- Competing for your country is wonderful. I've done it, and it's a wonderful experience, but at some point you have to grow up and go out and get a job and support yourself.
- I'm the exact opposite, I think, of lots and lots of people in sports, that they retire from a sport and then they go into something related to that, go into sports casting or something. I retired from competition and went and got a PhD, and specialized in Applied Statistics, and started a group of technology companies. It's not like if MMA had been there, I would've gone into that as a career. Judo is something I like to do. It was fun. I had a great time. And then I went and did something else.
- [on the pressure her youngest daughter Julia DeMars faces about her big sister Ronda Rousey] One of Julia's friends was over one time and she said, "It must be really great to have a famous big sister. I wish I had a famous big sister." And Julia said to her very seriously, "Why don't you wish you were famous yourself?" I think Julia has different interests. She likes to hang out with Ronda because she's her big sister and she's cool, but she [Julia] plays soccer, she likes that, and she's a really good student. Julia, I think, has a very good sense of her own self.
- I really think one of the biggest things, in all seriousness, is learning to give up what you want now for what you want most... that lots of people would like to be a world champion, they'd like to get into NYU, they'd like a lot of things, but they're not willing to give up sitting on the couch watching Vampire Diaries for it.
- [on her greatest role model] She [her grandmother] is an example of how one person can have a continuing affect for good in life, and I will never be as good of a person as she was. She was the kind of person that gave the Bible and Catholics a good name, and there are some people who are the opposite, you know? She used to tell me all the time that God gives you talents in life and you have nothing that God wants so the only way that you can show your gratitude for that is do the best you can with everything that you are given.
- [on how fame affects her daughter, Ronda Rousey] There are times when I am not so comfortable with some of the people around all the time saying, "Oh, you're so great! You're so great! You're so great!" And I told her, "Some of those people are just creepy. They're just polite stalkers. You should get rid of them." But she just rolls her eyes like most people do when their mothers talk to them.
- No one has the right to beat you... ever, ever, ever.
- [on French President of the Judo Federation, Jean-Luc Rougé's criticism of MMA] It is true that MMA is a business, and they make money in it, and the athletes make money. But it's equally true that the Olympics is a business and makes billions of dollars, and in that case, very little of it goes to the athletes. So I would just say that both Judo and MMA are a business. But in Mixed Martial Arts, the athletes get a greater share of the profits than they do in Judo.
- I think in Combat Sports you have to have that refusal to lose. You're basically coming out there with the determination to impose your will upon another person until they submit. And I have beaten lots of people who had better technique than me, better coaches than me, better everything than me, but by God, I was not going to lose.
- No one's easy until after you beat them.
- I grew up in a really tough neighborhood and got in lots and lots and lots of fights, and left home very early, and was living on my own in an even worse neighborhood. I got into fistfights on a daily basis. So a Judo match... that was nothing. I mean, if you got knocked down, nobody got to kick you. The referee made them stop and you got up.
- Be your own person. Don't let all these people tell you what you can and can't do.
- [how she started Judo] I was a short, fat, little kid that wore really thick glasses and spent all my time sitting in my room, eating and reading books. And my brothers called me Stumpy because I was built like a little tree stump. And my mother said, "You cannot do this your whole life." And she put me in the car, and she drove to the YMCA, and she opened the door, and pushed me out and said, "Join something."
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