Abraham Lincoln

Always bear in mind, that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other thing.

If we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class.  There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall in to this vice.  The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and generosity.  ~Abraham Lincoln, address to the Washington Temperance Society, Springfield, Illinois, 22 February 1842

"Man is only truly great when he acts from his passions." Benjamin Disreali

"Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing"

(During the Civil War, on hearing complaints that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant drank alcohol to excess)
Find out what Grant drinks and send a barrel of it to each of my other generals!

"When you have got an elephant by the hind leg, and he is trying to get away, it's best to let him run."

It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong.

"Commitment is what transforms a promise into reality"

I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path . . . It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts for distinction.