Ron Clark Quotes

Learning from our mistakes and holding on to our memories help us become deeper individuals with a better sense of who we are and how we choose to live our lives.

I want the kids to enjoy reading not only today but for the rest of their lives.

I want the kids to enjoy reading not only today but for the rest of their lives. I try to do all I can to show them the power of their imaginzations and to teach them that images on a movie screen pale by comparison with the pictures we can paint with our minds.

Always make sure there are seven things in your life at all times: laughter, family, adventure, good food, challenge, change, and the quest for knowledge.

Rule #1.When responding to any adult, you must answer by saying “Yes ma’am” or “No sir.” Just nodding your head or saying any other form of yes or no is not acceptable.1-When responding to any adult, you must answer by saying “Yes ma’am” or “No sir.” Just nodding your head or saying any other form of yes or no is not acceptable.

Ron Ashton, the man who tore my life apart, sending my mother into a downward spiral she never recovered from and leaving me to live alone in a car for my final year of high school and beyond.

2-Make eye contact. When someone is speaking, keep your eyes on him or her at all times. If someone makes a comment, turn and face that person. 3-During discussions, respect other students’ comments, opinions, and ideas. When possible, make statements like, “I agree with John, and I also feel that…” or “I disagree with Sarah. She made a good point I feel that…” or “I think Victor made an excellent observation, and it made me realize…” 4-If you win or do well at something, do not brag. If you lose, do not show anger. Instead, say something like, “I really enjoyed the competition, and I look forward to playing you again,” or “good game,” or don’t say anything at all. To show anger or sarcasm, such as “I wasn’t playing hard anyway” or “You really aren’t that good,” shows weakness. 5-“When you cough or sneeze or burp, it is appropriate to turn your head away from others and cover your mouth with the full part of your hand. Using a fist is not acceptable. Afterward, you should say, “Excuse me.” 6- “Do not smack your lips, tsk, roll your eyes, or show disrespect with gestures.” 7-“Always say thank you when I give you something. 8-“Surprise others by performing random acts of kindness. Go our of your way to do something surprisingly kind and generous for someone at least once a month.” 9-“You will make every effort to be as organized as possible.” 10-"Quickly learn the name of other teachers in the school and greet them by saying things like, "Good morning Mrs. Graham," or "Good afternoon Ms. Ortiz. 11-"When we go on field trips, we will meet different people. When I introduce you to people, make sure that you remember their names. Then, when we are leaving, make sure to shake their hands and thank them, mentioning their names as you do so." 12-“If you approach a door and someone is following you, hold the door. If the door opens by pulling, pull it open, stand to the side, and allow the other person 13-to pass through it first, then you can walk through. If the door opens by pushing, hold the door open after you push through." "Be positive and enjoy life. Some things just aren't worth getting upset over. Keep everything in perspective and focus on the good in your life.

I felt a lightness bloom inside of me. Life was long, and a lot of things could happen. Circumstances might bring me home again, back into Ron’s circle. And if they did, Cory had taught me how to be ready for him.

My entry into this job required me to get my real estate license, and there was no getting around the social security number and fingerprinting. But that’s okay, because this time I want my name to be known. For Ron Ashton—developer, local politician, and candidate for state senator—to know it was me who took everything from him. Not just his money, but the reputation he’s spent years cultivating.

How wonderful it would be to live an entire life with such freedom to try new things, experience the unknown, and face our fears. It is hard for many adults to step out there and take those chances, but kids are more willing to release their inhibitions and truly live life. If we can teach them to embrace that feeling when they are young, hopefully it will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

But why are those moments so essential? It's because laughter boosts productivity. It makes a task more manageable. It releases endorphins, forges emotional connections, and can encourage more honest communication. When your staff has fun at work, they work together more collaboratively. Every single day at work becomes a team-building activity.

People who walk slow ain't got nowhere to go.

What sort of things might constitute an agenda for further professional improvement? Beyond the sharing of the good, bad and the ugly in conversations in staff meetings and at professional development sessions, new vistas are opened up when we read about considered practice. Books such as Ron Berger’s Ethic of Excellence, Graham Nuthall’s The Hidden Lives of Learners, Shaun Allison and Andy Tharby’s Making Every Lesson Count, David Didau’s The Secret of Literacy, Gordon Stobart’s The Expert Learner, Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School, Shirley Clarke’s Outstanding Formative Assessment and Dylan Wiliam’s Embedded Formative Assessment. For starters. Then there are the educational blogs which provide quick insights into new thinking.

But few companies followed the lead of Clark, Payne and invested in Standard Oil instead of taking payment.

In 2004, Rosie put a developer named Ron Ashton on the title to the house. Eight months later, she’d signed a quitclaim deed, giving him sole ownership. She’d died a year later.

And now it was happening again. Another man taking what he wanted while the rest of us scrambled to accommodate him. I remembered what Ron had said to my mother when she’d confronted him. When she realized she had no legal recourse to fix it. There are winners and losers in life, Rosie. You’re the loser here. Take the loss and be smarter next time.

Once again, I was being chased from my home. Five years ago, it was Ron Ashton who came in with promises that ended up being lies. This is just how financing works.

Recoiling at what he saw as the Clark brothers’ pomposity, he eventually grew as censorious of them as he had been of George Gardner.

The Clarks were the first of many business partners to underrate the audacity of the quietly calculating Rockefeller, who bided his time as he figured out how to get rid of them.

He tried almost from the beginning of our partnership to dominate and override me,” he said of Clark.

Undeterred by these extreme gyrations, both Rockefeller and Andrews wanted to borrow heavily and expand, while Clark favored a more circumspect approach.

James Clark later told Ida Tarbell that he sold out only from fear of the SIC contract.

Because Rockefeller had such respect for ledgers, Clark, nearly ten years older, looked down on him as a mere clerk, a rigid, blinkered man without vision. “He did not think I could do anything but keep accounts and look after the finances,” said Rockefeller.29 “You see, it took him a long time to feel that I was no longer a boy.”30 He thought Clark envious of his success in soliciting business on the road, perhaps because this undercut Clark’s image of him as an expendable clerk. At first, Rockefeller swallowed his anger and stoically endured this injustice. “He tried almost from the beginning of our partnership to dominate and override me,” he said of Clark.

Maybe Ron Clarke wasn’t being poetic in his description of Zatopek—maybe his expert eye was clinically precise: His love of life shone through every movement. Yes! Love of life! Exactly! That’s what got Vigil’s heart thumping when he saw Juan and Martimano scramble happy-go-luckily up that dirt hill. He’d found his Natural Born Runner.

I’m glad that the Simpson trial continues to provoke debate about these critical issues, but we should also not forget that two innocent people were brutally murdered. So I want to end this foreword by honoring Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. We owe them a great debt.

By documenting the years of torture she suffered at Simpson’s hands, Nicole helped pave the way for new laws and organizations that aid the victims of spousal abuse. And because Ron Goldman surprised Simpson that night and fought so valiantly, we wound up with much of the evidence that proves Simpson’s guilt. This edition is dedicated to you, Nicole and Ron. —Marcia Clark, February 2016

Ron Goldman, “decedent 94-05135,” had been found to the north. He’d fallen or been pushed backward and was slumped against the stump of a palm tree. He was wearing blue jeans and a light cotton sweater. Lying near his right foot was a white envelope containing a pair of eyeglasses. Goldman had injuries to the neck, back, head, hands, thighs. He’d apparently put up a fierce struggle.

We’d been told by Nicole’s friend Ron Hardy that the intercom controlling the lock on the front gate was broken. If Nicole had wanted to let a visitor in, she’d had to go down and open the gate manually. If this was true, it was easy to conceive how Nicole and Ron were both at the front gate when Simpson moved in for the kill. He could have attacked Nicole from behind, hitting her on the head, making a quick cut to her neck, and slamming her into the staircase wall. She would have been knocked unconscious long enough for him to deal with Ron before going back to dispatch her with the coup de grâce.

Frankly, I favored a slightly different scenario: Nicole Simpson hears something outside—the sounds made by her ex-husband lurking in the shrubs around her condo. Nicole steps outside to investigate. She ventures down to the front gate, looks down the walkway and into the shrubbery to the north. Nothing. And then, when she turns to mount the steps, to reenter the house where her children are sleeping, she walks right into him, smack into the man who she had vowed would no longer be the center of her life. He is dressed for silent combat—dark sweats, knit cap, gloves. He has come to take her life. Somewhere during this time, Ron Goldman, on his innocuous errand, appears. Perhaps Ron has come up the walk while Simpson is in the midst of his stiletto mêlée. Why doesn’t he flee? Perhaps he has come too close and can’t escape. Or perhaps—and this seemed a stronger likelihood—Ron feels compelled to come to Nicole’s aid. He is about to engage in an act of selflessness that will lead to his death. In either case, my strong feeling is that Simpson did not have to confront both of his victims simultaneously. He murders first one, then the other. The blood pools on the sidewalk. The dog howls.

Good God,” I whispered to myself. For the first time, I saw the wreckage of Ron Goldman’s body. The gashes to the head, the gaping slices cut into his neck from ear to ear. Stab wounds to the left thigh and abdomen had soaked his shirt and pants in blood. In death, his eyes remained open. The killer had waged a merciless assault against an unarmed, unsuspecting victim, a victim who was rapidly trapped in a cagelike corner of metal fencing and slaughtered. Whether the motive was sexual jealousy or the need to eliminate a witness, this killer had made a ruthless determination: Ron Goldman would die.

It was even possible that his blood was on the Rockingham glove. Preliminary tests indicated that this was the case. We had already found markers on that glove from Ron’s and Nicole’s blood. If we could establish that the glove bore a mixture of blood from both victims and from the defendant, that would be very powerful evidence. For that, however, we would need to send the samples away to Cellmark for more sophisticated testing.

For several weeks now, the team had been pulling together a montage, a sort of visual history of this crime. Over the images, we’d decided that we would play the 911 tapes. Although I’d seen bits and pieces of this opus as it was coming together, I didn’t feel the full power of it until this morning, when Jonathan hit the “play” button. You heard “Emergency 911,” then the static confusion on the caller’s end. The thumps of blows landing on flesh. Then, the more frantic pleas of the 1993 call. “He’s O. J. Simpson. I think you know his record. He’s fucking going nuts.” All the while, on the large screen, we showed the photo of Nicole taken after the beating of 1989. She was lifting her hair to reveal the full extent of the damage to her face. Her eyes were downcast, as if in shame. Then, the photo of her smeared with mud. Cut to the Bundy trail, the knit cap, a close-up of Ron’s shirt. Behind those images, O. J. Simpson’s voice rose to a peak of rage. Suddenly, the audio stopped, and all that was left was a picture of Nicole’s body curled in a pool of blood. We held on that image for thirty seconds in complete silence. There was sobbing throughout the courtroom. But all I could think was, It’s over.

By the end, we had over 150 entries pointing to guilt. It was too much for a summation, so we boiled it down to eight key pieces of evidence—each of which had an irrefutable connection to O. J. Simpson: The knit cap. Ron Goldman’s shirt. The shoe prints up the Bundy walk. The droplets of blood leading from Bundy. The blood in the Bronco. The Rockingham blood trail. The Rockingham glove. The socks found at the foot of Simpson’s bed. We’d originally included the Bundy glove as well, but it had less significant blood, hair, and fibers. Ultimately, we left it out. It didn’t add to proof of guilt.

Just as there had been blood where blood shouldn’t be, there was hair where hair shouldn’t be. •Simpson’s hair on the knit cap, Ron’s shirt, the Rockingham glove.

•Nicole’s hair—“forcibly removed hairs”—on the Rockingham glove. •Ron’s hair on the Rockingham glove.

The elements of that argument were threefold: opportunity; identity; motive. Opportunity presented no problem. Here was O. J. Simpson, a man whose face was recognized everywhere he went, who had no one to document his whereabouts for what we now computed as seventy-seven minutes, the exact period during which Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman were murdered. Identity was also a lock. We had identified O. J. Simpson six ways from Sunday as the man whose blood was at the murder scene—and in the Bronco and on the bloody Rockingham glove, where it was mixed with the blood of his victims.