“Men make different investments than women do. Women tend to invest more of their earnings than men do in their family’s well-being – as much as 10 times more.”

It is still just unbelievable to us that diarrhea is one of the leading causes of child deaths in the world.

Housework comes first, so girls often fall behind in school. Global statistics show that it’s increasingly girls, not boys, who don’t know how to read.

All lives have an equal value.

Any social or cultural change has to be made openly and with people agreeing. You don’t get there by just pushing an outsider’s point of view.

If you don’t have an effective teacher in front of the classroom, you won’t change the trajectory for students.

Having children made us look differently at all these things that we take for granted, like taking your child to get a vaccine against measles or polio.

When we invest in women and girls, we are investing in the people who invest in everyone else.

I realized that the only way to get into a good college was to be valedictorian or salutatorian. So that was my goal.

When we invest in women, we invest in a powerful source of global development.

Women speaking up for themselves and for those around them is the strongest force we have to change the world.

The biggest killers of children around the world are two things: diarrhea and pneumonia. When you think about it, in the United States, kids don’t die of diarrhea anymore, but it’s a huge problem in the developing world.

Now we just really need to do the work, which we’re doing, to get contraceptives out to women worldwide.

We [with Bill Gates] started to make decisions about what we’d invest in. Then I actually started traveling for the foundation. I’ve probably been to India now eight times at least and Africa numerous times.

Bill [Gates] and I believe philanthropy can only be effective if it starts things and proves whether they actually work or not. That’s the place that governments often don’t want to, or can’t, work.

I think the Americans need to understand that a lot of times the children are bored in school, and that is why they are not staying in.

I think it’s very important that we instill in our kids that it has nothing to do with their name or their situation that they’re growing up in; it has to do with who they are as an individual.

You could have 50 different states having 50 different regulations until they were all litigated out.

Part of spiritual and emotional maturity is recognizing that it’s not like you’re going to try to fix yourself and become a different person. You remain the same person, but you become awakened.

I’ve got friends in the different teams I’ve played for, but family is the most important thing to me. That will always be the case.

All the religions are true, they just see a different part of the elephant.

We’re merely one tree with various types, shapes and sizes of leaves that all wave differently in the breeze.

Every being cries out in silence to be read differently. Do not be indifferent to these cries.

The whole idea is just to continue to make movies that I enjoy playing and that audiences are going to enjoy me in just to put out quality on a lot of different levels.

Being still and doing nothing are two completely different things.