Quotes on Kids

You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.

The deal is such that when I begin writing something, I open a door, and those characters come in, and then they won't leave, and so I live with them every day, all day. They are there with me when I'm driving my kids to school, when I'm standing in line at the grocery store.

Children have always brought a tremendous amount of joy to me and I feel that if you can catch them at a young age you can really change a life. There are a lot of studies that show that one act of kindness to these children has a 40% chance of making that child have a completely different outcome in their life. What you hope is that you can get a kid to believe in something and to believe in themselves.

Of course you have to support the troops. They're just kids. They're doing for their country what's expected of them.

I began going to juvenile prisons. And some of these kids face some very, very tough lives. How do they handle these lives? Do they even know that if their life is bad, that they're still OK? Do they know that? Do they know that someone is thinking the same way that they're thinking?

I think kids in every minority need to see people like themselves in books; that's an acknowledgment of their existence on this planet and in this society.

A father is a reality-concealing machine, a machine for dishing up lies to kids, and that isn't even the worst of it: secretly he believes that he represents reality.

In a way, education by its nature favours the extrovert because you are taking kids and putting them into a big classroom, which is automatically going to be a high-stimulation environment. Probably the best way of teaching in general is one on one, but that's not something everyone can afford.

When I was 15, I started playing first class cricket and always dreamt of being a Test cricketer, wanted to do something for the country, married in 1995, have 2 kids it's been great.

I learned early that I had to work harder than the white kids and harder than the boys.

There's a part of me that's trying to represent kids that don't necessarily have the same outlet that I have. I'm not looking towards a new demographic. I'm looking towards the demographic I came from.

I asked my kids, 'Do you know what Papa used to do.' They said, 'You were a boxer, you won the Olympics!' And that's what they know.

As public schools deteriorate, the upper-middle class and wealthy send their kids to private ones. As public pools and playgrounds decay, the better-off buy memberships in private tennis and swimming clubs. As public hospitals decline, the well-off pay premium rates for private care.

I grew up on the Eastern Shore during desegregation. A lot of white parents chose to send their kids to private schools rather than integrate - but not mine. My brother and I both attended and graduated from public schools. It's one of the best things that happened to me.

Kids should be allowed to break stuff more often. That's a consequence of exploration. Exploration is what you do when you don't know what you're doing. That's what scientists do every day.

With every word we utter, with every action we take, we know our kids are watching us. We as parents are their most important role models.

When a father puts in long hours at work, he's praised for being dedicated and ambitious. But when a mother stays late at the office, she's sometimes accused of being selfish, neglecting her kids.

Our kids are reflections of us. How we interact with others, even in a hostile situation... how we respond and our children see that is how they are going to respond.

We are sold the idea of a refugee as a tiny child sitting crying, as a way of raising money, but elderly ladies and kids largely can't move. The demographic is mostly young men.

I got to play with my dad. I got to go to work with him. That's the biggest thing that ever happened to me other than the days my kids were born. That's bigger than any record I'll ever set.

Sports and entertainment are the only places where inner-city kids see themselves being able to succeed. Their intellectual development is something they don't relate to.