It's important for me to think I'm mixed-race.

The decathlon includes ten separate events and they all matter. You can't work on just one of them.

It really means a lot that I won the gold medal - but I woke up the next morning expecting to feel different. I felt the same.

I always know where the scissors are.

And there is such a thing as a decathlon high. It's like a rock rolling down hill, picking up momentum. You get better and better.

It took me time to realize that the men who won Olympic gold medals in the decathlon are just men, just like me.

Try everything, because you're never sure what you're going to be great at.

To me, the decathlon is its own little society and I am part of that culture.

When I was little, I wasn't allowed to put sugar on my breakfast cereal because it made me so hyper.

Breaking the world record in '92 was a very special personal moment, but I'd say my favorite moment as a decathlete was winning the Olympic gold medal.

You can only look forward to a South Dakota winter if, as with childbirth, remodeling a house, or writing a novel, you're able to forget how bad it was the last time.

Forgiveness means saying that you're not going to let what happened to you define you any longer.

How can you tell when the devil is lying? His lips are moving.

I am conscious that meat eatingis not in accordance with the finer feelings,and I abstain from it whenever I can.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

The primary cause of disease is in us, always in us.

That is what we have in revisionist historians. It starts with their own atheism, their own unbelief, and then they go back and attempt to revise and rewrite history in their own image.

We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.

The present time of believers is no longer determined by the past. It takes its definition from the future.

To vote is like the payment of a debt, a duty never to be neglected, if its performance is possible.

Im not a perfect Muslim; I think none of us are perfect human beings. I do the five pillars of Islam, you know, I pray five times a day.