Sports exact too harsh a toll on our beautiful women. Like engendered species, they should be protected, and instead, we exploit them and demand they fly too close to the sun for our amusement. We send them into the arena for an exhausting three-setter, an 18-hole playoff, a 200th lap. The burnout factor is insurmountable.

What we face may look insurmountable. But I learned something from all those years of training and competing. I learned something from all those sets and reps when I didn't think I could lift another ounce of weight. What I learned is that we are always stronger than we know.

I'm not in the best shape, but I want to prove to myself I can do something that seems insurmountable and inspire others by showing them no matter where they are in their fitness goals, they can do it, too.

There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.

No one is ever guaranteed a smooth life, so to expect as much is foolish. To be daunted by the challenges thrown at me was natural, but I knew what lay ahead was not insurmountable.

I hope you don't get stuck in the atrocities of your past. For others, it may just be a story but for people like us, it's the epitome of scars and a mountain of insurmountable obstacles.

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.

Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men. The strength of the emotion may not be so overpowering, the barriers against possession not so insurmountable, the urge to accomplish the desire less keen. With some, inhibitions and urges may be neutralized by other tendencies. But with every being the primal emotions are there. All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me 'Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid' - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of God, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don't think that being convinced that there is no God is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don't think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.

What we face may look insurmountable. But I learned something from all those years of training and competing. I learned something from all those sets and reps when I didn't think I could lift another ounce of weight. What I learned is that we are always stronger than we know.

Young people can get very discouraged and get hooked on drugs or on alcohol because of problems they perceive as insurmountable. It is important that they realize a mistake need not ruin their future but they must also know that not everything in life is a bed of roses.

I'm not in the best shape but I want to prove to myself I can do something that seems insurmountable and inspire others by showing them no matter where they are in their fitness goals they can do it too.

There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.