Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.

For me, often, there’s such a cloud of melancholia about knowing I’m going to have to leave my daughter on her own. I don’t know what age that is going to be, thank God. It just doubles me up in grief.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

Changing is not just changing the things outside of us. First of all we need the right view that transcends all notions including of being and non-being, creator and creature, mind and spirit. That kind of insight is crucial for transformation and healing.

Where thou art, that is home.

The details surrounding both my marriage and subsequent filing for divorce are private, and I had hoped to keep them that way for the sake of my family.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds, they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.

Education is not a problem. Education is an opportunity.

Probably because I’m from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don’t get too excited with big things.

My whole family are hams. They’re storytellers and everyone outdoes the next one.

I love being American, and I love family. I love having a family, and I feel so blessed, and I feel like God gave me exactly what I wanted, so now I have to do the right thing in God’s eyes also. Just follow what God wants me to do.

In our home there was always prayer – aloud, proud and unapologetic.

I guess you could say I devoted myself so strongly to my music that for awhile I forgot about my family. But I only get one set of parents, and I think I forgot about that for a little while.

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.

Purity of personal life is the one indispensable condition for building up a sound education.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

The first time you say something, it’s heard. The second time, it’s recognized, and the third time it’s learned.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.

In terms of my involvement in ‚don’t ask, don’t tell‘ and marriage equality and anti-bullying and social emotional learning in schools – these are all things that arise out of my relationship with the world and with my fans.

An armchair Jungian would say the whole thing is about my own ongoing spiritual search. My interior life has always been one of trying to find a spiritual link, maybe because I’m from a family of separate religious philosophies: Protestant and Catholic.

Our Creator expects His children everywhere to educate themselves.

Back when I was in school, few people understood dyslexia and what to do for it. My teachers thought I was lazy and not very clever, and I got bored easily… thinking of all the things I could do once I left school. I couldn’t always follow what was going on.

Our teachers deserve better feedback.

Early on in my life, I had a broken soul. I was abused by my father, abandoned by my mother and ended up in a destructive first marriage. By the time I was 23, I was broken in my soul. I didn’t know how to think right. I felt wrong about everything. But God stepped into my life, and I came out on the other side and didn’t even smell like smoke.

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

For me, already being part of a single parent household and knowing it was just me and my mom, you’d would wake up times and hope that the next day you’d be able to be alongside your mother because she was out trying to make sure that I was taken care of. But all I cared about was her being home.

Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.

Having a child, that’s always been my biggest fear. I want a child and I fear a child.

I sang a song at my sister’s wedding. My mother forced me into that, too. But that one felt all right.

You may be educated abroad, you may be a great scientist, politician, but you always have a sneaking fear that if you don’t go to temples or do the ordinary things that you have been told to do, something evil might happen, so you conform. What happens to the mind that conforms? Investigate it, please.

For me, education was power.

America’s experience, like many others, teaches us that fostering entrepreneurship is not just about crafting the right economic policy or developing the best educated curricula. It’s about creating an entire climate in which innovation and ideas flourish.

Sometimes, you might meet somebody that you love that’s turning into a ‚they.‘ My key is invite them to Miami and take them to the ocean and let them jump off the boat in the ocean, on the sand bar, and cleanse off and pray and then go take a shower, and hopefully the ‚they‘ is out of you.

Then not only an old man, but also a drunkard, becomes a second time a child.

Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.

I admire Ralph Nader and Denis Kucinich very much, and insofar as they bring up issues and carry out an educational and organisational function – that’s important, and fine, and I support it.

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

Educate the masses, elevate their standard of intelligence, and you will certainly have a successful nation.

Why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as well as prohibition did, in five years Americans would be the smartest race of people on Earth.

I don’t even call them fans. I don’t like that. They’re literally just a part of my life; they’re a part of my family. I don’t think of them as on a lower level than me. I don’t think I’m anything but equal to all of them. So yeah, they’re basically all of my siblings.

I was very worried about my mother, growing up – a lot. I do not want my children to be worried about me.

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.

When schools flourish, all flourishes.

You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.

I went from being the Terminator to being the governator.

Education is hanging around until you’ve caught on.

When you think of the exponential speed and scale of expansion of social media or a service, you have to believe that it is equally possible to rapidly transform the lives of those who have long stood on the margins of hope.

You know, my Grandpop Finnegan used to have an expression: he used to say, ‚Joey, the guy in Olyphant’s out of work, it’s an economic slowdown. When your brother-in-law’s out of work, it’s a recession. When you’re out of work, it’s a depression.‘

What life half gives a man, posterity gives entirely.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.

Studies serve for delight, for ornaments, and for ability.

The name Zahra was to have been lman’s own name at birth, but a senior member of the family changed it to lman at the last minute.

I mean, I look at my dad. He was twenty when he started having a family, and he was always the coolest dad. He did everything for his kids, and he never made us feel like he was pressured. I know that it must be a great feeling to be a guy like that.

Engineering training deals with the exact sciences. That sort of exactness makes for truth and conscience. It might be good for the world if more men had that sort of mental start in life even if they did not pursue the profession.

One of the greatest lessons of my own life was learning to turn the inner rampage of hatred and anger toward my own father for his reprehensible behavior and abandonment of his family into an inner reaction more closely aligned with God and God-realized love.

I don’t think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way.

Homework’s hard. Especially math. My kids joke with me. They tell me they have homework. I say, ‚Okay.‘ And then I sit down and they say, ‚It’s math.‘ ‚No! Not math! English, history, anything!‘

Family and friendships are two of the greatest facilitators of happiness.

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.

Before I became a chief minister, I never thought that one day I’d be the chief minister.