“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
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free . . . it expects what never was and never will be.”
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Ben Carson
“Many well-meaning Americans have bought into the PC speech code, thinking that by being extra careful not to offend anyone we will achieve unity. What they fail to realize is that this is a false unity that prevents us from talking about important issues and is a Far Left strategy to paralyze us while they change our nation. People have been led to become so sensitive that fault can be found in almost anything anyone says because somewhere, somehow, someone will be offended by it.”
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Ben Carson
“Wisdom is essentially the same thing as common sense, the slight difference is that common sense provides the ability to react appropriately, while wisdom is frequently more proactive and additionally encourages the shaping of the environment.”
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Ben Carson
“There is no such thing as an average human being. If you have a normal brain, you are superior.”
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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
“I had a mother who would never allow herself to be a victim no matter what happened… Never made excuses, and she never accepted an excuse from us. And if we ever came up with an excuse, she always said, "Do you have a brain?" And if the answer was yes, then she said, "Then you could have thought your way out of it.”
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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
“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”
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Ben Carson
“And, you know, what we need to do—[applause]what we need to do in this PC world is forget about unanimity of speech and unanimity of thought, and we need to concentrate on being respectful to those people with whom we disagree.”
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Ben Carson
“I came to realize that if people could make me angry they could could control me. Why should I give someone else such power over my life?”
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Ben Carson
“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.”
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Ben Carson
“Compassion, however, should mean providing a mechanism to escape poverty rather than simply maintaining people in an impoverished state by supplying handouts. By doing this we give them an opportunity to elevate their personal situations, which eventually decreases our need to take care of them and empowers them to be able to exercise compassion toward others.”
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Ben Carson
“Influence could get me inside the door, but my productivity and the quality of my work were the real tests.”
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Ben Carson
“I recognized others’ abilities as well. But in any career, whether it’s that of a TV repairman, a musician, a secretary—or a surgeon—an individual must believe in himself and in his abilities. To do his best, one needs a confidence that says, “I can do anything, and if I can’t do it, I know how to get help.”
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Ben Carson
