I can replace things, but I could never replace my wife and kids.
Kids know nothing about racism. They're taught that by adults.
The struggle to create a nation and world of economic and social justice and environmental sanity is not an easy one. The struggle to try and create a more peaceful world will be extremely difficult. But this I know: despair is not an option if we care about our kids and grandchildren. Giving up is not an option if we want to prevent irreparable harm to our planet.
A kid once said to me "Do you get hangovers?" I said, "To get hangovers you have to stop drinking.
In order to develop normally, a child requires progressively more complex joint activity with one or more adults who have an irrational emotional relationship with the child. Somebody's got to be crazy about that kid. That's number one. First, last and always.
I don''t know if I like communism, and I don''t know if I like socialism. But I know that the Breakfast for Children Program feeds my kids. And if you put your hands on that Breakfast for Children Program . . .
Oh, my God. What if you wake up some day, and you're 65 or 75, and you never got your novel or memoir written; or you didn't go swimming in warm pools or oceans because your thighs were jiggly or you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It's going to break your heart. Don't let this happen.
You score goals as a kid. Then you grow up stupid and become a goalkeeper.
We go hard. In everything we do we're going to accomplish our victory and our goal. If it takes a day, a year, or 20 years, we're going to win. I haven't taken a loss because everything I've done has been a working process to win. From being a kid on them turntables to becoming where I am is not a loss. It's a blessing.
If we expect kids to be losers they will be losers; if we expect them to be winners they will be winners. They rise, or fall, to the level of the expectations of those around them, especially their parents and their teachers.
The kids from the streets don't want preaching or messages. They want what they can identify with. They want to hear about the reality of their situation, not fairy tales. They don't care if it's ugly; they just want reality.
About a month ago some kids in my neighborhood were playing hide-and-go-seek and one of them ended up in an abandoned refrigerator. It's all anybody talked about for weeks. I said, 'Who cares? How many kids you know get to die a winner?
We are lending money we don't have to kids who can't pay it back to train them for jobs that no longer exist. That's nuts.
Some kids are so depressed at home and with how people treat them in school that they cut themselves. This happens all over the world - kids who don't want to kill themselves, but nobody understands how much they hurt, so they cut themselves with razor blades.
Yesterday I accidentally hit a little kid with my car. It wasn't serious — nobody saw me.
Kanye took me from a kid who listened to music to a kid who lived music.
I don't want my kids saying, 'My dad was a gangster, so I need to be a gangster. I would rather mine say, 'My dad was a stunna, so I need to be a stunna.'
You know why men make more money than women? Because, in the unlikely event that we're both on the Titanic and it starts to sink, for some reason, you get to leave with the kids and I have to stay - that's why I get the dollar more an hour.
Maybe we'll stop training our kids to stop looking at someone and automatically seeing them as Black or White or of this religion or that one etc, and instead, as a human being. Maybe we can stop forcing our ideas like, "I don't want them to marry this person because they are of this religion or this color" on them.
Differentiation is classroom practice that looks eyeball to eyeball with the reality that kids differ, and the most effective teachers do whatever it takes to hook the whole range of kids on learning.
I'm tired of hearing all this talk from people who don't understand the process of hard work-like little kids in the back seat asking 'Are we there yet?' Get where you're going 1 mile-marker at a time.
Most kids dream of scoring the perfect goal. I've always dreamed of stopping it.
It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools - friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty - and said 'do the best you can with these, they will have to do'. And mostly, against all odds, they do.
I would rather be a little nobody, then to be a evil somebody.
Every maker of video games knows something that the makers of curriculum don't seem to understand. You'll never see a video game being advertised as being easy. Kids who do not like school will tell you it's not because it's too hard. It's because it's--boring
