“Well, knowledge is a fine thing, and mother Eve thought so; but she smarted so severely for hers, that most of her daughters have been afraid of it since.”

Wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues.

I hope some future day will bring me the happiness of seeing my family again collected under our own roof, happy in ourselves and blessed in each other.

The heart is long, very long in receiving the convictions that is forced upon it by reason… affection still lingers in the Bosom, even after esteem has taken its flight.

Wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

No one is without their difficulties, whether in High, or low Life, & every person knows best where their own shoe pinches.

Dark and sour humours, especially those which have a spice of malevolence in them, are vastly disagreeable. Such men have no music in their souls.

I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.

Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.

I acknowledge myself a unitarian

If we expect to inherit the blessings of our Fathers, we should return a little more to their primitive Simplicity of Manners.

How few have souls capable of so noble an undertaking!

Some disagreeable circumstances that attend my situation.

These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed.

A little of what you call frippery is very necessary towards looking like the rest of the world.

That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute

Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.

I have always been happy to have daughters rather than sons. You never really can be mad at girls for anything in life.

I never neglected my daughters – quite the opposite – but I suppose I could have and should have spent more time with them.

As astronomy is the daughter of idleness, geometry is the daughter of property.

I knew ‘Mars Needs Moms! ‘ would be a movie seconds after the title came to mind. Similarly, I also knew that my daughter would be calling me a dork as a default term of endearment eventually.

I love my daughter, but there’s a certain feeling, a certain emotion when you got a granddaughter, you know?

Absent parents aren’t abusive per se. They’re neglectful. They love in a very imperfect way. There are parents like that, and they do love their daughters and sons, but they’re not parents in the way that we might think of it.

I actually started working on Madagascar before my daughter was born.

But, you know, when I look at somebody like Hillary Clinton, who sits there and tells her daughter and a government official that no, this was a terrorist attack, and then tells everybody else that it was a video. Where I came from, they call that a lie.