Maggie Smith Quotes

The trouble with children is that they're not returnable.

I was the one in charge of the kids growing up.

Kids are important.

I've always been interested in creating things for kids.

I tell my kids, "Look, your life is a video game, and I have to get you from level zero to 18 as an independent person with all your skills and limbs intact. Every time you hit your brother or throw food, you're taking us all back."

I want to give my kids the world, but I also want them to appreciate everything, to succeed, to be good people, to enjoy life. This is my most important role. If I fail at this, I fail at everything.

Real life, raising kids and trying to raise them to be good people takes a lot of work. It's all about (appearing) effortless, yet there's so much effort. You do it the best you can.

If I screw up raising my kids, nothing I achieve will matter much.

The dream for any parent is you want to raise happy, healthy, responsible, compassionate, kind kids. We all have a responsibility to do that.

I've always worked really hard, and the hardest thing I've ever done is have kids!

It is no hard matter to get children; but after they are born, then begins the trouble, solicitude, and care rightly to train, principle, and bring them up.

Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.

Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.

Hopefully I'll be able to mature one of these days, get serious, and at least have them [kids] pretty fast.

Fatherhood, to me, isn't something you do for awards or acclaim. It's a privilege and a huge responsibility

Having and raising children is doing something with your life! ... And I have to say that having your kids is one of the greatest things you can do.

The only people who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.

You become responsible for a human being, and a lot of people talk about how they've never felt love like this before. You hear all these things before you have a child, and they're all kind of true. It's just dealing with the overwhelming responsibility of like I'm the protector of this child that affected me the most.

In the end, the most important thing to me is that I've raised three kids. I know that'll be the most important accomplishment of my life and it is the most easily obtainable, because all you have to do is pay attention. It is hard work and most people don't realize that's the real gift they are getting in terms of goals and success and accomplishments.

Kids and violent TV, violent TV and violence, violence and kids. The only people missing from this discussion are the parents. Where are we? Gone. Abdicated.

I don't want to speak for all people who don't have children, but maybe there's a discomfort with kids and the amount of attention they demand, by just being the age that they are.

Parenting is about being competent and responsible. It's not about gender, necessarily.

We know that every father has a personal responsibility to do right by their kids - to encourage them to turn off the video games and pick up a book; to teach them the difference between right and wrong; to show them through our own example the value in treating one another as we wish to be treated. And most of all, to play an active and engaged role in their lives.

Though motherhood is the most important of all the professions - requiring more knowledge than any other department in human affairs - there was no attention given to preparation for this office.

If you have kids, in my opinion, your priorities better shift to them.