Brad and I have never wanted our kids to be actors, but we also want them to be around film and be a part of Mommy and Daddy’s life and for it not to be kept from them, either. We just want them to have a good, healthy relationship with it.

If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.

It is totally different making films in the East than in the West. In the East, I make my own Jackie Chan films, and it’s like my family. Sometimes I pick up the camera because I choreograph all the fighting scenes, even when I’m not fighting. I don’t have my own chair. I just sit on the set with everybody.

My dad was very intelligent, had a very strong personality. I was amazed with my father.

I refuse to feel guilty. I feel guilty about too much in my life but not about money. I went through periods when I had nothing, so somebody in my family has to get stinkin‘ wealthy.

Your children will see what you’re all about by what you live rather than what you say.

Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.

You know, my sister sings, my brother plays drums in my band. My whole family is a bunch of musicians.

I don’t pick up toys. I crush them.

I’ve worked with children all my life.

Imagine your family finally making it from nothing to something, and finally getting things going, and finally buying a beautiful house and taking care of your children – and the next day, it’s completely all gone. Zero. Boom. Flat broke. So that’s when I had to man up.

One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.

The greatest service that can be offered to children who show personality traits or inclinations that might not be understood by the adults around them is to allow them to express their own unique humanity.

I always play women I would date.

My mother was a full-time mother. She didn’t have much of her own career, her own life, her own experiences… everything was for her children. I will never be as good a mother as she was. She was just grace incarnate. She was the most generous, loving – she’s better than me.

I used to carry my father’s Bible and put it on the pulpit so he could preach.

There’s something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she’s only measured water in it.

I will never win an Oscar, and do you know why? First of all, because I’m not Jewish. Secondly, I make too much money for all those old farts in the Academy.

I really like children to watch my movies.

The death of my father is probably the biggest thing that I ever faced. Daddy and I were best friends.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

I, personally, think there is a really danger of taking food too seriously. Food should be part of the bigger picture.

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

You can’t have it all all at once. Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all, but in given periods in time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

I think your values are always influenced by your family and your community.

Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.

I can’t stress to you enough how much I can relate to teens being cyberbullied. Something that helps me is looking at old videos of me and my friends from middle school, or videos of my family. I love watching funny videos of my favorite people – it really cheers me up.

The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.

Neither of my parents went to church, but they did everything that you needed to do to be Christian. That’s something a Quaker would call an intimation of the divine.

Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination – and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past – are real and must be addressed.

The next thing I knew, I was out of the service and making movies again. My first picture was called, GI Blues. I thought I was still in the army.

Historically, the family has played the primary role in educating children for life, with the school providing supplemental scaffolding to the family.

My mami and papi love my music. They’re always listening to the radio waiting for one of my songs to come on. And when it does, they turn up the volume – and turn it back down when it’s over.

My goal is just to be respected as a man when I walk down the street with my family. I don’t care what your job is, you’re not gonna talk down to me, you’re not gonna try to get a rise out of me. I’m a man first. And in establishing that, some interesting things have happened.

If a man’s character is to be abused there’s nobody like a relative to do the business.

We had problems like all families but we had a lot of love. I was extremely loved. We always felt we had each other.

The problem with me, as far as getting married and having a family, is that my comedy is so important to me. So I don’t know if I’ll ever be as good a dad as my dad.

For me, the opposite of scarcity is not abundance. It’s enough. I’m enough. My kids are enough.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

If thy brother wrongs thee, remember not so much his wrong-doing, but more than ever that he is thy brother.

These days, children can text on their cell phone all night long, and no one else is seeing that phone. You don’t know who is calling that child.

Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do… but how much love we put in that action.

My friends ask me if I want more kids, and I always say yes, I want more; it’s the best thing you can have in your life.

Anger is certainly a kind of baseness, as it appears well in the weakness of those subjects in whom it reigns: children, women, old folks, sick folks.

We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. The teaching of the church is clear, and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.

In my heart, I’m just a kid from the council houses. I can remember the old cottage and my dad coming round with the tin bath. I’m not a rich man.

I am like a man so busy in letting rooms in one end of his house, that he can’t stop to put out the fire that is burning the other.

When I was growing up, my family was so poor we couldn’t afford to pay attention.

As I get older, I tend to put more into family than I used to.

I want parents to teach that academic intelligence is essential, but so is financial intelligence.

Somewhere it is written that parents who are critical of other people’s children and publicly admit they can do better are asking for it.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‚race‘ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

The thing I want more than anything else? I want to have children. I used to feel for every child I had, I would adopt another.

This character feels so much like my brother. He has two children. He has a wife. He works with me. He chooses to stay in New Hampshire because he wants his kids to grow up in the school they started with. He doesn’t want them to lose friends. He is his family’s hero.

Our need for certainty in an endeavor as uncertain as raising children makes explicit ‚how-to-parent‘ strategies both seductive and dangerous.

I think it does Discworld good if I don’t write about it all the time: sometimes you have to get it out of your system.

Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn’t do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.