“If there were only success in your life, you would not learn anything. Leadership is experience and you are still young. You still have much to learn about our people and war; it should not come easy to you. If it did, you would be robbed of life's most valuable teacher.”

“No one ever said your life would be easy. The nature of being human makes life for all of us a challenge. The most important thing to consider here is this. Your life is only as challenging as you think it is. Think of challenge as a teacher and yourself the student. It's up to you to figure out what the lesson is to be learned. To learn that lesson and build the strength and courage to face other challenges….”

“When did swearing become so easy? You still would never swear in front of your parents or most adults, but when you're with your friends it's like every fifth word. Why couldn't learning Spanish be that easy?”

“Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.”

“When you are in high school, you don't give much thought to what you can't do. For most people, that gets learned later, and for still fewer, gets unlearned for the rest of life.”

“Anything that you learn becomes your wealth, a wealth that cannot be taken away from you; whether you learn it in a building called school or in the school of life. To learn something new is a timeless pleasure and a valuable treasure. And not all things that you learn are taught to you, but many things that you learn you realize you have taught yourself.”