We spend the first 12 months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next 12 months teaching them to sit down and shut up.

Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.

We may not be able to prepare the future for our children, but we can at least prepare our children for the future.

Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.

The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.

Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil.

Having children is like living in a frat house - nobody sleeps, everything's broken, and there's a lot of throwing up.

No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I'm not talking about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.

There really are places in the heart you don't even know exist until you love a child.

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

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.

Your children are not your children, they come through you, but they are life itself, wanting to express itself.

Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.

I want my children to have all the things I couldn’t afford. Then I want to move in with them.

Before I got married I had six theories about raising children; now, I have six children and no theories.

One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun.

Leave your pride, ego, and narcissism somewhere else. Reactions from those parts of you will reinforce your children's most primitive fears.

If you can control your behavior when everything around you is out of control, you can model for your children a valuable lesson in patience and understanding...and snatch an opportunity to shape character.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.

Perhaps it takes courage to raise children.

If you are a parent, open doors to unknown directions to the child so he can explore. Don't make him afraid of the unknown,give him support.

All of us have moments in out lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.

Everything depends on upbringing.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.

We never know the love of the parent till we become parents ourselves.

To bring up a child in the way he should go - travel that way yourself.

Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you.

You know, I'm very proud of the large number of Hispanic endorsements that I've received.

If you cry 'forward', you must without fail make plain in what direction to go.

I didn't have a sweet tooth, but I liked butter, and I liked sauces, and I liked wine... and curry... and cheeses.

Be nice to nerds. Chances are youll end up working for one.

When I enter that higher-order space that's required to write, I'm a better human. For whatever my writing is, wherever it's ranked, it definitely is the one place that I get to be beautiful.

I try to do stories that make a difference - stories that affect the way people think, stories that people need to hear - and usually what drives me is to do stories about people who have no voice, people who have no political power, people who are overlooked by society.

It's as certain that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, we will just keep burning them.

I'm a huge, huge sports fan, and Marquette basketball is my No. 1 thing.

I don't need arms, and neither does anyone else... At the very least, a ban would prevent fights from turning deadly.

Like many traditional feminists, I became one of the boys, only better. For a while it gave me a buzz to win at their game, but ultimately, that kind of power just goes nowhere. Traditional feminism excludes men and so perpetuates conflict. I am not interested in warring about power.

We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

I, who have no sisters or brothers, look with some degree of innocent envy on those who may be said to be born to friends.

Any Southerner is spoiled when it comes to food.

When I was younger I used to want to own a sweet shop so I could eat sweets all day, but that dream died a long time ago.

I believe we need more culturally diverse books - about disabled characters, though not about their disability, about people with different sexual orientations, or a boy who is a cross-dresser. We need to reflect the diversity of our society.

James Patterson has a way with female characters. He understands women in a way that a lot of male writers don't.

I would like to see us find Osama Bin Laden, but let's say we did capture him. Let's say we did kill him. How much good would that do? There's still thousands of people behind him. It's this huge thing.

Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives.

Women who have managed to get successful normally have had to carve out pretty much their own route for doing it, because there are few roadmaps for how, as a woman, you become successful. You think about having to do it yourself, you carve your own way. Does that relate to being Jewish?