John McCain Quotes

Success in golf depends less on strength of body than upon strength of mind and character.

Every great player has learned the two Cs: how to concentrate and how to maintain composure.

If we go to Chihuahua we must be considered as prisoners of war?

A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.

Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above it.

My natural abilities weren't necessarily brute power and strength. They were more about the ability to endure and not give up.

Among the events of John McCain's five-and-a-half years of imprisonment and torture in North Vietnam, probably the most heroic, and surely the most celebrated, was his refusal to accept an early release from his captors.

It's all a mind thing, just all mental. You have to know going into the game you have to play at a high level, as many minutes, stuff like that. It's just all mental. You get yourself mentally prepared for it and go out there and play.

To help students steel themselves for captivity, SERE used a variety of 'stress and duress' techniques. The military's encyclopedic knowledge of these techniques was paid for in American blood because it was gleaned from former POWs tortured by totalitarian regimes. One technique, waterboarding, was a historically well-known torture.

The mental is more important than the physical. You know, that voice in your head telling you to give up if it gets tough. That's my main opponent - making sure that if your body wants to stop, your mind won't let you.

In football, you have to be strong in the head. The mentality is important, and I do have this quality so I can keep going.

If there is a Way involving the spirit of not being defeated, to help oneself and gain honour, it is the Way of Strategy.

There's no magic to running far or climbing Everest. Endurance is mental strength. It's all about heart.

In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

Your legs are not giving out. Your head is giving out. Keep going.

We, performers, work on willpower. This willpower works in a short term, not durational.

Every thought sounds like a footfall, Till a thought like a boot kicks down the wall.

Dark clouds may hang on me sometimes, but I'll work it out.

keep fresh before me the moments of my high resolve.

When I knew I couldn't suffer another moment of pain, and tears fell on my bloody bindings, my mother spoke softly into my ear, encouraging me to go one more hour, one more day, one more week, reminding me of the rewards I would have if I carried on a little longer. In this way, she taught me how to endure — not just the physical trials of footbinding and childbearing but the more torturous pain of the heart, mind, and soul.

When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps.

In sunshine, in prosperity, the flowers are very well; but how many wet days are there in life—November seasons of disaster, when a man's hearth and home would be cold indeed, without the clear, cheering gleam of intellect.

John McCain was a prisoner of war.

Don't let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole.