“It’s very important for people to know themselves and understand what their value system is, because if you don’t know what your value system is, then you don’t know what risks are worth taking and which ones are worth avoiding.”

You’re a slave if you let the media tell you that sports and entertainment are more important than developing your brain.

I believe that things are always going to work out, even if in the beginning it doesn’t look like they are working out. I know in the long run they are going to work out, and it’s going to be fine.

Even if you’re Bill Gates, you’ve got problems. I’m sure he would probably easily give a few billion dollars to get rid of all the problems that he has.

What we have to remember is we want to utilize the tremendous intellect that we have in the military to win wars. I’ve talked to a lot of the generals, a lot of our advanced people. And believe me, if we gave them the mission, which is what the commander-in-chief does, they would be able to carry it out.

If we can take young people who excel at the highest levels, put them on the same kind of pedestal as the all-state basketball player and the all-state football player, and begin to get the same kind of recognition, it will have a profound effect, and we are finding that it does.

So after a while, if people won’t accept your excuses, you stop looking for them.

But, you know, we have these entrenched entities – and I’m talking about both Republicans and Democrats – who believe that when you’re elected to office, you become some kind of member of the aristocracy, and that anyone who challenges you is attacking you and is unpatriotic. This is foolishness.

In general I was a good kid. It usually took a lot to make me mad. But once I reached the boiling point, I lost all rational control. Totally without thinking, when my anger was aroused, I grabbed the nearest brick, rock, or stick to bash someone. It was as if I had no conscious will in the matter.

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

Let’s let everybody believe what they want to believe. And that means, P.C. police, don’t you be coming down on people who believe in God and who believe in Jesus.

There’s a certain spiritual nature and something of the mind that we can’t measure. We can’t find it. With all our sophisticated equipment, we cannot monitor or define it, and yet it’s there.

Here’s a nation, one of the founding pillars was freedom of speech and freedom of expression. And yet, we have imposed upon people restrictions on what they can say, on what they can think. And the media is the largest proponent of this, crucifying people who say things really quite innocently.

Our schools too often want to shut people up so they can’t talk about real solutions. People who think differently tend to clam up because they think something is wrong with their ideas.

We should be concerned not only about the health of individual patients, but also the health of our entire society.

When I entered high school I was an A-student, but not for long. I wanted the fancy clothes. I wanted to hang out with the guys. I went from being an A-student to a B-student to a C-student, but I didn’t care. I was getting the high fives and the low fives and the pats on the back. I was cool.

You’re going to be much less likely to point the finger at somebody and create a huge brouhaha when it wasn’t necessary if you had stopped and asked yourself, ‘Could I have done things to prevent this situation?’

“I don’t know if I’ve got the will to even do this.” It’s the type of game that doesn’t let you walk away so that’s what happened, I just kept coming back to it until something really happened for me.

I don’t really know who I am as an actor: the best thing would be to experiment with it for the next 30 years and never really find out.

You know, it felt like him reverting back to what was in his bones and that’s, you know, optimism and a deep belief in, you know, American institutions and the American people.

I look back and understand the world a bit better and know how competitive it is .

Do you know anyone who has a lease on life? It isn’t a question of if; it’s a question of when.

I don’t think you could ever know just how truly special you are that even on the darkest nights you are my brightest star

Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it.

Cyndi Lauper knows how to work a crowd.