Joseph A. Califano Jr. Quotes

Great teachers will never be able to make up for bad parents, nor should they be expected to.

I am a raging alcoholic, but I don't want my kids to do the same.

How vital are mother’s influence and teaching in the home-and how apparent when neglected!

I think every person's parents teach them a lot and also mess them up royally.

Curiosity is missing. Curiosity in particular is something that the system, not only the educational system but, the parental... what you do as a parent at home.

Home is the first school for us all, a school with no fixed curriculum, no quality control, no examinations, no teacher training

Everyone of us plays 'tapes' from our parents until we die. That's why it's so important to talk good values to your child

My parents were always philosophizing about how to bring about change. To me, people who didn't try to make the world a better place were strange.

Every word, movement and action has an effect. No other person or outside force has a greater influence on a child than the parent.

Philanthropy has always been something that I've been kind of interested in because I think it was instilled at a very young age through my parents.

Parents have to get over the idea that their children belong just to them; children are a family affair.

Faithful parents can invite the power of heaven to influence their children. Nevertheless, those children remain agents unto themselves, and the choice to repent or not ultimately is theirs.

I was the oldest child, and both my parents worked, so I had a great deal of responsibility from a very young age.

For me, as much about being a parent as it is about being a child.

The footsteps a child follows are most likely to be the ones his parents thought they covered up.

Home is a child's first and most important classroom.

I think one of the things when you're casting children is you're also casting their parents.

I have long been convinced that families are the primary agents of social change in any society.

All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes — morals, behaviour, everything. Absolute trust in some one else is the essence of education.

There is but one way to eliminate juvenile delinquency - that is by providing each child in America with competent parents.

Kids and violent TV, violent TV and violence, violence and kids. The only people missing from this discussion are the parents. Where are we? Gone. Abdicated.

My parents taught me what life is about, so I grew up the type they warned me about.

Geniuses are just people who had good mothers.

The responsibility of building leadership in the Church belongs to the father and the mother. . . . As youth grow and mature through their teenage years and move toward adulthood, the Church picks up an important role in this process of giving youth an opportunity to lead, but it begins in the home.

Half voluntarily, half Winston's older brother [William] would take me in, saying, "Daddy, I think you oughta do this." And I'd say, "I think you're right, maybe I do need it." Sometimes a week later I'd leave the place; sometimes I'd stick it out for a month.