My mother early on taught us to respect all animals, and I mean all animals - not just cats and dogs but rats and snakes and spiders and fish and wildlife, so I really grew up believing they are just like us and just as deserving of consideration.

Coming from an Asian culture, I was always taught to respect my elders, to be a better listener than a talker.

Don't tell your kids you had an easy birth or they won't respect you. For years I used to wake up my daughter and say, 'Melissa you ripped me to shreds. Now go back to sleep.'.

My parents taught me about the importance of qualities like kindness, respect, and honesty, and I realize how central values like these have been to me throughout my life.

We learned about gratitude and humility - that so many people had a hand in our success, from the teachers who inspired us to the janitors who kept our school clean... and we were taught to value everyone's contribution and treat everyone with respect.

As the mother of two daughters, I have great respect for women. And I don't ever want to lose that.

There is all the difference in the world between teaching children about religion and handing them over to be taught by the religious.

To repay evils with kindness is the religion I was taught to practise, and this will forever be my rule.

Pictures may serve as helps to religion but are only an appendix to idolatry, for the people must be taught to believe in false gods and in the power of saints before they will learn to worship their images.

More people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, my friends, that is true perversion.

I don't think the 9/11 attacks taught us anything we didn't already know about religion. It has long been obvious - even to the deeply religious - that religious fanaticism is an extremely dangerous deranger of otherwise sane and goodhearted people.

Parents and schools should place great emphasis on the idea that it is all right to be different. Racism and all the other 'isms' grow from primitive tribalism, the instinctive hostility against those of another tribe, race, religion, nationality, class or whatever. You are a lucky child if your parents taught you to accept diversity.

There's naught, no doubt, so much the spirit calms as rum and true religion.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

'Little Baby' is a beautiful film about father and daughter relationship which talks of generation gap.

God assigned me a few really important things: this life, this vessel, but also my wife and that relationship, the two of us becoming one and then the family that we've grown with our four daughters.

I've always had a lot of time for servicemen. Yet there's been this bad relationship between civilians and the armed services. We say to soldiers, 'We want you when we want you, but stay away in peacetime. We're proud of you, but keep away from my daughter and don't come drinking in my pub.'

The mother-daughter relationship is the most complex.

When a mother quarrels with a daughter, she has a double dose of unhappiness hers from the conflict, and empathy with her daughter's from the conflict with her. Throughout her life a mother retains this special need to maintain a good relationship with her daughter.

My grandfather was doing business with a Japanese man. In exchange of good relationship the man taught my uncles the art of jiu jitsu. My father couldn't do it because he was very weak, he couldn't do one press-up, so he just sat back and watched, and memorised. What he did was add leverage into the moves.

Ears are made not for hearing but for listening. Listening is an active skill, whereas hearing is passive. Listening is something that we have to work at - it's a relationship with sound. And yet, it's a skill that none of us are taught.

If you want to have a relationship, at some point you have to let yourself get caught.

Once you accept the existence of God - however you define him, however you explain your relationship to him - then you are caught forever with his presence in the center of all things.

Laughter is an important part of a good relationship. It's an immense achievement when you can move from your thinking that your partner is merely an idiot to thinking that they are that wonderfully complex thing called a loveable idiot. And often that means having a little bit of a sense of humour about their flaws.