My being a black woman is not a deficit. It is a strength. Because I could not be where I am had I not overcome so many other barriers. Which means you know I'm relentless, you know I'm persistent, and you know I'm smart.

Girls are breaking barriers and boundaries every day in everything from sports and science to business and the creative arts.

Wildlife crime goes well beyond just a threat to endangered species but also has impacts on our society, economy and security. It undermines efforts to uphold the rule of law, acts as an agent for corruption, creates a barrier to development and fuels global instability.

It kind of sounds pretentious, but a film I find deeply romantic is 'Buffalo '66,' which is a film by Vincent Gallo. It's about how you break down all those barriers and expose yourself and open yourself up to ultimately being hurt.

Kabul is a walled city, which sounds romantic except the walls are pre-cast reinforced concrete blast barriers, 10 feet tall and 15 feet long and moved into place with cranes. The walls are topped with sandbags, and the sandbags are topped with guard posts from which gun barrels protrude.

Great companies that build an enduring brand have an emotional relationship with customers that has no barrier. And that emotional relationship is on the most important characteristic, which is trust.

I believe that two people are connected at the heart, and it doesn't matter what you do, or who you are or where you live; there are no boundaries or barriers if two people are destined to be together.

I am hoping that by breaking barriers myself, I can inspire a whole new generation of people to think 'you know what, maybe I can, not just run a country, maybe I could start a company, maybe I could do something in my own local community to make a positive change.'

Poetry has never been the language of barriers, it's always been the language of bridges.

Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures.

I've always loved to prove people wrong. I want to be able to cross color lines, because in music, there really is no barrier.

I'm the first Icelandic director who started working on U.S. movies. There are others behind me now, but it's like when Bjork opened the door for Icelandic musicians to work abroad. We're such a closed-off country, but Bjork broke the spell. And I'm glad it was a woman who did it. She showed us we could break this barrier.

I think Dustin Hoffman has been in at least three of my favorite movies of all time with things like 'Tootsie,' 'Marathon Man.' Getting a bit more arthouse and darker, 'The Graduate' - incredible, barrier-breaking movie, 'The Graduate.'

To be blunt, we need to remove the administrative barriers preventing legitimate research into medical marijuana, which is why I've decided to roll out the MEDS Act.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Authorities that erect major obstacles to migration - or place severe restrictions on migrants' work opportunities - inflict needless economic self-harm, as they impose barriers to having their labor needs met in an orderly, legal fashion. Worse still, they unintentionally encourage illegal migration.

Women are emerging as a major force for change. Countries that have invested in girls' education and removed legal barriers that prevent women from achieving their potential are now seeing the benefits.

The gateways to wisdom and learning are always open, and more and more I am choosing to walk through them. Barriers, blocks, obstacles, and problems are personal teachers giving me the opportunity to move out of the past and into the Totality of Possibilities.

The most significant barrier to female leadership is the actual lack of females in leadership. The best advice I can give to women is to go out and start something, ideally their own businesses. If you can't see a path for leadership within your own company, go blaze a trail of your own.

Later, I realized that the mission had to end in a let-down because the real barrier wasn't in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.

Before 9/11 there were weak procedures, willingness, and mechanisms for communicating among agencies for foreign intelligence and the FBI with its focus on law enforcement. The domestic-vs.-foreign barrier has been solved by the reforms after 9/11 that established the DNI.

The Patriot Act removed major legal barriers that prevented the law enforcement, intelligence, and national defense communities from talking and coordinating their work to protect the American people and our national security.

Since 2001, the Patriot Act has provided the means to detect and disrupt terrorist threats against the U.S. Prior to enactment of the law, major legal barriers prevented intelligence, national defense, and law enforcement agencies from working together and sharing information.

Proficiency in a craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies the prime source of creative imagination. Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist!