I have always had good strength in my legs from working out with weights. I have also been riding a bike of some sort for most of my life and have good agility.

The power of Haitian heritage and the strength of the Haitian people is tremendous. And Haiti holds a unique and rich role in the history of African Americans.

The foundation of the house of civil rights is in the voices of all the great civil rights leaders and the soul of every person who heard them. It's in the hands of every person who folded a leaflet for change, and it's in the courage of every person who changed.

At some point, I fell in love. Shortly thereafter, I got my heart broken. Sniff, sniff. And I realized at a young age - no matter what any adult literary critic would have us believe about female strength and autonomy - there is no test to strength of character like love.

You get elected, often, if you're a woman, on the strength of the women's vote; then you get into office, and you have to adapt to an overwhelmingly male environment.

People want change but not too much change. Finding that balance is tricky for every politician.

If you think of life and death on a continuum, finding the point where it tips is complicated. It cuts across all political lines and gets to the root of our humanity. It requires faith informed by years of intimacy that you're doing what's right for your loved one.

Good economic policy requires not so much the bravado to implement drastic change as the strength and wisdom to make reasonable trade-offs over the many years it takes to transform a country's standard of living.

I'm generally slow to anger, quick to forgive, and I take in information before making decisions. So no matter how controversial the decision, my general demeanour is to put on white lab coat and gloves and look at the evidence, weigh the arguments and see what makes sense.

I was always trying to make up for my size, to compensate. So to get people to take you seriously, you have to come at things with a great deal of strength. You have to emphasize that the way you are is unusual. That you don't come along every day.

When I was growing up, particularly during puberty in my teen years, I was so miserable because I elicited so much teasing and meanness from my teenage cohorts.

Every day, we have to strive to be better people. Some days we give in to weakness, and sometimes we give in to strength.

One thing in common between politics and marketing is that your greatest strength can often be your greatest weakness.

I asked my designer friend, Sam Klemick, to make a headdress for me, drawing inspiration from 1920s headpieces, Athena and Joan of Arc. Before each show, I have this quiet meditative moment where I put the headdress on and gather my thoughts and strength.

There's an integrity and a strength to women who have been raised in rough country.

Especially with the signing of riders with climbing abilities and the new arrival of Tyler Hamilton, who has the strength and ability to become a great leader for the big tours. All in all, I feel this is a very complete team.

To us Americans much has been given; of us much is required. With all our faults and mistakes, it is our strength in support of the freedom our forefathers loved which has saved mankind from subjection to totalitarian power.

If this war is not fought with the greatest brutality against the bands both in the East and in the Balkans then in the foreseeable future the strength at our disposal will not be sufficient to be able to master this plague.

There is nothing respecting which a man may be so long unconscious as of the extent and strength of his prejudices.

I give myself strength by staying away from any music.

When you punch somebody in the ring, you have to use your whole body. I learned that it's more about technique than physical strength.

Cinco de Mayo is an important day. The Mexicans had to defend themselves from the French. It is historically significant, but it is not Mexican Independence Day.

It could be said that all armed conflicts are a ludicrous and shameful waste of lives, but World War I has a special place in the history of futility - a war without clear purpose, a war whose resolution would ultimately make the world a far worse place.

The issue of equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals has vexed politicians for decades. I have my own cloudy history with the issue, having supported a law in Mississippi that made it illegal for LGBT couples to adopt children. I believed at the time this was a principled position based on my faith.

If you are fortunate in life, age and knowledge breed compassion. And as I have gotten older, I came to understand, that a person's sexual orientation has absolutely nothing to do with their ability to be a good parent.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

In my 20s, as I began to travel in Europe, I found comfort in religious paintings. Even though my own belief in Catholic dogma had been shaken and weakened, I found that the beauty and the richness of the art still held me.

The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.

You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.

I'm very comfortable with where history will judge me.

The more I draw and write, the more I realise that accidents are a necessary part of any creative act, much more so than logic or wisdom. Sometimes a mistake is the only way of arriving at an original concept, and the history of successful inventions is full of mishaps, serendipity and unintended results.

I still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever.

You can work on the saxophone alone, but ultimately you must perform with others.

Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.

Without moral and intellectual independence, there is no anchor for national independence.

Thought is a strenuous art - few practice it, and then only at rare times.

Courage is a special kind of knowledge: the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared.

Anyone who doesn't believe in miracles is not a realist.

Courage is... the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared.

Ours is a country built more on people than on territory. The Jews will come from everywhere: from France, from Russia, from America, from Yemen... Their faith is their passport.

At a purely practical level, history is important because it provides the basic skills needed for students to go further in sociology, politics, international relations and economics. History is also an ideal discipline for almost all careers in the law, the civil service and the private sector.

The great help of being in the Army is to understand why are the armies clever in what they describe as emotional intelligence, making soldiers come to terms with the death of comrades by certain rituals.

I have a unique history. There's no way to ever separate what your life would have been like if you had taken a different path. You have to embrace what is yours, and if you don't like it, you have to decide to change it.

My friends like to remind me that I have relatively weak fingers. Aerobic strength and general endurance have come easy, but finger strength has always been my biggest weakness.

Yosemite has the most impressive and accessible granite big walls in the world. The rock is amazing. And because of that, it's been the mecca for climbing in the U.S. - and the world to a large degree - for all of climbing history. It's the place to test yourself against the historic routes of the past.

People think I just walk up to a sheer cliff and climb it with no knowledge of anything, when in reality, there's tons and tons of information out there, and I'm already well tapped into it.

Big climbs energize me. It's all the other aspects of being a pro-climber that wear me down. The travel and expeditions and training can become pretty tiring. But the actual big climbs - that's what I live for.

I know that when I'm standing alone below a thousand-foot wall, looking up and considering a climb, my sponsors are the furthest thing from my mind. If I'm going to take risks, they are going to be for myself - not for any company.

You might get run over; you might get hit by lightning. I mean, who knows? Each day, there is a chance you might die. And there's nothing wrong with that. Every living being on Earth is facing that same existential rift.

The diet for climbing all the time isn't really different from the diet for living. It's not like cardio sports where you're burning a bajillion calories every day.