“Noble ideas, great sentiments have always existed and have always been transmitted, but wars have never ceased.”

In the first three years of life, the foundations of physical and also of psychic health are laid. In these years, the child not only increases in size but passes through great transformations.

To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator.

The development of language is part of the development of the personality, for words are the natural means of expressing thoughts and establishing understanding between people.

The adolescent must never be treated as a child, for that is a stage of life that he has surpassed.

It is fortunate, I think, that nature is not bounded by human reason and by laboratory work and experimentation, for by the laws of pure reason and by microscopic investigation, it might easily have been proved, long before this, that children could not be born.

The child, merely by going on with his life, learns to speak the language belonging to his race. It is like a mental chemistry that takes place in the child.

If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.

No, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was.

This is the age in which language and movement develop. The child must be safeguarded in order that these activities may develop freely.

The ability to see reality in form, in color, in proportion, to be master of the movements of one’s own hand – that is what is necessary.

The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.

The social relations which are the basis of the reproduction of the species are founded upon the continuous union of parents in marriage.

Suddenly, the child becomes very sensitive to the rudeness and humiliations which he had previously suffered with patient indifference.

It would be so simple to allow children, when tired of sitting, to rise, and when tired of writing, to desist, and then their bones would not be twisted.

How can any one paint who cannot grade colors? How can any one write poetry who has not learnt to hear and see?

Man is capable of every great heroism; it was man who found a means of conquering the formidable obstacles of his environment, establishing himself lord of the earth, and laying the foundations of civilization.

It has been women who have breathed gentleness and care into the hard progress of humankind.

The biggest surprise has been making the adjustment after losing a game.

I’ve been homeless. I’ve worked at 7-Eleven.

I have been the only female minister in every government department I’ve worked in.

It’s always been my formula to get the next picture set up before anyone’s seen the last one.

Why it’s been left to me to smooth things over, I don’t know. Dennis Rodman, of all people.

The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person.

I asked a girl who came from America to England, when I was only English, and she admitted she had been to a drama school. And I said, “What did they teach you?” And she said, “They taught me to be a candle burning in an empty room.”