A muscle is like a car. If you want it to run well...

I love working with kids, talking with them and listening to them. I always encourage kids to reach beyond their dreams. Don't try to be like me. Be better than me.

I couldn't wait until I grew up. I used to look at my mom's stockings and put them on with her high heels and mess with my hair.

That's what I'd like to do on the President's Council. Make sports and athletics available to every youth in America, not just one day a week like it was for me, but every day.

Why do people talk of the horrors of old age? It's great. I feel like a fine old car with the parts gradually wearing out, but I'm not complaining,... Those who find growing old terrible are people who haven't done what they wanted with their lives.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

I really think we should pass a law in every state, I don't care whether it takes the independence away from an old person or not. You shouldn't be driving a car if you're over the age of 80. Maybe even less than that.

Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.

We talk a lot on 'Biggest Loser' about how fitness is a natural antidepressant, how it burns off stress. What I like about running is that it gives me time alone. I'm always busy, with people at work, with my kids. I love getting out for a run by myself and just listening to my music.

I personally love to run outdoor fitness trails. I love the meditative value I get when out alone, challenging myself to run faster and higher.

With fitness, I do Bikrams hot yoga. The gym that I have in my building is amazing. I love to do cardio and weights there.

I think exercise tests us in so many ways, our skills, our hearts, our ability to bounce back after setbacks. This is the inner beauty of sports and competition, and it can serve us all well as adult athletes.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.