I've always felt that I had to go out and prove myself in every fight.

I like to have a lot of time to be able to format what I want to do, and how I'm going to do my training camp. When you're doing a camp on short notice, it makes everything else suffer.

True wealth is not measured by how much money you've got in the bank or how many toys you've got. Some of the happiest people in the world don't have a crying quarter, but they've got all the things that mean a lot to them.

When people are overlooking somebody like Phil Davis, it's a dangerous thing.

I remember the first time I fought somebody with a name and that was Tito Ortiz. I didn't start fighting until like the second round because I was like, 'Oh my God, that's Tito Ortiz. That's Tito Ortiz from TV. Look how big his head is, damn.'

I was a rowdy boy growing up.

I wanted to play football, and my football coach told me if I wanted to be a football player, I should wrestle. That's why I started to wrestle.

MMA was love at fight sight. I felt like I was born to do it.

You can have the best college wrestling in the world, but you can have terrible MMA wrestling.

Of course I expect to be booed. People always have to find the bad guy, and for some reason, the look on my face or something, people just want to boo me. That's fine.

The same people that boo you are the same people who will ask you for a picture an an autograph.

Only thing I care about, the only thing I think about is the fight in front of me.

Being tough is probably the biggest thing that NFL players are known for, having that kind of toughness.

Sometimes when you open your mouth you show what you're afraid of more than anything.

I will always find something to challenge myself. I will go up to heavyweight or down to middleweight.

Yeah, I miss that feeling of knocking somebody clean out. There's nothing like it when you go into a fight and you just take 'em up out of there with just one punch. It's just the best feeling in the world.

Keith Jardine pushes me the hardest because we're in the same weight class and we get competitive with each other, we make sure we're in shape and ready to compete.

I don't really think about the title, to be honest with you. I'm just going to go in there and fight. I'm a proud champion, but at the same time I'm not really fighting for the belt. I'm fighting because I love to fight and don't wanna lose and I don't like to lose.

I try to stay away from high sodium and high sugar.

I've trained with real, world-class wrestlers.

Everyone's talking about Phil Davis and what he did in college. It's an accomplishment to win an NCAA title. I don't want to discredit that. But I believe if I would have wrestled him in college, I would have beat him.

There's a lot of reasons I didn't perform the way I could have in college. Going to college, I was a new parent, I lived in another state. I just wasn't mentally into it when I was in college.

I won't fight Thiago Silva. I won't fight Cezar 'Mutante' Ferreira. I won't fight anybody who I train with.

It's sad because I worked so hard to be able to provide for my kids and give them a better life than I ever had for myself but I can't give them the one thing which they really need more than anything, and that's me.

I grew up so poor and now I have an opportunity to provide for my family in a way that I never imagined. I take that in consideration and try to exploit every single opportunity because when it's over it's over, there are no redos.

At one point in my life, I felt as if fighting was everything. It was everything. I put life second.

I don't want to go out losing. But at the same time, it's what I need. It's what I need to do because I feel like I have other things in life that are calling me to do, to go to.

I give a lot of credit to my training partners and to my coaches. Both Greg Jackson and Michael Winklejohn are amazing.

Getting the title shot was huge.

I got Rampage's style down so good I am even wearing my dog's chain!

I'm one of those athletes, I compete better for coaches that I have a lot of love and respect for.

I didn't grow up with my father in my life, and that bred a resentment in me, and it bred a mentality in me that made me very angry.

Eric Knuutila was one of those coaches who I could tell who cared, who went the extra mile, who made sure that it wasn't just about getting me on the mat and wrestling.

I wouldn't have won anything without Bill Dixon.

I didn't really realize that I could make it into a career until midway through the 'Ultimate Fighter' show when I started beating guys who had been training in the sport for a really long time.

Chicago is like a New York City. It's one of the those older cities. It really means something to fight there.

For me I think the pressure Chael Sonnen brings is hard to match with his offense, takedowns, ground and pound, hand in the face and dropping elbows and shots. It kind of wears down a fighter.

You know, MMA doesn't need New York, New York needs MMA. And I say that with all due respect to New York.

Eric Knuutila had a big impact on my wrestling career.

Coming into community college, I wasn't sure of where I wanted to go in my future.

Yeah, I like going away for camp. It brings out the savagery.

My wife is married to a part-time husband. That's hard to do. The kids get the short end of the stick, too.

When I'm training for a fight, I'm not the same person that I normally am when I'm at home. I'm always thinking about fighting. I'm doing it day in and day out. Pretty soon, my personality starts to change. My temper's a little bit shorter, I don't have a lot of patience for a lot of things.

I believe I can beat Anderson Silva, and I believe that the skills that I have is something he'd have hard time dealing with, but to compete against the guy, first and foremost, would be an honor in and of itself.

But if you look at a fight, it is anything but comfortable. So when you're fighting tough guys and you're not willing to go out of your comfort zone, you lose.

I'm open to fighting at 185 or 205 pounds, but I think I need to give this 185-pound run a real, honest crack. Being at this weight class has definitely made me into a different fighter.

Ring rust is real. I've experienced it myself.

I enjoy the whole aspect of training with different people.

I want to train with whoever is the best.

You want your workout to sneak up on you. That's when you get the best results.