Barack Obama Quotes

I think I started learning lessons about being a good person long before I ever knew what basketball was. And that starts in the home, it starts with the parental influence.

Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.

I'm just going to be as honest as I can with my children and really try to build their character to be as strong as ours is.

In an age in which infidelity abounds, do we observe parents carefully instructing their children in the principles of faith which they profess? Or do they furnish their children with arguments for the defense of that faith? ...it is not surprising to see them abandon a position which they are unable to defend.

The greatest responsibility is your children. If my children turned out badly, I'd feel that nothing I had done was worthwhile.

Teach your children to work, teach your daughters modesty, teach all the virtue of economy. And if not make them saints, at least make them Christians.

Protestant parents still keep a Bible handy in the house, so that the children can study it, and one of the first things the little boys and girls learn is to be righteous and holy and not piss against the wall. They study those passages more than they study any others, except those which incite to masturbation. Those they hunt out and study in private.

The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event.

Parents have no greater responsibility in this world than the bringing up of their children in the right way, and they will have no greater satisfaction as the years pass than to see those children grow in integrity and honesty and make something of their lives.

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.

Train up a child in the way that he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

I've got a life that really matters to me, and that's because of the way I was raised. My ethics are high because my parents did a great job.

It's very important, once you are a parent, that you educate your kid day by day.

My mother taught me what it is to have a sense of humour; my dad, who was a headmaster, everything you need to know about hard work. My dad is the most decent man you could come across.

As a parent, you have to figure out how to shape your kid's character. You want to have human beings who learn about good character. You have to be able to see your child with clarity, see the good side and the bad side of them, and work on the bad side and make them better so they fulfill their potential.

I'm not a goody-two-shoes. I'm just a father with four children.

Parents are supposed to instill a sense of right and wrong in their children and then keep up the due diligence necessary to make sure they don't veer off that path.

At some point, some of these people are going to wake up to find that the great secular assault they see on their children was, in fact, a bogeyman created to hide their own bad parenting. If they can't convince their own kids of the appropriateness of their religion and values, then the religion, the values, or the convincing, must not have been very good.

Kids are great imitators. Give them something great to imitate.

Every day, at home, I have the astonishing and humbling opportunity - together with my wife Sophie - to nurture empathy, compassion, self-love, and a keen sense of justice in our three kids.

We're living in a society where you need to be accountable for your actions, for your behavior - for yourself. To sit back and be reactive would be to allow your children to make big mistakes without the benefit of your wisdom being bestowed on them. It's not what my parents taught me.

I'm going to obviously do my best as a father to set a good example for my children, and I want them to see good examples from our leaders.

When you are bringing up your kids, you hope you have given them some sense of right and wrong, a sense of good and bad.

I'm raising three children. I'm teaching my kids what it means, the Golden Rule, to treat people like you want to be treated.

I'm lucky my parents raised me well.