“You might not be able to control your circumstances but you can control your response to your circumstances.”

People want to psychoanalyze me, but the fact is, I’m not that complicated. I’m pretty straightforward. And I’m not all that self-reflective, because I tend to be a doer.

So I think, if September 11 taught us anything, it taught us that we’re vulnerable, and vulnerable in ways that we didn’t fully understand.

It’s bad policy to speculate on what you’ll do if a plan fails when you’re trying to make a plan work.

When diplomacy has been exhausted, the Security Council must become involved. Questions about Iran’s nuclear activities remain unanswered, despite repeated efforts by the IAEA.

I firmly believe you never should spend your time being the former anything.

History’s long arc is different than the today’s headlines.

In America, with education and hard work, it really does not matter where you came from; it matters only where you are going.

The quicker we get about the business of reducing our reliance on oil the better.

Every life is capable of greatness.

The best armor against everything around you is to be well educated, to work hard, to be twice as good as if you had to be, to do languages and culture better.

You can never ask others to do something you would not do. That is integrity.

Leading in a complex world means recognizing the simple things you can do to make things better.

We’re not going to negotiate about the terms of terrorism. You don’t negotiate about terrorism. It’s is wrong to engage in terrorism, and there isn’t anything to negotiate.

You cannot be on one hand dedicated to peace and on the other dedicated to violence. Those two things are irreconcilable.

If you cannot allow people to do their jobs, nobody with substance and creativity will work for you.

What you know today can affect what you do tomorrow, but not what you did yesterday.

Always Do Your Best. Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

You lose power to the people and circumstances you judge. They capture your attention in the same way that a movie does.

The circumstances that surround a man’s life are not important. How that man responds to those circumstances IS IMPORTANT. His response is the ultimate determining factor between success and failure.

Meet everybody and every circumstance on the battlefield of life with the courage of a hero and the smile of a conqueror.

It is our relation to circumstances that determines their influence upon us.

God has a purpose behind every problem. He uses circumstances to develop our character. In fact, he depends more on circumstances to make us like Jesus than he depends on our reading the Bible.

If circumstances are bad and you have to bear them, do not make them a part of yourself.