“Bias has to be taught. If you hear your parents downgrading women or people of different backgrounds, why, you are going to do that.”

It seems to me I spent my life in car pools, but you know, that’s how I kept track of what was going on.

I decided I ought to pick a project that would not be controversial, that would not really cost the government a lot of money.

If more people could read, write, and comprehend, we could be much closer to solving so many of the other problems our country faces today.

The Titanic was built by professionals. The Ark was built by volunteers.

Never lose sight of the fact that the most important yardstick of your success will be how you treat other people – your family, friends, and coworkers, and even strangers you meet along the way.

I think togetherness is a very important ingredient to family life.

I hate abortions, but just could not make that choice for someone else.

I may be the only mother in America who knows exactly what their child is up to all the time.

I love talking to people, but what I really love is to feel you’re doing something instead of sitting home and twiddling your thumbs.

Family and friends and faith are the most important things in your life and you should be building friendships.

I don’t like attacking.

I’m not going to jump out of airplanes or anything like someone else I know.

Nancy Reagan was a perfectionist, and I am not.

You may think the president is all-powerful, but he is not. He needs a lot of guidance from the Lord.

Giving frees us from the familiar territory of our own needs by opening our mind to the unexplained worlds occupied by the needs of others.

I mean you can learn how to build a bullet or build a gun or build a bomb on the Internet.

My parents taught me: Do not rely on a man. Not rely on it that you get married and it pays for you. That’s what I figured. I have always paid my own bills.

…I had to point at Hanna. But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. I tried to tell myself that I had known nothing of what she had done when I chose her.

In view of this and other things, I demand forgiveness for being so obviously impressed with my own parents.

Both of my parents are surfers, of course, so they understood where my passion for surfing was at and I guess they saw the talent that I had.

My parents, products of the Great Depression, were successful people, but lived in a state of constant fear that my sister and I, and they, would sink into the kind of economic insecurity that their generation knew so well.

My parents were not pushy or anything like that. I think my mom was still expecting me to be an astronaut, but now she is very happy that I’m not doing that.

Although I was born to famous parents, I know and feel the problems of ordinary citizens.

Physical punishment teaches children that the larger, stronger person has the power to get his way, whether or not he is in the right, and they may resent this in the parent-for life.