I was the very first athlete in East Germany allowed to go professional.

I was the very first athlete in East Germany allowed to go professional.

Money was never the motivation. It never should be in sports.

It's hard work to make a four-minute program look effortless and elegant.

Figure skating is a mixture of art and sport.

When I get up, I have a cup of coffee, surf the Internet, then do a half-hour run.

Every man prefers to look at a well-shaped woman instead of a rubber ball.

Almost nothing is presented to you on a silver platter. You have to really work for it.

I can't say, 'It doesn't matter if you win or lose.' It's not true. You go in to win.

I don't want to compete. I want to skate for the joy. I get so nervous in competition. I get always sick. I had pressures enough in my life from skating.

I hope that I can maintain my skating as long as possible.

I learned not to depend on other people. I needed support, but it's you who has to go out and deliver.

I never had a serious injury that kept me out of a big competition. Now everyone has injuries - to their feet or their knees or their backs.

I never really like to skate in an empty ice rink; I always need the attention of an audience.

I started the class late. The teacher said I would have to learn as much in half a year that the others learned in a year. I did it.

I want to see sunrises in the mountains. You never get to see such things enough in a lifetime. I want to see more.

I was an athlete. And I proved I didn't win just because I was pretty. I was good, too.

I'm the sort of person who needs a big mountain in front of me to climb.

It's not like I didn't do anything for 10 years and chose a new profession. I've been on the ice a lot. I'm not an outsider.

Skating taught me to set a goal and to block out other things and just focus on this one thing.

Sometimes I even now feel like a stranger in my country. But I knew there would be problems because I had seen the world as a skater. And now? A lot of people in eastern Germany have lost jobs, rents went up, food costs went up, unemployment went to 20 percent. Freedom is good, but it is not easy.

Sometimes, success almost haunts you. You want to be the best at everything you do and know you have to work hard.

The desire to really compete again has been there for a long time.

Too many times women try to be competitive with each other. We should help support each other, rather than try to be better than each other.

When I go out on the ice, I just think about my skating. I forget it is a competition.

When you see the audiences and the smiling faces at the shows it really makes up for the work that you put in. I have a job I really love so whatever hecticness comes up - I'll just deal with it.

When you're young, you don't think very far ahead. You just think in terms of the next day, the next week, the next competition. You don't think about injuries that could threaten your long-term health.

The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.

All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.

Let me first state that I believe that marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

I never taste the wine first in restaurants, I just ask the waiter to pour.

After the first miscarriage, I tried to take the attitude that it was my body's way of telling me that this pregnancy wasn't meant to be.

Before and during the first phase of the war his administration repeatedly maligned the UN but now, that Iraq has turned into a quagmire, it is asking the UN for help.

You look at the whole Human Rights questions, I happened to be there at just the right time when the country was awakening - this goes to the first question you asked - the whole country was awakening to a hundred years of injustice that hadn't been resolved yet.

So, first you have to be able to play with a metronome. Then you take your freedom. If you play in an orchestra, you got to watch the conductor, he is like a metronome, but it is more difficult because he can change rhythms.

My first figure was a SLAYER eagle. And the dragons and the tribals are all I have got.

We're parents first, and once you have kids, everybody knows that you have priority lists. Number one is your family and everything else just kind of finds its place.

Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

But in the first Gulf war the United Kingdom was not under any threat from Iraq, and is still less so in the second one. Then there is no justification for obstructing freedom of information, particularly as nations have a right to know what their soldiers are being used for.

I sort of understood that when I first started: that you shouldn't repeat a success. Very often you're going to, and maybe the first time you do, it works. And you love it. But then you're trapped.

Working-class Americans have waited too long, close to a decade in fact, for an increase in the minimum wage. This has been the second longest period without a pay raise since the Federal minimum wage law was first enacted in 1938.

The first thing you do when you get out to center field is put up your finger and check the wind chill factor.

Christians must be Jews. The truth of what we believe depends on the truth of Judaism, depends on the first covenant.

The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848.

Success requires first expending ten units of effort to produce one unit of results. Your momentum will then produce ten units of results with each unit of effort.

I want to be the first lady to land a quadruple jump in competition. As I grow older, I know that my skating style will develop and mature.