The finest steel has to go through the hottest fire.
If you think the United States has stood still, who built The largest shopping center in the world?
A man who has never lost himself in a cause bigger than himself has missed one of life's mountaintop experiences. Only in losing himself does he find himself. Only then does he discover all the latent strengths he never knew he had and which otherwise would have remained dormant.
Let us move from the era of confrontation to the era of negotiation.
We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another -- until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.
The easiest period in a crisis situation is actually the battle itself. The most difficult is the period of indecision -- whether to fight or run away. And the most dangerous period is the aftermath. It is then, with all his resources spent and his guard down, that an individual must watch out for dulled reactions and faulty judgment.
Defeat doesn't finish a man -- quit does. A man is not finished when he's defeated. He's finished when he quits.
Life isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to take being on the top -- or on the bottom. I guess I'm something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things. Life is one crisis after another.
Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
Only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.
People react to fear, not love --they don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true.
Yet we can maintain a free society only if we recognize that in a free society no one can win all the time. No one can have his own way all the time, and no one is right all the time.
For its part, Government will listen. We will strive to listen in new ways -- to the voices of quiet anguish, to voices that speak without words, the voices of the heart, to the injured voices, and the anxious voices, and the voices that have despaired of being heard.
Those who hate you don't win unless you hate them; and then you destroy yourself.
Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them-and then you destroy yourself.
I don't think that a leader can control to any great extent his destiny. Very seldom can he step in and change the situation if the forces of history are running in another direction.
I was under medication when I made the decision not to burn the tapes.
This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation, because as a result of what happened in this week, the world is bigger, infinitely.
I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.
The lesson of all history warns us that we should negotiate only when our military superiority is so convincing that we can achieve our objective at the conference table, and deny the aggressor theirs.
The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.
A man is not finished when he's defeated; he's finished when he quits.
Nobody is a friend of ours. Let's face it.
I played by the rules of politics as I found them.
I am not a crook.
The one thing sure about politics is that what goes up comes down and what goes down often comes up.
If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.
When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.
The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.
A public man must never forget that he loses his usefulness when he as an individual, rather than his policy, becomes the issue.
It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody.
The sky is no longer the limit.
Once one determines that he or she has a mission in life, that's it's not going to be accomplished without a great deal of pain, and that the rewards in the end may not outweigh the pain --if you recognize historically that always happens, then when it comes, you survive it.
Once you get into this great stream of history you can't get out. You can drown. Or you can be pulled ashore by the tide. But it is awfully hard to get out when you are in the middle of the stream -- if it is intended that you stay there.