The whole 'bad girl' thing allows me to mess up sometimes. And I have freedom to say more of what I want to.

Life is a fight from the minute you take your first breath to the moment you exhale your last.

That I happened to fall into a career that no other girls wanted isn't surprising to me. I wanted something that didn't exist, so I had to create it.

The way that I like to fight is I like to paint myself into a corner and so the only way is for me to win.

The Olympics is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I was lucky enough to go twice, but most people only get one chance. And in judo you can train your whole life and it’ll come down to a split second: You can lose everything or win anything.

My first injury ever was a broken toe, and my mother made me run laps around the mat for the rest of the night. She said she wanted me to know that even if I was hurt, I was still fine.

I kind of like to think of myself as the bad girl Olympian that would get kicked out of the Miss America pageant.