My mother was a powerful influence. She made me toe the line. If I didn’t have a perfect report card, she showed her disappointment.

I have spent the greater part of my life in a hotel room with seven or eight kids, looking after everyone, sorting out fights, wiping noses, handing out towels, not having a clean towel left for me.

I found that the corridors of power in Delhi were littered with lobbies of various kinds.

Neil Young is my hero, and such a great example. You know what that guy has been doing for the past 40 years? Making music. That’s what that guy does. Sometimes you pay attention, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes he hands it to you, sometimes he keeps it to himself. He’s a good man with a beautiful family and wonderful life.

My report card always said, ‚Jim finishes first and then disrupts the other students‘.

My mother did not like children.

I’ve always felt heroic about my life… As a child, I remember little girls in the playground moaning about how boys could do more than they could. I didn’t think that was the case at all. My parents didn’t treat me as a girl.

Kids will remind you that, even though you’ve gone down a road 100 times, it’s brand new for them – and that’s healthy.

The biggest thrill a ballplayer can have is when your son takes after you. That happened when my Bobby was in his championship Little League game. He really showed me something. Struck out three times. Made an error that lost the game. Parents were throwing things at our car and swearing at us as we drove off. Gosh, I was proud.

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

The unsuccessful person is burdened by learning, and prefers to walk down familiar paths. Their distaste for learning stunts their growth and limits their influence.

Power is not alluring to pure minds.

My next baby will be my new record.

My own eight children all march to the beat of their inner music, and in some cases, it is definitely far away from what I hear. I’ve had to honor their instincts and their choices, and merely guided them out of harm’s way until they could be their own guides.

If you want someone to say, ‚She’s so sweet, and she’s so cute, and, honey, point your foot,‘ that’s not my school. You can go to the YMCA and have a nobody teach your kid if that’s what you want to hear.

My mother was and will always remain my greatest hero.

My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.

Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

I’m not a big believer in trying to jam stuff down somebody’s throat: ‚You’re going to do it my way.‘ I’d rather show by example and live my life and have people say, ‚You know what, I want to live like Joel has. He’s got peace and joy, and he seems content.‘

Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.

I always wanted to do what my brothers were doing. I always wanted to play the games they played and play rough and wear pants and go outside.

If you’re working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

People look to time in expectation that it will eventually make them happy, but you cannot find true happiness by looking toward the future.

He who molds the public sentiment… makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to make.

When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It’s inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.

I’ve never been a hands-on dad. I’m not ashamed to admit it, but you can’t run a restaurant and be home for tea at 4:30 and bath and change nappies.

It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.

That nice, soft pillow and the warm blanket, and it’s all comfortable, and no one wants to leave that comfort – but if you can wake up early in the morning, get a head start on everyone else that’s still sleeping, get productive time doing things that you need to do – that’s a huge piece to moving your life forward.

As a mom, I know it is my responsibility, and no one else’s, to raise my kids. But we have to ask ourselves, what does it mean when so many parents are finding their best efforts undermined by an avalanche of advertisements aimed at our kids.

I remember my mother’s prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.

Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.

Do something wonderful, people may imitate it.

If a woman can, by careful selection of a father and nourishment of herself, produce a citizen with efficient senses, sound organs and a good digestion, she should clearly be secured a sufficient reward for that natural service to make her willing to undertake and repeat it.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.

Football in itself is a grand game for developing a lad physically and also morally, for he learns to play with good temper and unselfishness, to play in his place and ‚play the game,‘ and these are the best of training for any game of life.

Do I worry about being in the public eye and raising kids? Yeah. Any situation you’re in, you’re gonna worry about raising kids. But it’s champagne problems, too. There are people who can’t feed their kids.

Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.

Mum had done everything you need to educate a kid. She made me a kid who likes books and she told me about ‚Wind in the Willows‘ and read it and I thought this is weird, Rat, Mole, Toad and my first ever Bolshie thought – you know about ‚The Wind in the Willows.‘

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.

I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: ‚Checkout Time is 18 years.‘

Everything rises and falls on leadership.

My music is influenced by L.A. culture.

The Bible says that Christians are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. On the job, in the grocery store, even among unsaved friends and family members, God’s people are there to bring seasoning to an unsavory situation.

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.

I don’t know that my schooling was conducive to wild ideas and creativity, but it gave me discipline, drive. They taught me how to think. I really know how to think.

It’s my old girl that advises. She has the head. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be maintained.

People have told me, ‚You shouldn’t bring your daughter onto the podium, ‚cause it’s the workplace,‘ and things like that. But I’m not gonna really listen to that. I’m gonna do what I think is fun for me and my family, and everything’ll be all right.

It wasn’t so long ago that I was a working mom myself. And I know that sometimes, much as we all hate to admit it, it’s just easier to park the kids in front of the TV for a few hours, so we can pay the bills or do the laundry or just have some peace and quiet for a change.

There are some important differences between me and Tony Stark, like I have five kids, so I spend more time going to Disneyland than parties.

I think the personal relationships I established mattered in terms of what I was able to get done. And I did bring women’s issues to the center of our foreign policy.

Whatever we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

What we need to understand is that when traditions become laws, rules, obligations and expectations others put on us that we don’t want to fulfill, then they lose real meaning and steal the joy from our lives. And if we’re too religious, we won’t be able to be led by the Holy Spirit and enjoy an intimate relationship with Him.

Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.

There’s a lot of pressure putting an album out all over the world and hoping people everywhere like it.

Women will only have true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.