“First ladies throughout our history have been expected to be adoring wives and perfect mothers.”

Once you accept the fact that you’re not perfect, then you develop some confidence.

If we have not achieved our early dreams, we must either find new ones or see what we can salvage from the old. If we have accomplished what we set out to do in our youth, we need not weep like Alexander the Great that we have no more worlds to conquer.

If you doubt you can accomplish something, then you can’t accomplish it. You have to have confidence in your ability, and then be tough enough to follow through.

I believe that one of the most important things to learn in life is that you can make a difference in your community no matter who you are or where you live.

Don’t worry about polls, but if you do, don’t admit it.

You must accept that you might fail; then, if you do your best and still don’t win, at least you can be satisfied that you’ve tried. If you don’t accept failure as a possibility, you don’t set high goals, you don’t branch out, you don’t try – you don’t take the risk.

Without volunteers, we’d be a nation without a soul.

A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.

I had already learned from more than a decade of political life that I was going to be criticized no matter what I did, so I might as well be criticized for something I wanted to do.

There is clearly much left to be done, and whatever else we are going to do, we had better get on with it.

If you look at suicides, most of them are connected to depression. And the mental health system just fails them. It’s so sad. We know what to do. We just don’t do it.

Early diagnosis is so important because the earlier a mental illness can be detected, diagnosed and treatment can begin, the better off that person can be for the rest of his or her life.

There is nothing more important than a good, safe, secure home.

Do what you can to show you care about other people, and you will make our world a better place.

Times of upheaval require not just more leadership but more leaders. People at all organizational levels, whether anointed or self-appointed, must be empowered to share leadership responsibilities.

We have to get the word out that mental illnesses can be diagnosed and treated, and almost everyone suffering from mental illness can live meaningful lives in their communities.

Words are so powerful treat them as weapons. You say you love someone expect a war.

I don’t know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.

We [with Andrew Ridgeley] didn’t expect people to take it seriously. But naturally they did, and they thought we were a couple of wankers.

I’ve always been a worker. I’ve never expected be given anything.

A lot of times when you keep it real with somebody, you can’t expect them to keep it real with you. In this industry people just want to be famous and they forget how to keep it real and they forget to give credit to the people who helped them get to where they at.

The gods that we’ve made are exactly the gods you’d expect to be made by a species that’s about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.

I was expecting it to be cynical because I’m like that myself. I wouldn’t want it to be all roses because life isn’t like that.

Pain made me grow in the most unexpected places. And now I know what it feels like to be a wildflower.