You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

Someday I want to have children and give them all the love I never had.

Once you have six children, you’re committed.

In the real world, children love me.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.

I was baptized by my father when I was 4 years old.

We believed in our idea – a family park where parents and children could have fun- together.

I am no supporter of factory labor for children, but I have never joined with those who clamored against proper work of children on farms outside their school hours.

The Gates Foundation has learned that two questions can predict how much kids learn: ‚Does your teacher use class time well?‘ and, ‚When you’re confused, does your teacher help you get straightened out?‘

I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

There is a ‚sanctity‘ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.

I read the ‚Old Testament‘ all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read ‚The Origin Of Species‘, hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

My father had a dairy farm. He employed three black families and one white family, and I used to play with black children.

Nature has always had more force than education.

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

In all my days of schooling, from preschool all the way up to 12th grade, there was not one white person in my class. Literally zero.

It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.

I mean, I went to a Catholic boys‘ school for a year, but that was to play hockey. Religion class was quite contentious for me.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Not many people know this about me, but I’m a natural blonde. My hair went from light blonde naturally to a darker kind of blonde. My mother dyed my hair dark when I was a child, as I loved the look then. So I’m basically a natural blonde.

My husband’s a pediatrician, so he and I talk about parenting all the time. You can’t raise children who have more shame resilience than you do.

I always wanted to be a father and thought it would be great, but it just took the right woman and the right time to make it all happen.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.

If something inconveniences my children too much or takes me away from them, I won’t do it.

My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.

As a kid, even I knew everything about my favourite cricketers. I used to know everything possible. Now I see kids knowing about me. It feels good.

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.

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.

Children make your life important.

There is no education like adversity.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

Even if we give parents all the information they need and we improve school meals and build brand new supermarkets on every corner, none of that matters if when families step into a restaurant, they can’t make a healthy choice.

My grandmother used to embarrass me more, when she would pick me up from school wearing a big fuzzy hat. I didn’t like that.

Sadly, I do my homework. I’ve a soft spot for the boring minutiae. I read the Charter of the United Nations before meeting with Kofi Annan. I read the Meltzer report, and then I’ll read C. Fred Bergsten’s defense of institutions like the World Bank and the I.M.F. It’s embarrassing to admit.

I am a big believer in education, because when I grew up in Austria – when I grew up in Austria I had a great education. I had great teachers.

I’d go to, like, six different schools in one year. We were on welfare, and my mom never ever worked.

Education doesn’t change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard.

I do not think that I am a natural born mother… If I ever wanted to mother anyone, it was my father.

If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.

I’m dying to be a great dad one day, whenever that day comes.

We’ve got to dumb America up again.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.

A teacher should have a creative mind.

We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. We have truly entered the century of the educated man.

He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.

A child who is allowed to be disrespectful to his parents will not have true respect for anyone.

As the father of eight children, I’m quite convinced that each individual arrives here with their own unique personality. We are intended here from an invisible held of infinite potentiality. That which has no form, has no boundaries – it’s the I that’s in the ever-changing body.

I don’t believe in ‚thinking‘ old. Although I’ve transitioned through many bodies – a baby, toddler, child, teen, young adult, mid-life and older adult – my spirit is unchanged. I support my body with exercise, my mind with reading and writing, and my spirit with the knowing that I am part of the Divine source of all life.

There happen to be a lot of people around who spent an hour on the Internet and think they know a lot of physics, but it doesn’t work like that… There’s a reason there are graduate schools in these departments.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.

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

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents‘ boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing ‚Amazing Stories,‘ with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

The cool thing about reading is that when you read a short story or you read something that takes your mind and expands where your thoughts can go, that’s powerful.

There are thousands of boys being wasted daily to our country through being left to become characterless, and, therefore, useless wasters, a misery to themselves and an eyesore and a danger to the nation. They could be saved if only the right surroundings or environment were given to them at the receptive time of their lives.

Are we a nation that educates the world’s best and brightest in our universities, only to send them home to create businesses in countries that compete against us? Or are we a nation that encourages them to stay and create jobs, businesses, and industries right here in America?