Quotes from Jonny Kim

I didn't have the confidence from my childhood, but dreams are possible and all good things in life are hard to get, so persevere and don't give up!

I was good at school but I thought I sucked at everything else. I was socially scared of making relationships. High school was a big fail as the social experiment that it is.

For me... after having some intense wartime experiences where I lost a lot of good friends that I've loved, I made a promise to those guys who died - that I'd do everything in my power for the rest of my life to make this world a better place. Because those men were great human beings and they left a void.

I was told that with the right attitude, and with enough hard work, if you get up after every time you fail, you can amount to something and you can do positive work. You can leave a positive mark for our world, and that's what I aim to do.

You're going to learn a lot every time you fail. So embrace that.

I fundamentally believed in the NASA mission of advancing our space frontier, all the while developing innovations and new technologies that would benefit all of humankind.

My kids, I love it when they tell me, 'Abba, I want to be an artist.' And I say, that is awesome... I just want you to be happy and to follow your heart.

I think living with humility, and serving with humility, is one of the most important things humans can do.

The SEALs were very good in teaching me hard skills - that means resilience, pushing past your mental and physical boundaries; and having an enormously high threshold for pain.

I was pretty much nonexistent on the Internet before NASA, and that was really because I've been inspired by amazing sacrifices of people who did amazing things - jumping on grenades or sacrificing their lives or doing the most crazy, brave things without hesitation and never, ever seeking recognition for it. That was always very powerful for me.

A lot of those soft skills - working with groups of people who I've never met before to accomplish a mission, adapting to personality types - those are skills I've learned outside the SEAL time.

All things that are worthwhile are very difficult to obtain.

August 2nd, 2006 is just a taste of what war is. We lost two people that day. There are companies, battalions that have lost half, most of their unit. You look at the numbers from WW2 or Vietnam, it's astounding.

Chris Kyle was the Primary Sniper, Navigator, Pointman, and newguys kind of get matched up to a person. He was the person I got matched up to, because I would eventually be groomed to take on his responsibilities, so early on, I got tasked with being the Assistant Lead Navigator and Point Man and Sniper, which I eventually got to take on these roles more as a Primary later, and in workup and also on deployment.

Single cracks are usually not good. The crack, you know, in the crack, when I say crack, I mean when you are on the giving end of a rifle, you it's a much different sound than being on the receiving end of a rifle, that of a bullet that is supersonic makes a very distinctive crack. And when you hear that, and it's a single one, it generally is not good.

The way I would talk to a platoon of SEALs would be very different than the way I would talk to a 60 year old COPD patient.

You can be born with bad cards. You don't need to have it all. But you have a choice and the power to craft your own destiny, your own path.

You choose your battles. I think it's important to choose what battles you stand up for. But there are some battles that you should never, ever stand down from.

You don't learn how to be a SEAL in BUD/S. You just learn how to suffer.

You should never think you're too good to do a job. And I think you should be like that in everything you do. 'Be a forever new guy' is what I try to emulate, and I don't mean as in you shouldn't step up to the role and be a leader and delegate appropriately, but never think that you are above taking out the trash or that you're above not respecting the secretary or the lowest junior enlisted.

I never want my children to ever feel like they need to be a SEAL, or that they need to go into medicine, or be an astronaut in order to please me - because I don't think that's very fair. I just want them to live their own lives. I don't hesitate at every opportunity to remind my children of that.

Ego is probably one of the biggest poisons we can have - it's toxic to any environment.

High school was interesting. For a lot of people, high school was just a big social experiment, and I think the value of high school was not so much learning how to be a great student... but I think it's learning how to interact with people and be social. I would say that in that endeavor, I completely failed.

Controlled aggression, to me, is one of the most important traits to have. To have that social intelligence to know when to exert aggression in the military environment, and when to stay calm, cool, and collected.