"My mentors are those individuals who saw potential in me long before I perceived it in myself – or who challenged me to do more – the people who helped guide me toward excellence."

"I would like people to recognize in looking at my story that the person who has the most to do with what happens to you is you. It's not the environment, it's not the other people who were there trying to help you or trying to stop you. It's what you decide to do and how much effort you put behind it."

"The outstanding doctor constantly emphasized the humanitarian aspect of medical care."

"You pray for yourselves and just ask God to guide you and to give you strength."

"Nobody can hinder you from doing what you want, if that's what you set your mind to. You can always find a hook to hang excuses on, but they're only excuses. You don't have anyone to blame but yourself. Nobody else makes you fail."

"I started reading about people of great accomplishment ... and it dawned on me suddenly that the person who has the most to do with what happens in your life is you."

"There are a group of people who would like to silence everybody and have everyone go along to get along. But that's not going to be very helpful for us in the long run in terms of solving our problems, and someone has to be courageous enough to actually stand up to the bullies."

"God loves us all, and all of us are equal in God's sight."

"You know Obamacare is really I think the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery, and it is in a way, it is slavery in a way, because it is making all of us subservient to the government, and it was never about health care. It was about control."

"We have no time for excuses."

"One of the great truths of life: I did not do it alone. I had help along the way."

"I need the Lord's guidance on what to do... I asked God for wisdom."

"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."

"This is a book about giving our best and especially about doing whatever we can to help others."

"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."

"Reading is the way out of ignorance, and the road to achievement."

"Happiness doesn't result from what we get, but from what we give."

"The wonderful thing about a company like Mannatech is that they recognize that when God made us, He gave us the right fuel. And that fuel was the right kind of healthy food. You know we live in a society that is very sophisticated, and sometimes we’re not able to achieve the original diet. And we have to alter our diet to fit our lifestyle. Many of the natural things are not included in our diet. Basically what the company is doing is trying to find a way to restore natural diet as a medicine or as a mechanism for maintaining health."

""You do your best, we do the rest." That fit the way I felt about God. I was going to give God my best and then it was up to God to do the rest."

"When we have done our best, we also have to learn that we still need to rely on God. Our best – no matter how good – is incomplete if we leave God out of the picture."

"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."

"To THINK BIG and to use our talents doesn't mean we won't have difficulties along the way. We will—we all do. How we view those problems determines how we end up. If we choose to see the obstacles in our path as barriers, we stop trying. “We can't win,” we moan. “They won't let us win.”However, if we choose to see the obstacles as hurdles, we can leap over them. Successful people don't have fewer problems. They have determined that nothing will stop them from going forward.Whatever direction we choose, if we can realize that every hurdle we jump strengthens and prepares us for the next one, we're already on the way to success."

"I don't believe in one-person productions. Everyone on the team is important and needs to know that he or she is vital."

"I can provide one living example of someone who made it and who came from what we now call a disadvantaged background: me."

"The kind of job doesn't matter. The length of time on the job doesn't matter... If you work hard and do your best, you'll be recognized and move onward."

"Carol James, who is my physician's assistant and my right-hand person, frequently teases me by saying, "It's because women need only half of their brain to think as well as men. That's why you can do this operation on so many women.""

"You have to try, you have to do everything you can."

"We don't necessarily have to play by the strict rules if we can find a way that works better, as long as it's reasonable and doesn't hurt anybody."

"It's all in God's hands."

"Someone told me that creativity is just learning to do something with a different perspective."

"You have yourself to blame."

"We create our own destiny by the way we do things. We have to take advantage of opportunities and be responsible for our choices."

"I have sunshine in my heart regardless of conditions around me."

"It wasn't that I had to be first in everything, but I should have been number one."

"My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids to store grain. Now all the archaeologists think that they were made for the pharaohs’ graves. But, you know, it would have to be something awfully big if you stop and think about it. And I don’t think it’d just disappear over the course of time to store that much grain. And when you look at the way that the pyramids are made, with many chambers that are hermetically sealed, they’d have to be that way for a reason. And various scientists have said, “Well, you know there were alien beings that came down and they have special knowledge and that’s how they were”—you know, it doesn’t require an alien being when God is with you."

"Why should I give someone else such power over my life?"

"Stop thinking about failing."

"I always pray before any of the operations."

"Jesus Is All the World to Me."

"We've been conditioned to think that only politicians can solve our problems. But at some point, maybe we will wake up and recognize that it was the politicians who created our problems."

"Maybe that's how I learned to handle my deep hurt—by forgetting."

"We need to be thinking about: How do we allow people to ascend the ladder of opportunity, rather than how do we give them everything and keep them dependent."

"Abraham Lincoln once said, "All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my mother." I'm not sure I want to say it quite like that, but my mother, Sonya Carson, was the earliest, strongest, and most impacting force in my life. It would be impossible to tell about my accomplishments without starting with my mother's influence."

"I want people to see me as an honest person, a person who is actually willing to express what they believe. The way I look at it, if people don't like that, I'd rather not be in office. I don't want to be in office under false pretenses, just saying things people want to hear so I can get elected."

"I actually have something I would use the Department of Education to do. It would be to monitor our institutions of higher education for extreme political bias and deny federal funding if it exists."

"She was not a person who would allow the system to dictate her life."

"We'd be Cuba if there were no Fox News."