Quotes from Ben Carson

I looked up through a scatter of fluttering leaves silhouetted against the rosy autumn sunset.

There was a time when I was a hothead, and my temper wreaked havoc in my life until I learned to take myself out of the center of the circle. The real key to staying cool and calm is to relinquish selfishness and always consider the feelings of others.

If we apply logic to solving our problems and add the godly principles of loving our fellow man, caring about our neighbors, and developing our God-given talents to the utmost so we become valuable to those around us — allowing these values and principles to govern our lives — then not only will we remain a pinnacle nation, we will truly be "one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

The bottom line was that we have only ourselves to blame. We create our own destiny by the way we do things. We have to take advantage of opportunities

Totalitarianism always starts with restrictions on the rights of others. We must avoid this at all costs. George Washington even said, "If the freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

One way to develop courage is to consider what will happen if we fail to act.

Today we produce only 60,000 to 70,000 engineers per year, 40 percent of whom are foreigners, while China produces over 400,000 engineers per year. With this kind of technological discrepancy, we will be left far behind in the not too distant future unless we begin to address our educational shortcomings with more than political rhetoric.

of Jesus Christ and my relationship to Him and remember that the One who created the universe can do anything. I also have evidence—my own experience—that God can do anything, because He changed me. From age 14, I began to focus on the future. My mother's lessons—and those of several of my teachers—were at last paying off.

Influence could get me inside the door, but my productivity and the quality of my work were the real tests.

When I entered Yale, I had to face two important facts about myself. First, though I could consider myself a smart enough person — I was not quite as smart as I thought I was. Second, I did not know how to do in-depth studying.

if you can read, honey, you can learn just about anything you want to know. The doors of the world are open to people who can read.

All citizens need to arm themselves with a basic knowledge of American history and stay abreast of current events, analyzing them with respect to history. Knowledge is power and at a time when the people are becoming increasingly impotent while the government grows larger and more powerful, it is vital that we arm ourselves with knowledge.

Sometimes one has to be humble enough to start at the bottom with a minimum-wage job even if you have a college degree. Once you get your foot in the door, you can prove your worth and rapidly move up the ladder. If you never get in the door, it is unlikely that you will rise to the top.

When a government turns from following the will of its people to willing its people to follow — acting according to its own prerogatives — it ceases to be a representative government and instead has transformed into something else. One

Similarly, if the American people and their representatives do not know and understand what is in our Constitution, others will take advantage of them. Only when we understand the law of our land can we effectively hold our representatives accountable. Knowledge is power, and we must refuse to be bullied.

There have been many stories recently about the bullying epidemic that seems to be occurring in our public school system. We should not be terribly surprised by this because children emulate what they see adults doing. One does not have to look at television for very long or listen to the radio for an extended period before one sees supposedly rational and mature adults vehemently attacking one another, calling each other names and acting like third graders.

Our problems are not ours alone — we share them with future generations — and we have a moral obligation to hand our nation over to our children and grandchildren in good shape.

The fact that the Republican Party in particular often seems to stand for principle, only to cave in to pressure at the last minute, has turned off a huge number of voters.

They forbid the use of the word slavery by conservatives, the mention of Nazism by conservatives, or the mention of homosexuality in anything other than a positive context, to name a few of their rules.

We also need a way to regulate the way some companies and individuals buy up patents of promising ideas that would threaten their sources of revenue.

The human brain has billions of neurons and hundreds of billions of interconnections. It can process more than two million bits of information per second and can remember everything you have ever seen or heard.

The only reason I can imagine that it would be a good idea for government to foster dependency in large groups of citizens is to cultivate a dependable voting bloc that will guarantee continued power as long as the entitlements are provided. The problem of course is that such a government will eventually "run out of other people's money," as Margaret Thatcher once famously said.

Political correctness has thrown a veil of silence over our important discussions. Rather than asking those with whom we disagree to clearly state their case, we set up rules of political correctness that mandate that their perspective must be the same as ours. We then demonize those with whom we disagree and as a result fail to reach any consensus that might solve our problems.

I am fond of saying that if two people think and say the same thing about everything, then one of them is not necessary.