Fred Rogers Quotes

The kiss lasted forever as Otto Frank kept talking from behind me. "And my conclusion is," he said, "since I had been in very good terms with Anne, that most parents don't know really their children.

People ask me, do I ever disagree with my father? It would be a little strange if I didn't.

Teenagers' relationships with their parents often aren't really explored in much depth, but at that age, it's your primary relationship; they're the people you live with.

It's harder for me, never having brought up a child, to enter the universe of the child.

Few sons are like their fathers - many are worse, few better.

Fathers and sons are much more considerate of one another than mothers and daughters.

A baseball manager has learned a lot about his job from having played the game, but a parent has not learned a thing from having once been a child.

I hated my father all my life but in his final days I forgave him for all the suffering he caused us. As you grow older, marry, and have children of you own, you learn and forget. I do not forget easily, but I do forgive.

The first service a child doth his father is to make him foolish.

I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.

Our children give us the opportunity to become the parents we always wished we'd had.

Make up your mind to this. If you are different, you are isolated, not only from people of your own age but from those of your parents' generation and from your children's generation too. They'll never understand you and they'll be shocked no matter what you do. But your grandparents would probably be proud of you and say: 'Theres a chip off the old block,' and your grandchildren will sigh enviously and say: 'What an old rip Grandma must have been!' and they'll try to be like you.

Parents don't know their children at all. No one knows anyone, in fact.

What the father kept silent the son speaks out.

There was an age in which it was clear to me that my parents weren't perfect, but then there was an age at which I had empathy for that. And that was through therapy, probably. You have to rebuild and you also have to grow in your understanding of whatever it is your parents are facing, and that takes a major, profound shift of perspective from being a child.

It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

The people whom the sons and daughters find it hardest to understand are the fathers and mothers, but young people can get on very well with the grandfathers and grandmothers.

If you're a parent, the five worst words you can say to your children are, "When I was your age ..." You were never their age. You were older in the womb.

They may already know too much about their mother and father--nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I've noticed this is often the time when children begin calling their parents by their first names, becoming little ironists after their parents' faults. What could be lonelier for a parent than to be criticized by his child on a first-name basis?

It's especially hard to admit that you made a mistake to your parents, because, of course, you know so much more than they do.

Love is the very essence of family life. Why is it that the children we love become so frequently the targets of our harsh words? Why is it that these children who love their fathers and mothers sometimes speak as if with daggers that cut to the quick? "There is beauty all around," only when there's love at home.

Whenever one of my children says, 'Goodnight, Daddy,' I always think to myself, 'You don't mean that.

Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.

[On her troubled relationships with her daughters:] You can acquire enemies. Why give birth to them?

When you're a father you censor yourself. You get just as angry with a child but you don't want to say, "What the filth and foul and I'll filth and foul, filth and foul and, yeah, ya filth and foul face, and I'll filth and foul, foul, filth!" You don't want to say that to a child so you censor yourself and you sound like an idiot: "What the... Get your... I'll put a... Get out of my face!"