I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, ‚We’re black. You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we’re all brought up differently.‘

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

All my stepchildren carried the burden of my fame. Sometimes they would read terrible things about me, and I’d worry about whether it would hurt them. I would tell them: ‚Don’t hide these things from me. I’d rather you ask me these things straight out, and I’ll answer all your questions.‘

You bring children into the world. You love them with heart and soul.

I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

This character feels so much like my brother. He has two children. He has a wife. He works with me. He chooses to stay in New Hampshire because he wants his kids to grow up in the school they started with. He doesn’t want them to lose friends. He is his family’s hero.

Jesus isn’t lettin‘ you off the hook. The Scriptures don’t let you off the hook so easily… When people say, you know, ‚Good teacher‘, ‚Prophet‘, ‚Really nice guy‘ … this is not how Jesus thought of Himself.

Your life will be a blessed and balanced experience if you first honor your identity and priority.

You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.

Anger is certainly a kind of baseness, as it appears well in the weakness of those subjects in whom it reigns: children, women, old folks, sick folks.

People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any forum that would require me to stop talking for three hours.

Men and women aren’t the same. And they won’t be the same. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be treated fairly.

The one thing I want to leave my children is an honorable name.

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

I don’t blame the average seventeen-year-old punk-rock kid for calling me a sellout. I understand that. And maybe when they grow up a little bit, they’ll realize there’s more things to life than living out your rock & roll identity so righteously.

I give the children education.

I would say the most satisfying thing actually is watching my three children each pick up on their own interests and work many more hours per week than most people that have jobs at trying to intelligently give away that money in fields that they particularly care about.

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

I imagine I will spend my days traveling from country to country to visit our children, who I expect will live around the world.

We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

I’m not a parenting expert. In fact, I’m not sure that I even believe in the idea of ‚parenting experts.‘ I’m an engaged, imperfect parent and a passionate researcher. I’m an experienced mapmaker and a stumbling traveler. Like many of you, parenting is by far my boldest and most daring adventure.

To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.

To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another.

While I believed deeply in my husband’s vision for this country… and I was certain he would make an extraordinary President… like any mother, I was worried about what it would mean for our girls if he got that chance. How would we keep them grounded under the glare of the national spotlight?

I guess if I’m a product, either you’re chocolate, you’re vanilla or you’re butterscotch. You can’t be all three.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

I know I will never be happy, but I know I can be gay!

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.

If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ‚em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

I was born on a full moon. Both my children were born on full moons, too. Some people say that’s scary. It is what it is, man, I don’t be trippin‘. I couldn’t tell God when I wanted to be born.

Don’t say I hate institutionalised religion – rather than saying I hate those things, which I do not, what I’m saying is that perhaps there is a way of opening more doors, rather than closing so many.

Being beautiful is not so fun when you’re in a business with all men.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one’s children will become than for the children one’s ‚mature‘ critics often are.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

There is one way to have a short but exciting conversation with me, and that is to move too slow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination – and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past – are real and must be addressed.

It was the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.

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.

When I take my kid to school, all the parents stop and stare.

The essence of all religions is one. Only their approaches are different.

Actually, I didn’t start sweating until I had children.

My greatest blessing has been the birth of my son. My next greatest blessing has been my ability to turn people into children of mine.

I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition.

We have a tendency to condemn people who are different from us, to define their sins as paramount and our own sinfulness as being insignificant.

The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.

When you’re a little kid, you don’t see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.

I can’t disguise myself with a wig and dark glasses – the wheelchair gives me away.

I am what I am. A fighter.

Racial prejudice, anti-Semitism, or hatred of anyone with different beliefs has no place in the human mind or heart.

I made a decision when my father passed away that I was going to be who God made me to be and not try to preach like my father.

I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

I love being a dad. I just love it.

The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it’s beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.

There’s something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she’s only measured water in it.

Although the circumstances of our lives may seem very disengaged, with me standing here as the First Lady of the United States of America and you just getting through school, I want you to know we have very much in common. For nothing in my life ever would have predicted that I would be standing here as the first African-American First Lady.

Our goal in the ’70s was to end the closed door era. There were so many things that were off limits to women: policing, firefighting, mining, piloting planes.