Training with Bela and Marta Karolyi took the joy out of the Olympics for me. I look back and feel there was a lot of verbal and physical abuse. For years, I felt it was my problem.

I learned to take those experiences that were difficult in my life and in the adversity that I had overcome to use it for a positive change.

I had this sister that was born who was given up for adoption, and I never knew it.

Autographs and pictures do get a little old, but I don't mind if the people want it.

As a competitive gymnast, my life has always been filled with challenges that would ultimately define my future. From day one, I was taught to be prepared at all costs.

My parents enrolled me in a gymnastics class when I was three years old, and I just was drawn to gymnastics. I loved it. It was my playground, and I could run around and be free there.

Since my mother is an extremely devoted Christian Orthodox woman, she prayed a great deal and taught me how to pray.

In my very first interview, at nine years old, I said I wanted to be an Olympic gold medalist. That was the first time I said it out loud in front of somebody other than my parents.

I was 26 years old when I found out that I had a sister who I never knew existed.

Every morning, the sun rises with endless possibilities that give you endless opportunities to begin again and to create a brand-new life.

Often, we tend to wrap ourselves around him so tight that we neglect our mission, our purpose, our calling, sometimes our children and even our God

You can lead with or without a title. If you wait until you get a title, you may wait forever.

England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.

If we want liberation, we must rewrite the Sleeping Beauty myth. No one is coming and no one else is to blame.

My buildings are all on budget.

I'm so loud, as if I know what I'm on about, but deep inside, I'm so insecure. Just a little girl.

Where progress is desire, change is Inevitable.

I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology - that progress comes through class struggle, often violent.

The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story that at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at.