Love is moral even without legal marriage but marriage is immoral without love.

Corporal punishment is as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one.

When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination.

At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.

The mother is the most precious possessions of the nation, so precious that society advances its highest well-being when it protects the functions of the mother.

Education can give you a skill, but a liberal education can give you dignity.

Everything, everything in war is barbaric... But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.

Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.

The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen.

The belief that we some day shall be able to prevent war is to me one with the belief in the possibility of making humanity really human.

Love requires peace, love will dream; it cannot live upon the remnants of our time and our personality.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine someone watching a boot stamping on a human face - forever...and ‘liking’ it.

We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.

How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms

I take responsibility only for the future, not the past. The past can't hurt you the way the future can.

The way to avoid evil is not by maiming our passions, but by compelling them to yield their vigor to our moral nature.

I don't take myself too seriously. I enjoy what I do. I enjoy making people laugh.

I think people love shows that are relationship-oriented. I think they love family shows.

But that's how the heart is. Stubborn and foolish.

I live on hairspray. The bigger the hair, the closer to God.

My first novel, Leaving Atlanta, took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead.