Never make friends with people who are above or below you in status. Such friendships will never give you any happiness.

The basis for all human relationships and where we derive our greatest strength and power, trust is single-handedly the most powerful source of positive energy and, once in place, unlocks a freedom and peace to explore.

True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

The power of forgiveness transcends personal relationships.

I have very high standards for every part of life - my work, my relationships, food, love. I can't just pretend.

Food for us comes from our relatives, whether they have wings or fins or roots. That is how we consider food. Food has a culture. It has a history. It has a story. It has relationships.

It's no secret that I live in Woking and I go to the MTC every day. So I've spent every available day working - either with my engineers, with the team management, or with the trainers at MTC; building those relationships, getting to grips with the car, the style of driving, the cockpit and control systems, and improving my fitness.

My assumption was that people are already motivated to go to a fitness class. That's who I am. I was already ready to go out there and get to class. All I needed was a search tool. But it turns out people need more than that, and that's why gym memberships exist.

At the start of his second term, one wonders less about Obama's fitness than his willingness: Why doesn't he do more to build and maintain the relationships required to govern in era of polarization?

I have run two Olympic 'A' standard times over the past 12 months and with the time I ran at the African Championships last week I know my speed and fitness are constantly improving so that I will peak in time for the Olympics.

Doing nothing would stress me out. So I am still pretty much active practicing judo with my friends, who are former judo athletes, to maintain our fitness as well as the friendships among us. In my spare time, I usually go jogging around the Gelora Bung Karno stadium or head to the gym.

I believe there's tremendous value in having a Supreme Court with a diverse set of experiences - especially when we're dealing with issues that range from our intimate relationships to how we finance campaigns.

Particularly with internships, you have to work for a year with no money. How on Earth are you going to finance that?

When you're building a company, you need to continually strengthen every component - finance, strategic partnerships, executive team, and relationships with every last constituency.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

On the other hand, when I give it closer thought, I realize I'm not enough of a dictator to conduct an orchestra because it requires a pretty awful person. When you read these biographies of famous conductors, they are all awful people who fail in their private relationships.

I thought the more famous I became, the more friendships I would have, but the opposite was true.

I know this might sound absurd, but since I've been famous, I believe I've only been on two dates that would be considered a 'first date.' It's not the way I've ever really engaged in terms of romantic relationships.

When it comes to women, there has been a tendency to define women in sports in the context of their relationships - they watch games because their husbands watch. They're interested because their kids play a sport. They buy tickets to a sporting event because it's a way to spend time with family.

I'm always interested in relationships between women. I'm always interested in how women relate to each other, whether it's a family relationship or it's a friend relationship. That's such uncharted territory in cinema.

You can be in love and raise a family wonderfully by not being married, but actually, marriage does give us a strength, because it's quite hard to get out of, and so it makes us fight more to keep it together. If divorce becomes dead easy - which it sort of has - then we don't have that backup. Because, for everybody, relationships are hard.

When my son was growing up, I was always guilty, no matter what I did. Make decisions and be happy with the decisions you've made. I tell myself, in the long run, it's the love, the quality of relationships that you have with your family, your friends and giving back to the community that matters.

When we understand the connection between how we live and how long we live, it's easier to make different choices. Instead of viewing the time we spend with friends and family as luxuries, we can see that these relationships are among the most powerful determinants of our well-being and survival.

The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can't so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care?