“I had one of those steel thermal mugs you carried everywhere with you as a kind of signifier of how busy, and therefore how important you were.”

“If only you could sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.”

“… home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down.”

“Before I begin, may I ask how old you are?"
"You may ask."
"How old are you?"
"It's none of your business”

“It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

“The essential question is not, "How busy are you?' but 'What are you busy at?' 'Are you doing what fulfills you?”

“I never really studied business in school. I kind of wish I had, but how boring is that?”

“It didn't matter what you looked like. It was how you carried yourself, how you saw yourself.”

“I think the knowledge about how legislation really affects small businesses is extremely valuable. If you haven’t run a small business, then you don’t have this kind of knowledge about how a regulation passed or taxes increased affects your bottom line. If you recognize that every new regulation takes that much more time to comply with, requires that many more employees, then it really gives you that foundational basis to make those decisions.”

“My dear fellow citizens,
For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us.
I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.”