hear something sensational in the press about me.

Of course, there [in China] has to be chaos. It has to be crazy, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong about it except this government, which is really incapable of doing anything meaningful.