“Both parents came from big families: my mother had 23 siblings, and my father grew up with 13 brothers and sisters. They married when my father was 28 and my mother was 13. Many years later she confided that she was looking for a way to get out of a desperate home situation.”
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Ben Carson
“I hope we can continue to find ways to encourage integrity in all aspects of government operations”
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Ben Carson
“I am convinced that knowledge is power - to overcome the past, to change our own situations, to fight new obstacles, to make better decisions.”
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Ben Carson
“Having a ballot referendum on an important issue is a farce if a federal judge can throw out the results and impose his or her own will in place of the will of the people.”
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Ben Carson
“when the Vietnamese came to the United States they often faced prejudice from everyone—White, Black, and Hispanics. But they didn’t beg for handouts and often took the lowest jobs offered. Even well-educated individuals didn’t mind sweeping floors if it was a paying job. Today many of these same Vietnamese are property owners and entrepreneurs. That’s the message I try to get across to the young people. The same opportunities are there, but we can’t start out as vice president of the company. Even if we landed such a position, it wouldn’t do us any good anyway because we wouldn’t know how to do our work. It’s better to start where we can fit in and then work our way up.”
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Ben Carson
“We were very poor. But between the covers of books I could go anywhere, I could be anybody, I could do anything. I began to read about people of great accomplishment. As I read those stories, I began to see a connecting thread. I began to see that the person who had the most to do with you and what happened to you in life, is you. You make decisions. You decide how much energy you want to put behind that decision.”
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Ben Carson
“When I was young, I thought classical music was only the background noise for cartoons.”
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Ben Carson
“We can help our nation quite a bit if we refrain from getting into our respective corners and throwing hand grenades at each other, and instead try to understand the other’s viewpoint, reject the stifling of political correctness, and engage in intelligent civil discussion.”
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Ben Carson
“As citizens, we need to get beyond squabbling with one another about tactics. For example, instead of arguing about how fast the debt should be reduced, we should unite on the common ground that it ought to be reduced at all. As we fight over details, our children’s future is worsening. It’s time to focus on common ground and take swift action based on our agreement before our nation moves beyond saving.”
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Ben Carson
“We all have choices in the way we react to the words we hear. Our lives and the lives of all those around us will be significantly improved if we choose to react positively rather than negatively.”
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Ben Carson
“One way to develop courage is to consider what will happen if we fail to act.”
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Ben Carson
“Being a doctor at Johns Hopkins does not make me any better in God's sight than the individual who has not had the opportunity to gain such an education but who still works hard.”
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Ben Carson
“What will maintain the pinnacle position of our nation in the world: the ability to shoot a 25-foot jump shot, or the ability to solve a quadratic equation?”
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Ben Carson
“We need to start evaluating people based on their abilities and not on their sex or other congenital characteristics.”
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Ben Carson
