When it comes to developing character strength, inner security and unique personal and interpersonal talents and skills in a child, no institution can or ever will compare with, or effectively substitute for, the home’s potential for positive influence.

When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems.

You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.

The child who desires education will be bettered by it; the child who dislikes it disgraced.

Train up a child in the way that he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.

Guilt is just as powerful, but its influence is positive, while shame’s is destructive. Shame erodes our courage and fuels disengagement.

I just want to be a great example to younger kids.

Well, the thing that I learned as a diplomat is that human relations ultimately make a huge difference.

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.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

Relationships are the hallmark of the mature person.

Treat your kid like a darling for the first five years. For the next five years, scold them. By the time they turn sixteen, treat them like a friend. Your grown up children are your best friends.

To bring a healthy child into this world, raise them right and watch them grow is the biggest miracle there is.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

But I’m pretty good with collaborative thinking. I work well with other people.

If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings.

I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.

To be a successful father… there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.

To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.

Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.

It takes a great deal of character strength to apologize quickly out of one’s heart rather than out of pity. A person must possess himself and have a deep sense of security in fundamental principles and values in order to genuinely apologize.

Who will take responsibility for raising the next generation?

In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a ‚continent,‘ a continuous landmass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness.

Luckily for me, people don’t scream at me that much in my everyday life.

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.

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.

He who knows how to flatter also knows how to slander.

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

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.

When it comes to knowing what to say, to charm, I always had it.

Charm is a way of getting the answer ‚Yes‘ without asking a clear question.

My mother never cursed at home; my father never cursed at home. My father didn’t drink. Even though we were poor, we would say a blessing over the table. So that’s who I am.

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.

The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.

The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.

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.

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.

It takes three to make a child.

Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.

Prince Charles is definitely my hero; he uses his position to do only good in this world.

I’ve worked with children all my life.

Discretion of speech is more than eloquence, and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal is more than to speak in good words, or in good order.

But sports carried me away from being in a gang, or being associated with drugs. Sports was my way out.

A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.

Practice Golden-Rule 1 of Management in everything you do. Manage others the way you would like to be managed.

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.

Until you have learned to be tolerant with those who do not always agree with you, you will be neither successful nor happy.