When you grow up on camera and in the public eye, you feel you have to put forth this image. I just took that to the extreme and there was a lot of pressure on me

The rate of childhood obesity is just ridiculous. Anytime I can get involved with teaching them how to get physical exercise, I want to help in any way possible

If you want to take it up a step and aim to become a competitive gymnast, you have to be mentally strong and prepared to take on the workload of going to the gym every day, rain or shine.

Doing your best is more important than being the best.

Other people may not have had high expectations for me... but I had high expectations for myself.

Everyone gets scared, and everyone falls. The key is to get right back up and try again.

Face each day with the expectation of achieving good, rather than the dread of falling short.

It's amazing to me that they're cutting physical education programs in the school systems.

Gymnastics uses every single part of your body, every little tiny muscle that you never even knew.

Charles Barkley, I used to watch him growing up. Then I met him. He was a big teddy bear.

When I go in to compete, whether it's gymnastics or anything else, I do my own thing. I compete with myself.

There is a certain relief in change even though it be from bad to worse as I have found in traveling in a stagecoach it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place.

A man without persistence will never make a good shaman or a good physician.

Not only has the eyes taken over, but we have anaesthetised the ears through all the muzak that we hear all the time.

I just really, really, really hate to lose. Really.

Those who hate most fervently must have once loved deeply; those who want to deny the world must have once embraced what they now set on fire.

I was thinking that maybe when everything around you changed all the time, it was nice to know that something would always be the same

Obviously, I'm not homeless. I'm not an old alcoholic. I'm not jumping trains. I just like to live in a certain way.

Every time you build a golf course, it’s not a golf course when you get there. You have to improvise.

There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action - to try to balance out those effects.

I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.