Family Discussions Quotes

I had the good fortune to spend hours with my parents around the dinner table having debates on politics and economics.

There is a list of things I'm not allowed to discuss at the dinner table! I am extraordinarily passionate about the Black Death, which is not something most people are into.

No, I got a GED in my 30s. My kids know that I never stop learning, and they know I love reading. I have books overflowing everywhere. I am current on today's events and I read the paper every day, and we talk about it, so they see that appetite.

Learning can take place in the backyard if there is a human being there who cares about the child. Before learning computers, children should learn to read first. They should sit around the dinner table and hear what their parents have to say and think.

When I go to Ohio to visit relatives on holidays, I am often astonished by the level of casual dismissal offered up by way of discussion.

There comes a point, in any kind of, whether it's in your family discussions or business or whatever, where you finally have to get over the making of the points and now let's see if we can find common ground.

My parents always asked me what I thought, listened to my opinions, articulated their diagnoses of our challenges at home and abroad, and shared their ideas for how to build a more equal and prosperous country. I always felt part of their call to serve and part of my father's journey.

I was raised by a single psychologist mother and we spent every evening sitting at the kitchen table and dissecting our emotions and speculating about the inner life of everyone we knew.

We talked about politics constantly in my family growing up in North Carolina. There were always debates. Being of Greek background, it's in our blood to drink coffee and talk politics.

Neither of my parents are involved in politics or anything like that, but my dad is political, certainly, and we would have always talked about politics and religion and money, and all those things that you're not supposed to talk about at the dinner table, we did.

I grew up with my parents in the kitchen discussing the audition my dad had that day or moaning about something or other in the industry, so it was unglamourised and normalised for me from a very young age.

If your kitchen table is like mine, you sit there at night before you put the kids to bed and you talk about what you need. You talk about how much you are worried about being able to pay the bills. Ladies and gentlemen, that is not a worry John McCain has to worry about. It's a pretty hard experience. He'll have to figure out which of the seven kitchen tables to sit at.

Dad was a pure entrepreneur. The dinner conversations weren't like, 'Did the Yankees win today?'

My own kids were with me in Berlin when Germany was reunited, and they were with me in Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed. We talked about these things at the dinner table, at their schools, with their friends.

When my brothers and I were young, my mom, a Democrat, and my dad, a Republican, used to lead freewheeling discussions at our dinner table. The only rule was paying attention when others were talking, and no interrupting.

People worry that if they buy an annuity and then die before the policy starts to pay off, their heirs will lose out. I tell them, "What you should be more worried about is if you outlive your money, you will have to move in with your kids. Ask your kids which of these outcomes they are more worried about."

Don't take up a man's time talking about the smartness of your children; he wants to talk to you about the smartness of his children.

I think Grace [Dunham] and I are always working from a personal place, and the fact that these were issues that we'd been talking about in our own families really clicked, but also Jason's [Benjamin] passion about it and his clear sense that this was going to be something emotional and remarkable to watch. It was very hard not get excited about it and want to help in any way we could.

My wife and I will often have conversations about 'Good Times' and 'The Jeffersons' and 'Sanford and Son.' They were doing incredible stuff that was very funny but also very socially conscious.

I grew up with a lot of dinner table conversations about health care and ways in which the system was inadequate for the needs of many of the patients they took care of.

I think that sometimes kids use the show as a jumping off point for talking about things with their parents.

My parents were really political. The news was very important in our home. We basically had dinner every night while watching the news, and then we'd discuss it with our parents.

In college, I had a course in Latin, and one day the word "divorce" came up. I always figured it came from some root that meant "divide." In truth, it comes from "divertere," which means "to divert." I believe that. All divorce does is divert you, taking you away from everything you thought you knew and everything you thought you wanted and steering you into all kinds of other stuff, like discussions about your mother's girdle and whether she should marry someone else.

My daughter loves stories about my childhood, and we both love discussing women's issues. She's a wise and mature ten-year-old.

I always read all these books about the slaves. My mother is very educated. My father would talk to us like we were grown men. We never knew what he was talking about half the time.