Military school was great and especially great for leadership and then I spent two years in Vietnam.

When you’re around the kids, you feel like you act the most grown up just because you’re supposed to lead. I say things, like every other parent, that reminds you of your own parents. One thing I do know about being a parent, you understand why your father was in a bad mood a lot.

Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.

I believe enlightenment or revelation comes in daily life. I look for joy, the peace of action. You need action. I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

Your most important work is always ahead of you, never behind you.

While you’re saving your face, you’re losing your ass.

Nothing can be more hurtful to the service, than the neglect of discipline; for that discipline, more than numbers, gives one army the superiority over another.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

Your entire life only happens in this moment. The present moment is life itself. Yet, people live as if the opposite were true and treat the present moment as a stepping stone to the next moment – a means to an end.

You can’t learn in school what the world is going to do next year.

In those days he was wiser than he is now; he used to frequently take my advice.

Our purpose in Vietnam is to prevent the success of aggression. It is not conquest, it is not empire, it is not foreign bases, it is not domination. It is, simply put, just to prevent the forceful conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam.

To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.

We work to become, not to acquire.

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

Die to everything of yesterday so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigor and passion.

I’m asking myself, ‚What do my girls, what do all our children deserve in their president? What kind of a president do we want for them?‘ Well, to start with, I think we want someone who is a unifying force in this country: someone who sees our differences not as a threat, but as a blessing.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

Plenty of people wish to become devout, but no one wishes to be humble.

I don’t want a brat on my team.

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

The object of my relationship with Vietnam has been to heal the wounds that exist, particularly among our veterans, and to move forward with a positive relationship,… Apparently some in the Vietnamese government don’t want to do that and that’s their decision.

I never want to change so much that people can’t recognize me.

Community colleges play an important role in helping people transition between careers by providing the retooling they need to take on a new career.

Difficulties are things that show a person what they are.

I think, when you are growing up, you have to pull apart from what your mother wants or needs. You’ve got to go your own way, and that’s what I did.

Chaos is a friend of mine.

If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn’t need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around.

Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in our marching onward.

I have had fun being who I became, so to speak.

Education doesn’t change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard.

I don’t like to see a president who is just out campaigning all year long or for the last four years. I’d like to see somebody who’s going in the office. In fact, I’d like to not see them because that way you’d be sure that they’d be working.

I’m tender on the inside.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‚I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.‘

Yeah, I was a delinquent. It was when I was in the ninth grade. I was doing stupid stuff, and the cops came into the class. I was humiliated more than anything.

I don’t want followers.

In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people’s perspectives… I really try and live the mission of the company and… keep everything else in my life extremely simple.

In poor countries, we still need better ways to measure the effectiveness of the many government workers providing health services. They are the crucial link bringing tools such as vaccines and education to the people who need them most. How well trained are they? Are they showing up to work?

I’ve lived a very colorful life, and I’ve said some things, But not once have I taken them back, and I’ve never apologized for them – and I won’t.

I’m not generally a sensitive person, but I tend to be more sensitive toward others and what they’re going through. I don’t know if that’s the healthiest thing, but it’s the truth.

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence… on pain of liquidation.

Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong.

In my school, the brightest boys did math and physics, the less bright did physics and chemistry, and the least bright did biology. I wanted to do math and physics, but my father made me do chemistry because he thought there would be no jobs for mathematicians.

I try to teach my heart not to want things it can’t have.

Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.

I don’t want to just revolve. I want to evolve. As a man, as a human, as a father, as a lover.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

Many people resented my impatience and honesty, but I never cared about acceptance as much as I cared about respect.

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

It makes no sense to worry about things you have no control over because there’s nothing you can do about them, and why worry about things you do control? The activity of worrying keeps you immobilized.

No matter what happens on the field, getting an education makes you a winner.

I don’t know that you can put a label on growth. I’m just me.

And now, of course this is another thing I didn’t count on, that now as the governor of the state of California, I am selling California worldwide. You see that? Selling.

Me, as a person, I grow. I’m like a chameleon. You know? That is a gift and a curse for me. But more so a gift, because it never puts me in a box.

It’s normal for human beings to identify with their own separate self. The problem is that we get caught in that notion of ourself as a separate individual and caught in that individual self’s agenda.

Modern cynics and skeptics… see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.

There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.

In order to govern, the question is not to follow out a more or less valid theory but to build with whatever materials are at hand. The inevitable must be accepted and turned to advantage.

Education is not a problem. Education is an opportunity.