I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

The kids are old enough now – I just want to let them be kids. I don’t want to comment on them too much. They’re at an age where I just want to let them be kids.

It’s true my father abused me and didn’t love and protect me the way he should have, and at times it seemed no one would ever help me and it would never end. But God always had a plan for my life, and He has redeemed me.

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.

My children love Maleficent’s voice, so they always make me do it at home.

Romania, which had the worst dictator in Eastern Europe, Ceausescu, he was a darling of the West. The United States and Britain loved him. He was supported until the last minute.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.

My kids are the funniest two human beings there are.

If I have the chance to say something, I will say it – but that doesn’t obligate me to always say something, or to shed light on every problem, as if I were a lawmaker.

Don’t ever call a guy first. The thing they want the most is whatever they can’t have. It sounds really juvenile, but it works.

I try to speak plainly so that my constituents who don’t follow the nuances of government like I do, because they’re too busy earning a real living, can understand the issues before me. None of this stuff is brain surgery.

I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits – they may still be very distant – God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.

We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking – all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.

For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.

General consultant to mankind.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

We don’t get to know people when they come to us; we must go to them to find out what they are like.

I knew through the surgeries that he was on my side and that this wasn’t something where I was gonna feel less of a woman, because my husband wasn’t gonna let that happen.

If you can’t hear me, it’s because I’m in parentheses.

Friends applaud, the comedy is over.

We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.

I’ll be glad to reply to or dodge your questions, depending on what I think will help our election most.

I guess every single word I’ve ever said is going to be dissected now.

Giving responsibility is the key to success with boys, especially with the rowdiest and most difficult boys.

In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT’s Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!

Treat your children like the blessings they are or don’t have them at all.

As I’ve said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hopes for Iraqis‘ future.

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

Ironically, parenting is a shame and judgment minefield precisely because most of us are wading through uncertainty and self-doubt when it comes to raising our children.

Those who know me know I’m passionate about lists, and top of my list of priorities is my family. My wife Joan and I do not consider our legacy to our children to be wealth or fame but the opportunity to pursue happiness by following their own path.

Being a housewife and a mother is the biggest job in the world, but if it doesn’t interest you, don’t do it – I would have made a terrible mother.

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

There are many people in the world who really don’t understand-or say they don’t-what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin!

I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read – if not indeed write – the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

I don’t pick up toys. I crush them.

You learn that there’s no right way to do it, no wrong way to do it. It’s just what you feel comfortable with, to trust that, and don’t let anybody box you in to a certain style of parenting or make you feel a certain way about what your kids do.

No matter what message you are about to deliver somewhere, whether it is holding out a hand of friendship, or making clear that you disapprove of something, is the fact that the person sitting across the table is a human being, so the goal is to always establish common ground.

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.

Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.

Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.

When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

We’re always, by the way, in fundamental physics, always trying to investigate those things in which we don’t understand the conclusions. After we’ve checked them enough, we’re okay.

I haven’t gone out of my way to seek advice from people I don’t know.

Science is nothing but perception.

Anyone who is practicing understanding and compassion can exemplify true power. Anyone can be a Buddha.

If you’re in this business and you are scared, then you better do something else.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

Never explain – your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

Woman begins by resisting a man’s advances and ends by blocking his retreat.

A yawn is a silent shout.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

I’m 31 now. I think I’m beginning to understand what life is, what romance is, and what a relationship means.