I was given such a great gift. It's a miracle that never stops amazing me and reminding me to give thanks, every day. Having a wife and daughter gives me a lot more purpose. I was much more selfish before, but now I think about what kind of role model I'll be. I just want to be a better man.

We grew up probably having as hard a life as anybody. A lot of times, we didn't have any food on the table. At Christmas, everybody else would always get something nice, but we'd get one T-shirt or one shirt... So I want to take care of Mom and Dad... and I'm having a damn good time doing it.

It's easy to get negative because you get beat down. You go through a few disappointments and it's easy to stay in that negative frame of mind. Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is a whole cliche, but your attitude is going to determine how you're going to live your life.

Washington - having spent a lot of time there, I grew up there and have spent a lot of time there recently - is largely defined by detailed analytical views and policy choices that are not very good. You know, each policy choice has a winner and a loser, right? Somebody's ox is getting gored.

I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job.

So many people get involved with carrying grudges and having these moral battles with people, where they cast themselves as the righteous and the other guy is the dirtbag. They waste tons of energy on it, create all kinds of darkness around themselves and the other person. It gets you nothing.

When I design and wonder what the point is, I think of someone having a bad time in their life. Maybe they are sad and they wake up and put on something I have made and it makes them feel just a bit better. So, in that sense, fashion is a little help in the life of a person. But only a little.

My biggest beauty tip would be exfoliation, exfoliation, exfoliation! After a lifetime of almost no breakouts, I started having some pretty embarrassing ones and learned that if you don't exfoliate, your skin has a hard time shedding the old skin and therefore clogs your pores and causes zits.

I'm thankful to God for having a family that's been there for me. He's been there from the time I was a child to even now with my family helping with my little boy. It's worth more than words could ever describe. That's one of the ways I've been able to stay grounded is thanks to family and God.

When I was drafted to Smackdown, I was like, 'Hell yes, I'm going to captain this ship.' Then I was like, 'Oh, wait, you're losing your best friend and travel partner and the person you enjoy having matches with the absolute most.' That's Charlotte. We travel together, and she is my best friend.

I'm a third-culture child. It's an interesting concept. Having an American father, a South American mother, born in England, grew up in Hong Kong, went to school in Europe - it makes me a third-culture child, which means you take on the culture of the place where you live. So I'm very adaptable.

Regarding my pay, my salary, that I don't 'earn a lot,' these are things that are a result of two years ago when I came to Inter. To me, it was a good contract for having arrived at Inter. I signed the contract with the excitement and desire to prove my worth and be an important player for Inter.

We can actually accelerate the process through meditation, through the ability to find stillness through loving actions, through compassion and sharing, through understanding the nature of the creative process in the universe and having a sense of connection to it. So, that's conscious evolution.

Government is force, pure and simple. There's no way to sugar-coat that. And because government is force, it will attract the worst elements of society - people who want to use government to avoid having to earn their living and to avoid having to persuade others to accept their ideas voluntarily.

Getting a tax refund is nice, but having more money year-round is better. If you get a chunk of change from the IRS, you're giving the government an interest-free loan - not something they, or any bank, would ever give you. Instead, change your withholding so you get a little extra in each paycheck.

No matter what has happened to you in the past or what is going on in your life right now, it has no power to keep you from having an amazingly good future if you will walk by faith in God. God loves you! He wants you to live with victory over sin so you can possess His promises for your life today!

My mother was murdered by my step-father, my brother's father, who was also named Joel, twenty-five years ago. Whatever sadness or burden I've been living with since then, my brother's also been living with, but he's lived with the added burden of having the exact same name as our mother's murderer.

I think people really understand that clean air and clean water and not having factories dumping their emissions into the atmosphere and into the rivers and into the sea has been a very good thing for America. EPA stands watch for very important principles that go all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt.

The Universal Zulu Nation stands to acknowledge wisdom, understanding, freedom, justice, and equality, peace, unity, love, and having fun, work, overcoming the negative through the positive, science, mathematics, faith, facts, and the wonders of God, whether we call him Allah, Jehovah, Yahweh, or Jah.

If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair. If I were organizing in an orthodox Jewish community, I would not walk in there eating a ham sandwich unless I wanted to be rejected so I could have an excuse to cop out.

It's really about making opportunities for yourself and connecting with people on a more-than-normal level. That opens doors. You never know if the caterer's brother is someone. You don't know who someone is having dinner with that night. So being a nice person and touching people creates opportunity.

Having an animal that you fix, knowing that you saved its life or you saved a pet - Like on a dog, these little kids will come, and their dog is just ready to die, and you do something, and they leave happy. The kids are happy, and the little puppy is licking your hand. Those are kind of neat feelings.

Don't ever criticize yourself. Don't go around all day long thinking, 'I'm unattractive, I'm slow, I'm not as smart as my brother.' God wasn't having a bad day when he made you... If you don't love yourself in the right way, you can't love your neighbour. You can't be as good as you are supposed to be.

I'm not a blokey bloke. I don't take myself too seriously. But that doesn't stop me being a bad person sometimes and doing things I regret. Such as having a child with someone you've split up with, then falling in love and wanting to spend the rest of your life with someone else. That's quite difficult.

I've heard people say that God is the gift of desperation, and there's a lot to be said for having really reached a bottom where you've run out of any more good ideas or plans for everybody else's behavior; or how to save and fix and rescue; or just get out of a huge mess, possibly of your own creation.

As a youngster, my mother and father always drilled into my head having something to fall back on. My father was kind of funny. I'd score 40 points. I'd come home and say, 'Look dad, I scored 40.' He'd never have a smile on his face. He'd be like, 'I saw that move you did. What if you'd hurt your knee?'

If you like small government you need to work hard at having a strong national defense that is not so militant. Personal liberty is the purpose of government, to protect liberty - not to run your personal life, not to run the economy, and not to pretend that we can tell the world how they ought to live.

I have to say, I have to tell you that my kids had a most marvelous time having two moms. When my daughter was at university, she got flu. And both mums rushed to be with her. And we were both looking after her and making soup and tidying up. And one of her friends came in and went, 'Two mums? Not fair.'

Someone told me that having a baby is like having your heart walking around outside of your body, and I didn't understand it until I had a baby. Now, like, everything he does literally crushes my heart. In a great way. And then if he's in pain, it's like my whole endeavor is to make sure he's not in pain.

When you have a concussion, one of the symptoms that is common is anxiety. Imagine having the normal amount of anxieties that everybody shares - about life and meeting people in social spaces, whatever. Imagine that being multiplied by 10, 20. And so your worry over people's perceptions of you multiplies.

The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.

I don't mind expressing my opinions and speaking out against injustice. I would be doing this even if I wasn't a writer. I grew up in a household that believed in social justice. I have always understood myself as having an obligation to stand on the side of the silenced, the oppressed, and the mistreated.

You start to think in terms of making an album that might be greater than the sum of its parts. It's sort of like having a lot of footage and then editing it into something that will make sense to a viewer, you know. Sometimes it might involve even working on an older song that might complete that picture.

A successful competition for me is always going out there and putting 100 percent into whatever I'm doing. It's not always winning. People, I think, mistake that it's just winning. Sometimes it could be, but for me, it's hitting the best sets I can, gaining confidence, and having a good time and having fun.

I'm very, very focused on my children. In fact, I'm very religious about having breakfast with them every morning, having dinner with them every evening, and spend all the weekends with them that I don't work. So as long as I'm not traveling, I'm always with them and I go to their soccer and tennis matches.

I envy people with dreams and passions, but I don't think that way. I still don't have a 'bliss' to follow. For people like me - I suspect that's most people - holding out for a 'dream' or a 'passion' is paralyzing. I just like having work I enjoy that feels meaningful. That's hard enough... but it's enough.

I feel very lucky to have grown up having interaction with adults who were making change but who were far from perfect beings. That feeling of not being paralyzed by your incredible inadequacy as a human being, which I feel every day, is a part of the legacy that I've gotten from so many of the adult elders.

I grew up as a British kid - I went to school in London, roamed the streets of London - but having these interactions with my roots and going back to Ghana, I'm like, 'Yeah this is sick.' I love my country and my people, and the energy and vibes that they bring back. So I want to rep that and be a part of it.

I have so much residue crap in my hair from years and years of not washing it and not having any sense of personal hygiene whatsoever. Even today, I go into these things where I'm supposed to be this sexy guy or whatever, and I'm literally asking, 'If I get plumes of dandruff on me, can you just brush it off?'

Being on a book tour is like being on the seesaw when you're a little kid. The excitement is in having someone to play with, and in rising up in the air, but then you're at the mercy of those holding you down, and if it's your older brother, or Paul Wolfowitz, they leap up, so that you crash down and get hurt.

I actually had someone say to me, 'Lynn, you're going to have very good days, and you're going to have very bad days. But It's rare that things are as good as they look, and it's rare that things are as bad as they seem.' So having perspective, and challenging perspective, is important to making good decisions.

I thought that the fashion world could be a bit fake sometimes, but it's nothing compared to Hollywood. These girls would walk over their grandmothers' graves to get a part, and the producers talk about actresses like they're dirt, picking over every part of them so that they end up paranoid and having surgery.

When we talk about the word 'socialism,' I think what it really means is just democratic participation in our economic dignity and our economic, social, and racial dignity. It is about direct representation and people actually having power and stake over their economic and social wellness, at the end of the day.

While you're going through this process of trying to find the satisfaction in your work, pretend you feel satisfied. Tell yourself you had a good day. Walk through the corridors with a smile rather than a scowl. Your positive energy will radiate. If you act like you're having fun, you'll find you are having fun.

Karma is experience, and experience creates memory, and memory creates imagination and desire, and desire creates karma again. If I buy a cup of coffee, that's karma. I now have that memory that might give me the potential desire for having cappuccino, and I walk into Starbucks, and there's karma all over again.

I do sing in the car. I actually sing Britney Spears songs in the car - me and a close friend of mine. She lives in West Palm and I live in Miami, and when we're going back and forth to see each other, we sing: 'Oh, Baby Baby.' We sing all these 1990s songs. We're like two 14-year-old kids just having a good time.

Give, give, give - what is the point of having experience, knowledge or talent if I don't give it away? Of having stories if I don't tell them to others? Of having wealth if I don't share it? I don't intend to be cremated with any of it! It is in giving that I connect with others, with the world and with the divine.

I think just having everybody know who you are is more of a challenge. More than anything about it is just knowing people are watching. I know who I am, so it's watching things I say, what I do. Even if I'm in line at one of the rest stops or something, it's just being on my Ps and Qs at all times more than anything.

Laughter is an important part of a good relationship. It's an immense achievement when you can move from your thinking that your partner is merely an idiot to thinking that they are that wonderfully complex thing called a loveable idiot. And often that means having a little bit of a sense of humour about their flaws.

Imagine having all of your freedoms taken away, being forced to work against your will, and constantly living under the threat of violence - in short, being forced to live as a slave. Sadly, this situation is a reality for millions of children, women, and men each year as part of the global human trafficking industry.

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