“My favorite subject was recess. Fortunately for me, I had a mother who believed I was smart.”

One of the reasons surgeons have so much trouble separating Siamese twins is that nobody gets to do many of them. On the table, the anatomy is so different from normal, that you’re constantly trying to figure out, ‘Can I cut this? Does this wire lead to what?’ It’s like trying to defuse a bomb.

Every time I am looking into the depths of somebody’s brain, I’m thinking, ‘This is what makes a person who they are. That structure contains memories. Everything that they’ve ever experienced is right in there.’

There is so much potential out there in young people and they aren’t getting the right information or being encouraged in the right ways. This is our duty as a society.

I’m not a politician. I don’t want to be a politician, because politicians do what is politically expedient. I want to do what’s right.

There is no one that we can afford to throw away.

You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to be a valuable person. You become valuable because of the knowledge that you have. And that doesn’t mean you won’t fail sometimes. The important thing is to keep trying.

I have no problem whatsoever with allowing gay people to live as they please, as long as they don’t try to impose their lifestyle on everyone else.

We need to find ways to elevate the expectations, particularly of those individuals who may start off on a lower socioeconomic rung, who might be seen as disadvantaged. But, you know, the reason I say be seen as disadvantaged, it’s because life is so short, and there’s so much that can change.

Our – our friends can’t trust us anymore. You know, Ukraine was a nuclear-armed state. They gave away their nuclear arms with the understanding that we would protect them. We won’t even give them offensive weapons.

There’s no question that as science, knowledge and technology advance, that we will attempt to do more significant things. And there’s no question that we will always have to temper those things with ethics.

What we have to stop and think about is that we have weakened ourselves militarily to such an extent that it affects all of our military policies.

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.

There’s absolutely no reason at all that physicians, scientists, shouldn’t be involved in things that affect all of us.

You need an incredible amount of self-confidence to go digging around in someone’s brain.

The most important thing for me is having a relationship with God. To know that the owner, the creator of the universe loves you, sent His Son to die for your sins; that’s very empowering. Knowing Him and knowing that He loves me gives me encouragement and confidence to move forward.

People spending more of their own money on routine health care would make the system more competitive and transparent and restore the confidence between the patients and the doctors without government rationing.