Ideas such as not helping this (Iraqi) government take the necessary and hard steps to be able to do its job.

He'd barely taken a step when the shot rang out, hard and sharp, like hands clapping once.

He left feeling they had gone the first hard steps out of themselves and toward whatever battleground there would be.

"Those were hard steps, but once you take them you find it's much easier to keep going."

I was dragged down the hard, concrete steps on to the pavement.

To take the first hard steps down that road?

They heard his hard steps on the corridor floor grow fainter.

I took one hard step out to make sure it was a lateral.

Then he has to go one hard step further and say that what the whole world says about us is true.

We have taken the hardest and most difficult steps of all-the first ones.