“Upon experiencing my first miscarriage, I was incredulously told I'd need to endure three consecutive miscarriages before further action would be taken. The idea itself was staggering to me. You wouldn't ask someone to undergo multiple heart attacks or even endure recurrent minor injuries like broken fingers before intervening. Yet, the system requires women to face the trauma of three successive miscarriages.”— Myleene Klass
The quote archive
A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.
My fun statement is that if I see the same thing, three times in one week, from disparate news or information sources, I have to move quickly as it's a trend that's likely to happen.
— Chip WilsonFounder of Lululemon Athletica, Canadian entrepreneur and philanthropist
Our message to countries continues to be: you must take a comprehensive approach. Not testing alone. Not contact tracing alone. Not quarantine alone. Not social distancing alone. Do it all. Any country that looks at the experience of other countries with large epidemics and thinks 'that won't happen to us' is making a deadly mistake. It can happen to any country…
— Dr. Tedros AdhanomDirector-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) since 2017
Until James DeGale won a World Title, no-one who'd won a gold medal for Britain in the Olympic Games had ever won a professional World Title, which is quite amazing when you think about that. Think of the guys that didn't even get to the Olympic Games like Naseem Hamed, Nigel Benn, Eubank, Joe Calzaghe, Tyson Fury, Ricky Hatton. Sometimes the greatest boxers get overlooked- or maybe it's because of whoever is picking the amateur team… or maybe there are politics involved…. Sometimes you may just come across guys who are hungrier!
— Frank WarrenFounder of PostSecret, anonymous confessions project & book series
There's an old adage that the boxer is the last one to know – it's not true, he's the first one to know, but the last to acknowledge it. You can learn from defeat – it's not the end of the world, but you have to learn from it and realise that there are times when you can come back, and times where you have to say, 'enough… enough…. You're getting too hurt… you're just not the guy you were…'
— Frank WarrenFounder of PostSecret, anonymous confessions project & book series
Anyone can have a good trainer; you can learn the moves and get fit. Any boxer or athlete can get super fit – the edge is mental ability – It's having the self-belief. If you're not right in the head? You'll never do it. I've seen guys getting beaten mentally. Mike Tyson beat a lot of fighters mentally before they even got in the ring, Tyson Fury does the same thing – they get in people's minds.
— Frank WarrenFounder of PostSecret, anonymous confessions project & book series
To be a great fighter you obviously have to have talent, but what really matters is dedication and discipline. I've seen so many guys with talent where I've thought, 'this guy's going to be a world champion…' but they've not had the dedication. They've not given what you had to give, which is everything. To succeed as a boxer, you have to dedicate your life to it… it's a very short career for a professional fighter.
— Frank WarrenFounder of PostSecret, anonymous confessions project & book series
I got into boxing promotion by accident. One of my cousins was a boxer, so I used to go watch him fight as an amateur and then when he turned pro. He had a fight, I went to watch it… he got beat and had a return match… he beat the guy… they had another match, but they wanted to pay them crap money. I went to the meeting, turned around and said, '…I don't need you, we'll promote it…' I don't know why I even said that! The next minute, I was in the promotion business and helping to get this thing together; I got bitten by the bug, and it went from there.
— Frank WarrenFounder of PostSecret, anonymous confessions project & book series
This is nothing to do with the 0.000001% who go on to be professional fighters – it's about the 99.9% of people who train because they enjoy it, and connect with it – and who apply the lessons they've learned to deal with the setbacks, failures, victories, challenges and tests they're going to get in work and life.
— John KavanaghBoxing coach of Conor McGregor at Straight Blast Gym Dublin
Fighting crosses demographics. You can come to one of our gyms and find a barrister rolling with a security guard. If you go to the polo club, it's usually a single demographic.
— John KavanaghBoxing coach of Conor McGregor at Straight Blast Gym Dublin
We should learn how to fight not flight. And fight doesn't have to be a physical thing – it can be that you feel something's going to be uncomfortable 'okay well let's avoid it'. No, go through with it but go through with it in a progressive manner, and go through with it in an intelligent manner and measure your results.
— John KavanaghBoxing coach of Conor McGregor at Straight Blast Gym Dublin
If you want to grow, you need to go through something uncomfortable and come out the other end. If you want to grow, you have to go forward in progressive steps. It should always be a little bit uncomfortable because otherwise there's no growth. And that's the secret. It's like playing chess but while getting punched in the face.
— John KavanaghBoxing coach of Conor McGregor at Straight Blast Gym Dublin
I tried to remain as emotionless as possible – remaining as much of a scientist as I could be, going with the evidence. I felt that although I didn't have a coach on hand in Ireland, and even though the sport of MMA was very small, I had mountains of evidence I could study.
— John KavanaghBoxing coach of Conor McGregor at Straight Blast Gym Dublin
I earn my living from coaching people how to fight… it may come as a surprise, therefore, to learn that until I was in my early twenties, I was terrified of fighting. I hated arguing, shouting, violence – all forms of conflict, basically. That's not unusual, of course, but to be honest, I was a bit of a wimp – or, as some of the kids in school liked to tell me, a pussy.
— John KavanaghBoxing coach of Conor McGregor at Straight Blast Gym Dublin
Our psychology is open-ended: we can plug in variables, and are not just tied to constants. We can expand our circle of sympathy – we can employ the logic of impartiality, and the emotional prompts of human contact and vicarious experience, and expand our fellow-feeling from our family to our clan, our nation, tribe, and from there to all of humanity and even other sentient beings.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
Knowledge isn't always used to make people better off, of course. It can be used to make more lethal weaponry and more effective militia and armies – so we must couple knowledge with humanism, with universal sympathy, for it to be a force for good. Without knowledge, however, all the sympathy in the world would be impotent – they must exist together.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
An appreciation of entropy is necessary to grasp that we are not entitled to wellbeing, progress, comfort, or health. The forces of the universe are- at best, indifferent- at worse, antipathetic- to our interests. Left to their own devices, things get worse.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature