Benjamin Solomon Carson Sr. is an American politician, author and former neurosurgeon serving as the 17th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development since 2017, under the Trump Administration. Profoundly inspirational Ben Carson quotes will challenge the way you think, and help guide you through any life experience.
Famous Ben Carson Quotes
There is no fulfillment in things whatsoever. And I think one of the reasons that depression reigns supreme amongst the rich and famous is some of them thought that maybe those things would bring them happiness. But what, in fact, does is having a cause, having a passion. And that’s really what gives life’s true meaning. – Ben Carson
The Roman Empire was very, very much like us. They lost their moral core, their sense of values in terms of who they were. And after all of those things converged together, they just went right down the tubes very quickly. – Ben Carson
Quite frankly, having an uninformed populace works extremely well, particularly when you have a media that doesn’t understand its responsibility and feels more like it’s an arm of a political party. They can really take advantage of an uninformed populace. – Ben Carson
White liberals are the most racist people there are, because they put blacks in a box and insist that they think one way – and if they don’t, they attack them as illegitimate, all the while denying that their policies destroy blacks. – Ben Carson
Everybody has barriers and obstacles. If you look at them as containing fences that don’t allow you to advance, then you’re going to be a failure. If you look at them as hurdles that strengthen you each time you go over one, then you’re going to be a success. – Ben Carson
Marriage is a very sacred institution and should not be degraded by allowing every other type of relationship to be made equivalent to it. – Ben Carson
Knowledge is the key that unlocks all the doors. You can be green skinned with yellow polka dots and come from Mars, but if you have knowledge that people need, instead of beating you, they’ll beat a path to your door. – Ben Carson
We have much better policies than the Democrats do. – Ben Carson
I am convinced that knowledge is power – to overcome the past, to change our own situations, to fight new obstacles, to make better decisions. – Ben Carson
You can’t allow the forces of political correction to shut you up. I mean, why are people afraid to say, ‘Merry Christmas?’ Give me a break. If people don’t like it, yeah, they can go do something else. – Ben Carson
It’s very important for people to know themselves and understand what their value system is, because if you don’t know what your value system is, then you don’t know what risks are worth taking and which ones are worth avoiding. – Ben Carson
Lets teach those people that when they go to work, they get skills, they meet people, they get opportunities, they get to climb the ladder, they get much better off than the person whos just sitting at home receiving those things. – Ben Carson
You have the ability to choose which way you want to go. You have to believe great things are going to happen in your life. Do everything you can – prepare, pray and achieve – to make it happen. – Ben Carson
Right now, the United States of America is the patient. And the patient is in critical condition and will not be cured by political correctness and will not be cured by timidity. – Ben Carson
There is no such thing as an average human being. If you have a normal brain, you are superior. – Ben Carson
We have the world’s best military, even though he (President Barack Obama) has done everything he can to diminish it. – Ben Carson
Occasionally I talk with people who see doctors as people who do nothing but give of themselves and never receive from anyone else – especially not from their patients. That is totally false. The longer I remain in my profession, the more I realize how much I receive from those who come to me for help. – Ben Carson
Our schools too often want to shut people up so they can’t talk about real solutions. People who think differently tend to clam up because they think something is wrong with their ideas. – Ben Carson
There comes a time when people with values simply have to stand up. Think about Nazi, Germany. Most of those people did not believe in what Hitler was doing. – Ben Carson
Why should we be letting people smoke their cigars in their comfortable chairs in Raqqa? – Ben Carson
When I treat other people with kindness and love, it is part of my way of paying my debt to God and the world for the privilege of living on this planet. – Ben Carson
Here’s a nation, one of the founding pillars was freedom of speech and freedom of expression. And yet, we have imposed upon people restrictions on what they can say, on what they can think. And the media is the largest proponent of this, crucifying people who say things really quite innocently. – Ben Carson
Through the use of books I had the whole world at my feet: could travel anywhere, meet anyone, and do anything. – Ben Carson
What if someone hit us with an EMP, cyber-attack, and dirty bomb all at once? That would be pretty bad. – Ben Carson
God has opened many doors of opportunity throughout my lifetime, but I believe the greatest of those doors was allowing me to be born in the United States of America. – Ben Carson
If we acknowledge our need for God, he will help us. – Ben Carson
There’s no question that as science, knowledge and technology advance, that we will attempt to do more significant things. And there’s no question that we will always have to temper those things with ethics. – Ben Carson
Every person is endowed with God-given abilities, and we must cultivate every ounce of talent we have in order to maintain our pinnacle position in the world. – Ben Carson
There is no job more important than parenting. This I believe. – Ben Carson
If for you the most important thing is to make a lot of money, then you don’t want to take a certain type of risk. If, on another hand, the most important thing to you is to make people around you have a more fulfilled life, then there is a different set of things that are important to you. Unless you really know that about yourself, you will never be able to appropriately assess risk. – Ben Carson
Education does not necessarily make one wise? – Ben Carson
By thinking big, we can transform our world. – Ben Carson
I’m a part of the GOP and let me tell you what my stance is. My stance is that, we the people have the responsibility to take care of the indigent in our society. It’s not the government’s job. You can read the Constitution all you want; it never says that it is the government’s job and I think where we’ve gotten confused. – Ben Carson
The person who has the most to do what happens to you in life is you. Not somebody else and not the environment. – Ben Carson
I’ve had experiences in my life that leave no doubt in my mind about the fact that God exists. I’m quite willing to debate people who don’t think so because I want them to explain to me how did our solar system get so organized and how is the universe so complex and yet well-organized that we can predict 70 years hence when a comet is coming? – Ben Carson
But, you know, we have these entrenched entities – and I’m talking about both Republicans and Democrats – who believe that when you’re elected to office, you become some kind of member of the aristocracy, and that anyone who challenges you is attacking you and is unpatriotic. This is foolishness. – Ben Carson
We need to understand that we are not each others’ enemies in this country. And it is only the political class that derives its power by creating friction. It is only the media that derives its importance by creating friction… that uses every little thing to create this chasm between people. This is not who we are. – Ben Carson
We need to be willing to stand up and speak up for what we believe. – Ben Carson
No matter how good you are at planning, the pressure never goes away. So I don’t fight it. I feed off it. I turn pressure into motivation to do my best. – Ben Carson
Beware the abuse of Power. Both by those we disagree with, as well as those we may agree with – Ben Carson
If we can take young people who excel at the highest levels, put them on the same kind of pedestal as the all-state basketball player and the all-state football player, and begin to get the same kind of recognition, it will have a profound effect, and we are finding that it does. – Ben Carson
I wouldn’t go to war over Ukraine. – Ben Carson
I have this feeling that as time goes on, we’re not getting any more civilized, and we should be. We’re still running around like the days of Genghis Khan. There are so many important, better things to do and we need to encourage people to reach into the brighter side of humanity and not encourage people to continue to glorify the darker side. – Ben Carson
Kids have what I call a built-in hypocrisy antenna that comes up and blocks out what you’re saying when you’re being a hypocrite. – Ben Carson
I don’t think really conservative or liberal; I think what makes sense. – Ben Carson
When I was 14, I tried to stab someone. – Ben Carson
Uninformed people can be easily manipulated. – Ben Carson
A good surgeon doesn’t just concentrate on technical ability, but also on the appropriateness of what you’re doing. – Ben Carson
Do your best and let God do the rest. – Ben Carson
Marriage is between a man and a woman. No group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesn’t matter what they are – they don’t get to change the definition. – Ben Carson
I think one of the keys to leadership is recognizing that everybody has gifts and talents. A good leader will learn how to harness those gifts toward the same goal. – Ben Carson
It does not matter where we come from or what we look like. If we recognize our abilities, are willing to learn and to use what we know in helping others, we will always have a place in the world. – Ben Carson
We don’t know the end from the beginning the way that God does. So when a child dies, sure that is incredibly difficult, and when you are the parent, there is almost nothing anybody can say to you that makes any sense. – Ben Carson
There is a tendency of people to try to make you believe only a few people are smart. As a brain surgeon, I know better than that. – Ben Carson
Don’t let anyone turn you into a slave. You’re a slave if you let the media tell you that sports and entertainment are more important than developing your brain. – Ben Carson
Illogical thinkers throw names and slurs around because they have no arguments with which to rebut their opponents. Rational people have to keep hammering their points home. – Ben Carson
In the old days of America when communities were separated by hundreds of miles, why were they able to thrive? Because if it was harvest time and the farmer was up in the tree picking apples and fell down and broke his leg, everybody pitched in and harvested his crops for him. If somebody got killed by a bear, everybody took care of their family. – Ben Carson
The most important thing for me is having a relationship with God. To know that the owner, the creator of the universe loves you, sent His Son to die for your sins; that’s very empowering. Knowing Him and knowing that He loves me gives me encouragement and confidence to move forward. – Ben Carson
Through hard work, perseverance and a faith in God, you can live your dreams. – Ben Carson
When I look at the human brain, I’m still in awe of it. Every single time you lift off the bone and open the durra and there it is – the human brain, the thing that gives a person a personality, that distinguishes each one of us, that there could be more than 6 billion of us here on this planet with brains that look the same, but each one being distinctly different because of what is going on in that thing. I’ll never get over my awe of that. – Ben Carson
Let’s say somebody were [in the White House] and they wanted to destroy this nation. I would create division among the people, encourage a culture of ridicule for basic morality and the principles that made and sustained the country, undermine the financial stability of the nation, and weaken and destroy the military. It appears coincidentally that those are the very things that are happening right now. – Ben Carson
Happiness doesn’t result from what we get, but from what we give. – Ben Carson
Everyone in the world worth being nice to. Because God never creates inferior human beings, each person deserves respect and dignity. – Ben Carson
I don’t worry about things that aren’t important. – Ben Carson
Intelligent people tend to talk about the facts. They don’t sit around and call each other names. That’s what you can find on a third-grade playground. – Ben Carson
I always think it is kind of funny when it comes to wisdom, and I say God has a sense of humor, because my middle name is Solomon, and I love the Book of Proverbs which is written by Solomon, and I have read from the Book of Proverbs to start and end every day since I was 14. – Ben Carson
We have a war on women, race wars. Income wars, age wars, religious wars, anything you can imagine. A house divided against itself cannot stand it. And it’s going to be up to us, to people, to begin the focus on the positive things, on the things that we have in common and stop listening to those who are stoking the fires of division. – Ben Carson
What do lawyers learn in law school? They learn to win… What we’ve got to start thinking about is how do we solve problems. – Ben Carson
Obamacare is really I think the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery. – Ben Carson
Always give your best and try to figure out how to do an even better job. – Ben Carson
Successful people don’t have fewer problems. They have determined that nothing will stop them from going forward. – Ben Carson
What we have to stop and think about is that we have weakened ourselves militarily to such an extent that it affects all of our military policies. – Ben Carson
I don’t want my kids to grow up with no father like I did. I came to the conclusion a while ago that you can work until midnight and not be finished, or you can work until 6 or 7 and not be finished. I decided I’d rather work until 6 or 7. – Ben Carson
Corporations are not in business to be social-welfare organizations; they are there to make money. – Ben Carson
I always pray for God’s guidance in my life and he always provides it. He opens the right doors he shuts the right doors. And I have tremendous faith in him. He just guided my career in an amazing way. – Ben Carson
Those of us who believe in God and derive our sense of right and wrong and ethics from God’s Word really have no difficulty whatsoever defining where our ethics come from. People who believe in survival of the fittest might have more difficulty deriving where their ethics come from. A lot of evolutionists are very ethical people. – Ben Carson
I have no problem whatsoever with allowing gay people to live as they please, as long as they don’t try to impose their lifestyle on everyone else. – Ben Carson
I believe that things are always going to work out, even if in the beginning it doesn’t look like they are working out. I know in the long run they are going to work out, and it’s going to be fine. – Ben Carson
The government is supposed to conform to our will. By taking the most important thing you have, your health and your health care, and turning that over to the government, you fundamentally shift the power, a huge chunk of it, from the people to the government. This is not the direction that we want the government to go in this nation. – Ben Carson
There is so much potential out there in young people and they aren’t getting the right information or being encouraged in the right ways. This is our duty as a society. – Ben Carson
I’m not a politician. I don’t want to be a politician, because politicians do what is politically expedient. I want to do what’s right. – Ben Carson
Education is a fundamental principle of what made America a success. We can’t afford to throw any young people away. – Ben Carson
So after a while, if people won’t accept your excuses, you stop looking for them. – Ben Carson
I would like people to recognize in looking at my story that the person who has the most to do with what happens to you is you. It’s not the environment, it’s not the other people who were there trying to help you or trying to stop you. It’s what you decide to do and how much effort you put behind it. – Ben Carson
There are a group of people who would like to silence everybody and have everybody go along to get along, but that’s not going to be very helpful for us in the long run, in terms of solving our problems. And somebody has to be courageous enough to actually stand up to, you know, the bullies. – Ben Carson
I was asked by an NPR reporter once why don’t I talk about race that often. I said, ‘It’s because I’m a neurosurgeon.’ And she thought that was a strange response… I said, ‘You see, when I take someone to the operating room, I’m actually operating on the thing that makes them who they are. The skin doesn’t make them who they are.’ – Ben Carson
We should be concerned not only about the health of individual patients, but also the health of our entire society. – Ben Carson
And I’ve always said, ‘If two people think the same thing about everything, one of them isn’t necessary.’ We need to be able to understand that if we’re going to make real progress. – Ben Carson
In general, I was a good kid. It usually took a lot to make me mad. But once I reached the boiling point, I lost all rational control. Totally without thinking, when my anger was aroused, I grabbed the nearest brick, rock, or stick to bash someone. It was as if I had no conscious will in the matter. – Ben Carson
There is no one that we can afford to throw away. – Ben Carson
In my own personal life, God plays a great role in the risk, because I pray before I go into the operating room for every case, and I ask him to give me wisdom, to help me to know what to do – and not only for operating, but for everything. – Ben Carson
If God thinks proportionality is fair who are we to say that it is unfair? – Ben Carson
I started reading about people of great accomplishment… and it dawned on me suddenly that the person who has the most to do with what happens in your life is you. – Ben Carson
Resist this war on God, freedom of religion and freedom of speech. – Ben Carson
I serve God, and my purpose is to please Him, and if God be for you, who can be against you? – Ben Carson
Before this country came on the scene, for thousands of years people did things the same way. Within 200 years of the advent of this nation, men were walking on the moon, and I want us to recognize this is the kind of people that we are. We’re creative with a lot of ingenuity and a lot of energy. – Ben Carson
I was perhaps the worst student you have ever seen. You know, I thought I was stupid, all my classmates thought I was stupid, so there was general agreement. – Ben Carson
We are more than just flesh and bones. There’s a certain spiritual nature and something of the mind that we can’t measure. We can’t find it. With all our sophisticated equipment, we cannot monitor or define it, and yet it’s there. – Ben Carson
A lot of people simply don’t realize their potential because they’re just so risk adverse. They just don’t want to take the risk. – Ben Carson
Evolution and creationism both require faith. It’s just a matter of where you choose to place that faith. – Ben Carson
I pray before I go into the operating room for every case, and I ask him to give me wisdom, to help me to know what to do – and not only for operating, but for everything. – Ben Carson
We have much more in common with other people than we have apart. – Ben Carson
People all over the nation are starved for honesty and common sense. – Ben Carson
My favorite subject was recess. Fortunately for me, I had a mother who believed I was smart. – Ben Carson
I just happen to believe that people are not stupid. And the way I will come at it is to educate people, help people to actually understand that it is that progressive movement that is causing them the problems. – Ben Carson
Health care is one-sixth of our economy. If the government can control that, they can control just about everything. We need to understand what is going on, because there are much more economic models that can be used to give us good health care than what we have now. – Ben Carson
I actually don’t think that I’m that much smarter than anybody else. It’s just that I frequently just seem to know what to do, and I think that’s wisdom. – Ben Carson
Nobody is starving on the streets. We’ve always taken care of them. We take care of our own; we always have. It is not the government’s responsibility. – Ben Carson
If you go and talk to most people, they mean well but they don’t have much of a breadth on education, of knowledge of understanding what the real issues are and therefore they listen to pundits on television who tell them what they are supposed to think and they keep repeating that until pretty soon they say, ‘Oh, well that must be true.’ – Ben Carson
We need to find ways to elevate the expectations, particularly of those individuals who may start off on a lower socioeconomic rung, who might be seen as disadvantaged. But, you know, the reason I say be seen as disadvantaged, it’s because life is so short, and there’s so much that can change. – Ben Carson
Over the years my mother’s steadfast faith in God has inspired me, particularly when I had to perform extremely difficult surgical procedures or when I found myself faced with my own medical scare. – Ben Carson
You know, many people have said that I’m on the edge and I’m maverick for some of the big operations that I’ve done. I’m not at all. I pray; I ask God to give me wisdom, ‘Should I do it?’, guidance in terms of how to do it, who to consult with. All those kind of things are incredibly important. – Ben Carson
I’m very hopeful that I’m not the only one who’s willing to pick up the baton of freedom, because freedom is not free, and we must fight for it every day. Every one of us must fight for it, because we’re fighting for our children and the next generation. – Ben Carson
You can understand why I’m a believer. I have seen miracles. – Ben Carson
You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to be a valuable person. You become valuable because of the knowledge that you have. And that doesn’t mean you won’t fail sometimes. The important thing is to keep trying. – Ben Carson
I detest politics, to be honest with you. It’s a cesspool. And I don’t think I would fare well in that cesspool because I don’t believe in political correctness and I certainly don’t believe in dishonesty. – Ben Carson
You need an incredible amount of self-confidence to go digging around in someone’s brain. – Ben Carson
I was definitely an at-risk kid growing up. – Ben Carson
Well, I say that the most important job you can possibly have is raising a child, and it needs to be treated that way. You have to show them, rather than just talk to them. – Ben Carson
You’re going to be much less likely to point the finger at somebody and create a huge brouhaha when it wasn’t necessary if you had stopped and asked yourself, ‘Could I have done things to prevent this situation?’ – Ben Carson
You know, I’m a physician. I like to diagnose things. And, you know, I’ve diagnosed some pretty, pretty significant issues that I think a lot of people resonate with. – Ben Carson
I want the government to provide the military, so we don’t get invaded by somebody and destroyed. I want the government to provide the roads so I can get from point A to B. In terms of taking care of my day to day needs, I want to do that myself. I want my community to do that. – Ben Carson
Well, when did this become a monarchy? You know, we are the people. The president works for us and, you know, we need to remember that. – Ben Carson
What we need to do in this PC world is forget about unanimity of speech and unanimity of thought and we need to concentrate on being respectful of those people with whom we disagree. – Ben Carson
The key is to cut out the middleman and empower both doctor and patient with information about what things cost. – Ben Carson
This is a country for, of, and by the people not for, of, and by the government. If we turn it over to them, we cannot complain about what they’re doing because this is a natural course of men and we have to hold their feet to the fire. – Ben Carson
I could easily have decided that life was cruel, that being black meant everything was stacked against me. – Ben Carson
I would never turn my back on my fellow citizens. – Ben Carson
I would prefer to just continue to speak about truth and to speak about what makes sense. – Ben Carson
My thoughts are that marriage is between a man and a woman. – Ben Carson
There is no such thing as a politically correct war. – Ben Carson
There’s absolutely no reason at all that physicians, scientists, shouldn’t be involved in things that affect all of us. – Ben Carson
We’re not planning for the future. If we continue to spend ourselves into oblivion, we are going to destroy this nation. – Ben Carson
Our strength as a nation comes in our unity. We are the United States of America, not the divided states. And those who want to divide us are trying to divide us, and we shouldn’t let them do it. – Ben Carson
One of the reasons surgeons have so much trouble separating Siamese twins is that nobody gets to do many of them. On the table, the anatomy is so different from normal, that you’re constantly trying to figure out, ‘Can I cut this? Does this wire lead to what?’ It’s like trying to defuse a bomb. – Ben Carson
People spending more of their own money on routine health care would make the system more competitive and transparent and restore the confidence between the patients and the doctors without government rationing. – Ben Carson
The mind controls so much of the body. We are much more than flesh and blood; we are complex systems. Patients do better when they have faith that they’re going to do better. That’s why I always tell my patients and their families not to neglect their prayers. There’s nobody I don’t say that to. – Ben Carson
There’s a certain spiritual nature and something of the mind that we can’t measure. We can’t find it. With all our sophisticated equipment, we cannot monitor or define it, and yet it’s there. – Ben Carson
We have the purveyors of hatred who take every single incident between people of two races and try to make a race war out of it and drive wedges into people. And this does not need to be done. – Ben Carson
We’ve reached a point where people are actually afraid to talk about what they want to say, because somebody might be offended. We’ve got to get over this sensitivity and it keeps people from saying what they really believe. – Ben Carson
Every time I am looking into the depths of somebody’s brain, I’m thinking, ‘This is what makes a person who they are. That structure contains memories. Everything that they’ve ever experienced is right in there.’ – Ben Carson
