Our lifestyle was not in any way a negative. That was not the problem. That is and will remain one of the wonderful opportunities we are able to give our children.

With patient and firm determination, I am going to press on for jobs. I’m going to press on for equality. I’m going to press on for the sake of our children. I’m going to press on for the sake of all those families who are struggling right now. I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I am going to press on.

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

That I be not as those are who spend the day in complaining of headache and the night in drinking the wine which gives the headache!

My mother taught children to love to dance.

I have also seen children successfully surmounting the effects of an evil inheritance. That is due to purity being an inherent attribute of the soul.

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.

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?

As a father, I always want my son to be perfect. When he was young, I tried to train him in martial arts, but he said, ‚I don’t want to become like Bruce Lee’s son, with everybody telling me how good my father was.‘ I just think my son is too lazy.

I’m filthy rich!

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

K to 12 is partly about babysitting the kids so the parents can do other things.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.

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.

I’m not really a Hollywood person. Not that I don’t like L.A., but I’m just a Northern California guy.

I’ve said this time and again: My greatest concern coming into the White House was making sure my girls came out whole and normal, and decent and kind, just like I would expect them to if we were living on the South Side of Chicago. And it takes work to keep White House life normal for the kids.

I take my kids to school. And if I go to work, I go to work, and they visit me on set. I come home. I have dinner with my family. I have breakfast with my family. I have a very solid, very warm home.

Children astound me with their inquisitive minds. The world is wide and mysterious to them, and as they piece together the puzzle of life, they ask ‚Why?‘ ceaselessly.

For an Ethiopian mother, if you have a chubby kid, it means you’re doing something good.

One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That’s how the human species has done as well as it has.

Who will take responsibility for raising the next generation?

I did have two dads; one was a socialist, and one was a capitalist. I really decided I would rather be a capitalist.

The difference between us and them, between you and success, is not that you never fail, but it’s how you recover from those failures – is that you keep getting up time and time again. You figure out what you did wrong, and then you make it right. I say that to my kids every day.

My parents were just constantly affirming me in everything that I did. Late at night, I’d wake up and hear my mother talking over my bed, saying, ‚You’re going to do great on this test. You can do anything you want.‘

Creative people don’t behave very well generally. If you’re looking for examples of good relationships in show business, you’re gonna be depressed real fast. I don’t have time for anything else right now but work and my daughter. She’s my first priority.

Now that I’m a parent, I understand why my father was in a bad mood a lot.

A bachelor’s life is a fine breakfast, a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner.

I believe that the greatest gift you can give your family and the world is a healthy you.

Like every parent, when you start your family, your life completely changes. And you completely live for someone else. I find that the most extraordinary thing. Your life is handed over to someone else. From that moment on, they come first in every choice you make. It’s the most wonderful thing.

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.

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

I see children, all children, as humanity’s most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president, but they don’t want them to become politicians in the process.

I think about my own sons and my own daughters, and I’m sure that many parents are concerned about what their children are exposed to.

People change because of kids. They change how they eat. They change the way they think. They change the way they see one another.

I’d like to think that I’m a calm and sweet person. I tend to be very playful at home with my children, but in life… we have to fight our battles – our work battles, our political battles, our personal battles – and we’re focused.

As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.

When I’m around the kids I feel like I act the most grown-up just because you’re supposed to. And I say things, like every other day, that remind me of my own parents.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

According to Ethiopian custom, parents wait to name a baby because children often die in the first weeks of life.

It’s true that I’ve never had a burning desire to rebel against my parents.

Increase of material comforts, it may be generally laid down, does not in any way whatsoever conduce to moral growth.

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.

This way of life is worth defending.

Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they’re not trying to keep up with you.

It’s crazy how fast you get out of shape if you miss a couple days of action.

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

I had my first baby at twenty-one.

Where a man can live, he can also live well.

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

The childcare tax credit makes some sense.

The idea that there is one kind of African is, of course, ridiculous. Sometimes African entrepreneurs want to kill you because you are saying public health is the priority, not roads. Of course they are right to press for that issue, but so are we right, I believe, to argue, for example, that millions of children could and should be vaccinated.

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I’ll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

I’ve always been a little homemaker.

The United States, to state the obvious, is greatly concerned by the startling number of unaccompanied minors that – children and teenagers who are making a very perilous journey through Central America to reach the United States.

I think I became more productive through not having children. I never really had the desire to have them. My husband didn’t want them either, so it worked out well.

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

As a father and now a grandfather to three wonderful grandchildren, I know how magical the first year of a child’s life is but also how much hard work it takes. Being able to spend as much time as possible with your loved ones is absolutely vital, especially early on.