But it's important, while we are supporting lessons in respecting others, to remember that many of our youngest kids need to learn to respect themselves. You learn your worth from the way you are treated.

Anna Quindlen

Categorized in : Kids Important Respect

And I don't have to listen to a sermon to know what to think or feel about them. It's almost as if I absorbed completely what mattered most to me, and the rest could go.

knows feels thinking

Prosecutors insist they are mounting a "thorough investigation," which sometimes means thorough and sometimes, historically, has meant long enough to let the fire burn down in an incendiary case. A thorough investigation is fine; an interminable one is disgraceful.

fire justice mean

A friend and I flew south with our children. During the week we spent together I took off my shoes, let down my hair, took apart my psyche, cleaned the pieces, and put them together again in much improved condition. I feel like a car that's just had a tune-up. Only another woman could have acted as the mechanic.

women hair children

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around, and nearly every book represents what my son's third grade teacher refers to as a "teachable moment.

teacher book son

If we really feel like we're comfortable in our own skins now, we have a longer period of time to live out that kind of third or fourth act of our life.

skins periods kind

It makes me angry to think that . . . female sanitation workers will spend their days doing a job most of their co-workers think they can't handle, and then they will go home and do another job most of their co-workers don't want.

home jobs thinking

For most of my life the only ceremonies I've been to at which women were the stars were weddings. So I like weddings.

ceremony stars

Like cellulite creams or hair-loss tonics, capital punishment is one of those panaceas that isn't. Only it costs a whole lot more.

punishment loss hair

It's what the Taliban does in Afghanistan, it's what gets done in the Middle East, and it's clearly something that certain mainly conservative groups in the United States would like to do. They miss the good old days, when men were men and women were nothing.

middle-east missing men

Sure smokers have made personal choices. And they pay for those choices every day, whether sitting through an airline flight dyingfor a smoke, or dying for a smoke in the oncology wing of a hospital. The tobacco companies have not paid nearly enough for the killing.

addiction choices wings

All things being equal, I would choose a woman over a man in order to even the balance of power, to insinuate a different perspective into the process, to give young women something to shoot for and someone to look up to. But all things are rarely equal.

careers men order

Each instance of sexual harassment has to be judged on its merits. Facts, timing, motives, credibility: all must be considered before we make up our own minds what to believe.

merit mind believe

No one thinks anything silly is suitable when they are an adolescent. Such an enormous share of their own behavior is silly that they lose all proper perspective on silliness, like a baker who is nauseated by the sight of his own eclairs. This provides another good argument for the emerging theory that the best use of cryogenics is to freeze all human beings when they are between the ages of twelve and nineteen.

sight silly thinking

The problem with freedom is that you just can't go back. Once people see what it means to be free people, you can't go back. So they're going to keep nattering on about this and that, and maybe they'll make another stab at de-funding the fabulous Planned Parenthood or something of the sort. To my mind, it's just not going to work.

mind mean people

Anyone who has breast-fed knows two things for sure: The baby wants to be fed at the most inopportune times, in the most inopportune places, and the baby will prevail.... And so the baby should, and the mom, too. Sometimes a breast is a sexual object, and sometimes it's a food delivery system, and one need not preclude nor color the other.

color mom baby

I know the difference now between dedication and infatuation. That doesn't mean I don't still get an enormous kick out of infatuation;: the exciting ephemera, the punch in the stomach, the

dedication heart mean

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

joy beauty thinking

If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children.

mother children years

One of the things that got me on this topic for this book was that when I was researching the column I wrote in 2009 saying that I was stepping down from my column at "Newsweek" because I wanted to make room for newer, fresh voices out there, I discovered that in the year I was born, 1952, the average life expectancy of an American was 68. I was shocked by that figure and every time I mention it I hear a gasp from somebody in the crowd. Now, of course, we're more or less at 80, so that means that we've gotten 12 additional years.

average mean book

The misdeeds of ordinary men can be buried with them, and their lives described in half-truths that are really half-lies. But not a public man. Particularly not this one.

ordinary men lying