Ben Carson

"I am sensitive to the fact that other people may have different beliefs."

"I believe God has a specific purpose for me – and for every other person to whom he gives the gift of life."

"I don't consider myself a “religious” person at all. I am, however, a person of enormous faith."

"We can see God's reflection in everything he created."

"If there is a God and you believe in him, you know the best is yet to come."

"I realized my obligations to others should be greater than my obligations to myself."

"Creativity requires risk. So do exploration and innovation. Anyone who thinks outside of the box is taking a risk. Leadership brings many risk. Courage is exercised in the face of risk. Invest involve risk. Decision-making always mean a certain degree of risk."

"True greatness isn't so much what you do as who you are."

"God doesn't make mistakes. So if I'm supposed to die, there's a very good reason for it. I'm not going to question him. I'm just going to enjoy all these beautiful things that God created."

"The point is, we can decry the dangers we face or ignore them or even allow ourselves to be paralyzed by fear."

"Every time I open a child's head and see a brain, I marvel at the mystery: This is what makes every one of us who we are. This is what hold all our memories, all our thoughts, all our dreams. This is what makes us different from each other in millions of ways."

"Do you have a brain? Then use it. It's all you need to overcome any problem. That's the secret. That's my simple but powerful prescription for life, love, and success in a dangerous world."

"God has opened many doors of opportunity throughout my lifetime, but I believe the greatest of those doors was allowing me to be born in the United States of America."

"The PC police are out in force at all times. ... We've reached the point where people are afraid to actually talk about what they want to say."

"When someone is being particularly mean and nasty, I simply think to myself, He or she used to be a cute little baby, I wonder what happened?"

"Now we know for sure that education is no hedge against mindblowing irrational thinking. Our proof? None other than Dr. Ben Carson, highly trained pediatric neurosurgeon, man of science, leading GOP presidential contender and batsh*t crazy Bible-thumper in the first degree."

"Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East."

"... for a very senior eminent distinguished doctor as he is to say that [evolution is false] is even worse. Because of course, evolution is the bedrock of biology and biology is the bedrock of medicine. He clearly doesn't understand the fundamental theorem of his own subject. That is a terrible indictment."

"Crass isn't really the right word for it. Ignorant, offensive, and downright stupid would also fit the bill. I'm talking about the opinions of US Republican Presidential hopeful Ben Carson regarding gun laws and the dreadful fate of European Jewry in the Holocaust."

"By associating the Biblical Joseph with the Egyptian pyramids, he is imposing a Judeo-Christian narrative on a landscape now occupied by Muslims."

"Donald Trump, for all of his bluster, is at least authentically stupid... All these other guys are clown posers. Trump is the genuine article. And, God help me, I think I’d rather have him sitting in the Oval Office, getting stupidly out-maneuvered by the politicians under him, than bringing in a guy like Carson who is willing to shred every last bit of his intellectual credibility in order to lord over a citizenry he doesn’t seem to have much respect for."

"If neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson really believes that somebody with zero governing experience is qualified to be president, he must first let someone with zero medical training operate on his brain."

"The Carson conundrum is not fully captured by a list of his eccentric beliefs, however. He also confounds the traditional demographics of US politics, in which national African American political figures are meant to be Democrats. Not only is Carson a Republican – he is a strong conservative on both social and economic issues, opposing abortion including in cases of rape and incest, and framing welfare programs as a scheme to breed dependence and win votes. He has visited the riot zones of Ferguson and Baltimore but offered little compassion for black urban poor populations who feel oppressed by mostly white police forces. Even Carson’s core appeal as a Christian evangelical is complicated by the fact that he is a lifelong adherent to a relatively small sect, the Seventh-Day Adventist church, whose celebration of the sabbath on Saturday instead of Sunday and denial of the doctrine of hell have drawn accusations of heresy from other mainstream Christian groups."

"In his books, [Carson] often mentions incidents in which God intervened in his life. When he neglected to study at Yale, God showed him the answers on a chemistry exam. When he fell asleep while driving home one night, God spared his life. When he used new surgical techniques on children's brains, God saved some of his patients. And when he was on a safari in Africa, God answered his prayer for plenty of photogenic wildlife. Now that he's running for president, Carson sounds as if he's counting on divine intervention to pull him through again."

"How does Carson plan, as president, to command the respect, much less the actions, of uniformed service members when it appears a healthy portion of his biography is utterly fabricated? ... The bigger problem here, though, is one I mentioned earlier. You don’t have to be a soldier or be issued an Army Values card to understand that integrity is an important virtue, particularly for someone who is planning to run our country and lead the free world."

"Republicans who encounter Black Lives Matter protesters should resist the temptation to go Chris Christie on them. Instead, they should follow the lead of Ben Carson and use the protests as an opportunity to point out that the Democratic policies of the Obama era are failing our most vulnerable citizens. Carson didn’t wait for the protesters to come to him. He took his campaign to Harlem last week to make the case that the GOP has better solutions for the challenges of poverty, dependency and lack of mobility... That is precisely the message every Republican candidate should be delivering. When confronted by Black Lives Matter protesters, Republicans should declare that they fully agree — black lives do matter — but that the policies of the past seven years have not made black lives better. They should point out that the African American youth unemployment rate in July 2015 was 31 percent — more than double that of whites, at 14.4 percent. To put that figure in perspective, in 1932 — the very worst point of the Great Depression — the national unemployment rate was 22.9 percent. So for young black men and women today, the employment rates of the Great Depression would be a step up from those of the Obama 'recovery'."

"Use PMA: Positive Mental Attitude."

"You are what you think."

"If we allow ourselves to dwell on negatives, on hurts, on mistreatments, we will be negative thinkers. So be open to positive thinking, THINK BIG!"

"THINK BIG means opening our horizons, reaching for new possibilities in our lives, being open to whatever God has in store for us on the road ahead. T=TALENT : If you recognize your talents, use them appropriately, and choose a field that uses those talents, you will rise to the top of your field. H=HONEST : If we live by the rule of honesty and accept our problems, we can go far down the road of achievement. I=INSIGHT : If we observe and reflect and commit ourselves to giving our best, we will come out on top. N=NICE : If we are nice to others, other respond to us in the same way, and we can give our best for each other. K=KNOWLEDGE : If we make every attempt to increase our knowledge in order to use it for human go, it will make a difference in us and in our world. B=BOOKS : If we commit ourselves to reading thus increasing our knowledge, only God limits how far we can go in this world. I=IN-DEPTH LEARNING : If we develop in-depth knowledge, it will enable us to give our best to others and help to make a better world. G=GOD : If we acknowledge our need for God , he will help us."

"God has given to every one of us more than fourteen billion cells and connections in our brain. Now why would God give us such a complex organ system unless He expects us to use it?"

"It is not a matter of competing with someone else. Essentially, it is accepting our own special abilities as special – and then developing them."

"Anyone with a normal brain has the capacity to do almost anything, but when one has special gifts or talents (and everyone has) and takes advantage of and develops these talents – that person is likely to excel."

"What a wonderful thing is to be able to contribute to the restoration of someone's health. It's not only a feeling that I'm worth something, but that I have something to contribute."

"I'm convinced that we all harvest the fruits of our labors."

"Although we all make mistakes in life, the problems occur when we try to hide our mistakes, to cover them up rather than to learn from them and allow other people to learn from them."

"It is not where we have come from but where we are going that counts!"

"Be nice to every-body. You meet the same people going up as you meet going down."

"Not prejudge others – not decide their value before knowing them."

"God don't make no junk."

"Being nice always comes back to repay us in the long run."

"Not only we can say that we cannot overload our brain, but we also know that our brain retains everything. The difficulty does not come with the input of information, but in getting it out."

"Knowledge makes people special. Knowledge enriches life itself."

"You never know how useful even seemingly insignificant knowledge can be."

"Knowledge make us valuable. When we have knowledge that other people do not readily have, somebody need us. It does not matter what we look like, or where we came from, if we have something that others have a need for."

"So after a while, if people won't accept your excuses, you stop looking for them."

"By believing we are the product of random acts, we eliminate morality and the basis of ethical behavior. For if there is no such thing as moral authority, you can do anything you want. You make everything relative, and there’s no reason for any of our higher values."

"Ultimately, if you accept the evolutionary theory, you dismiss ethics, you don’t have to abide by a set of moral codes, you determine your own conscience based on your own desires. You have no reason for things such as selfless love, when a father dives in to save his son from drowning. You can trash the Bible as irrelevant, just silly fables, since you believe that it does not conform to scientific thought. You can be like Lucifer, who said, “I will make myself like the Most High.”"

"There is no fulfillment in things whatsoever. And I think one of the reasons that depression reigns supreme amongst the rich and famous is some of them thought that maybe those things would bring them happiness. But what, in fact, does is having a cause, having a passion. And that's really what gives life's true meaning."

"I think one of the keys to leadership is recognizing that everybody has gifts and talents. A good leader will learn how to harness those gifts toward the same goal."