Samuel Johnson Quotes

From where can your authority and license as a parent come from, when you who are old, do worse things?

I brought you in this world, and I can take you out!

If you're the parent, be a parent. You know what I mean? I'm a parent. I have daughters.

The child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering.

It's difficult to keep that perspective, I think, as a parent: to know your boundaries as to what's good parenting or just projecting your own expectations on your kids. That's the hardest.

When my children were young, I was very cocky. I thought I could maintain total control.

Parents learn the uses of power and its limits. They can insist on certain outward behavior but cannot change inner attitudes. They can require obedience but not goodness - and certainly not love.

For parents to restrain the inclinations of their children in marriage is an usurped power.

Disobedient parents are a great trouble to their children.

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

Decent responsible parents are a royal pain- that's how you know when you have them [such parents].

Always obey your parents. When they are present. This is the best policy in the long run. Because if you don't, they will make you. Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgment.

I always feel like the odd mom out, because trust me when I tell you I'm on my girls. And every time I am, I know from the outside it looks like I'm an overbearing, controlling parent. But I don't think we have any responsibility to anybody else but our kids and ourselves.

When I travel with my kids abroad, I am not myself, but I'm more a father who wants to protect them. Sometimes, I am even aggressive about certain things and get surprised seeing myself like that: for instance, when people want to take pictures of them. I am fine if they want to take my pictures, but they are not public property.

Parents don't need government to raise their kids. That's their job. But government can help them protect their children from influences they may not want their kids exposed to.

You want to be a good parent and you want to be a friend, and it's hard to be both. You have to balance it as well as you can.

When children are small, parents should run their lives and not the other way around.

I think parenting is very different now. We're totally governed by our children!

Parents, you know, can be terrible.

Our need for certainty in an endeavor as uncertain as raising children makes explicit 'how-to-parent' strategies both seductive and dangerous.

Different parents have different standards for their children.

The problem with children is that you have to put up with their parents.

I'm worried about parents who aren't parenting.

All men would be tyrants if they could.

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak.