Everything is about your movements and precision and timing, which is what gymnastics is about.

As long as you've done your best, making mistakes doesn't matter. You and I are human; we will mess up. What counts is learning from your mistakes and getting back up when life has knocked you down.

Stay strong. Stand up. Have a voice.

I have a chaperone everywhere I go - my mom.

My approach to gymnastics in Beijing was heavily based on the amount of difficulty I could do.

I still can't believe I'm an Olympic athlete.

Gymnastics taught me everything - life lessons, responsibility and discipline and respect.

The body is an amazing machine... If you eat the right things your body will perform incredibly well!

To have any doubt in your body is the biggest weakness an athlete can have. There are times when I physically can't get myself to go for a skill because I'm thinking, 'My knee hurts really bad.'

Image isn't everything, It's what comes from your heart, and what you learn and what you say and how you act that means more than anything.

I don't call them sacrifices. I call them exchanges.

My dad always used to tell me that sometimes you have to have a massive storm in order to clear the sky.

The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in others.

For some reason, I have a very strange conception of time. I am constantly hovering at some overview, more macro.

He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.

Children are potentially free and their life directly embodies nothing save potential freedom. Consequently they are not things and cannot be the property either of their parents or others.

No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid; but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

I thought Gen. McChrystal was unfireable, that his position was secure.

The truth is a rabbit in a bramble patch. All you can do is circle around and say it's somewhere in there.

Give me a kiss, and to that kiss a score: Then to that twenty, add a hundred more.