"I savored my time on top of the podium by watching the American flag rise up out of the crowd as the anthem played, thinking about how every single second of training I've done was for this minute and how many people played a role in my achievement."

“I don't worry too much about the script, I just ad lib, like Pearl Bailey.”

“He was beyond gorgeous. But Eastlake High was full of pretty people who acted like total freaks. I blame the local water supply. Which was why I drank bottled water.”

“To really be tortured by a song, it needs to be more than just something you don't like or don't get; it has to make your skin crawl by getting under it. Strangely, that last clause could describe provocative or daring music, as well.”

“Life is a series of commas, not periods.”

Source : "The McConaissance or 'I Wear No Mask'" by Timothy Braun, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 10, 2014.

“When dictators feel their support slipping among adults, it is not unusual for them to alter school textbooks in the hope of enlisting impressionable youths in their cause.”

“Poetry, song, stories, art, our reverence for nature, are key to our survival as a species, and to the survival of all species, I believe. You can't always extract such emphatic hunches and activist stances from a scientific maxim or mathematical axiom.”

“Quarterback is not a position that you come in having not played it your whole life.”

Source : "Sorry, Charles, but NBA stars couldn't cut it". Interview with Mike Sando, www.espn.com. May 29, 2013.

“Men tell us sometimes there is no such thing as an atheist. There must be. There are some men to whom it is true that there is no God. They cannot see God because they have no eye. They have only an abortive organ, atrophied by neglect.”