So after a while, if people won't accept your excuses, you stop looking for them.

If you don't accept excuses, then people will stop giving them and will start looking for solutions.

I was asked by an NPR reporter once, why don't I talk about race that often. I said it's because I'm a neurosurgeon. And she thought that was a strange response. And you say - I said, you see, when I take someone to the operating room, I'm actually operating on the thing that makes them who they are. The skin doesn't make them who they are.

I hope we, the American people, can come to the understanding that we are not each other's enemies. The enemies are those who are stoking the flames of division, trying to divide us into every category.

I started reading about people of great accomplishment … and it dawned on me suddenly that the person who has the most to do with what happens in your life is you.

I find the big bang, really quite fascinating. I mean, here you have all these highfalutin scientists and they're saying it was this gigantic explosion and everything came into perfect order. Now these are the same scientists that go around touting the second law of thermodynamics, which is entropy, which says that things move toward a state of disorganization.

Kids have what I call a built-in hypocrisy antenna that comes up and blocks out what you're saying when you're being a hypocrite.