Quotes about Toughness

Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

A lot of people are afraid to tell the truth, to say no. That's where toughness comes into play. Toughness is not being a bully. It's having backbone.

That's not what justice is, the colonel jeered, and began pounding the table again with his big fat hand. That's what Karl Marx is. I'll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning. Garroting. That's what justice is when we've all got to be tough enough and rough enough to fight Billy Petrolle. From the hip. Get it?

Notoriously outspoken, his sentences always punctuated with profanities, General George S. Patton was the epitome of what a leader should be like - or so he thought. Patton believed a leader should look and act tough, so he cultivated his image and his personality to match his philosophy.

Saints have to be tough as well as tender because saints are like Christ, and Christ was the toughest and the tenderest man who ever lived.

Hard weather, says the old man. So let it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will wash rain like the stones.

Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love.