“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 problem with drugs is that people forget to stop doing them. There’s a time and a place for everything, Mr. Mackey, and it’s called college.

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.

My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they’ll leave in people’s hearts.

Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.

I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it’s only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.

God laughs on two occasions. He laughs when the physician says to the patient’s mother, ‘Don’t be afraid, mother; I shall certainly cure your boy.’

The student is to collect and evaluate facts. The facts are locked up in the patient.

A patient had a 50-50 chance of benefiting from visiting a physician as of 1910. Medicine was more like voodoo than science until the 20th Century.

Everybody knows that I am not usually patient enough to actually sit down and watch one of my own films from the beginning to the end – I never do.

The only English patients I have ever known refuse tea, have been typhus cases; and the first sign of their getting better was their craving again for tea.