Top 45 Barbara Bush Quotes

I’m not being outspoken or pro or con abortion.

Family and friends and faith are the most important things in your life and you should be building friendships.

Everything I worry about would be better if more people could read, write and comprehend.

Well, look at what people are doing for returned veterans now. The wounded warriors. They’re working hard to make the wounded veterans feel that they are loved and welcomed home, unlike Vietnam. It was not a very kind, gentle world then. I think we are kinder and gentler.

It seems to me I spent my life in car pools, but you know, that’s how I kept track of what was going on.

I’m not a competitive person, and I think women like me because they don’t think I’m competitive, just nice.

I’m not going to jump out of airplanes or anything like someone else I know.

My son, George, has been a bad, bad boy! Right, George?

Bias has to be taught. If you hear your parents downgrading women or people of different backgrounds, why, you are going to do that.

Raising George Walker was not easy.

You know, for one glorious half hour, I was the mother of the president-elect.

I’m a great believer that the most important years are the sort of early years but the preschool years and then into the first and second grades. If you get a good base in the first and second grade and you can read, you can do anything.

Giving frees us from the familiar territory of our own needs by opening our mind to the unexplained worlds occupied by the needs of others.

Nancy Reagan was a perfectionist, and I am not.

Believe in something larger than yourself… get involved in the big ideas of your time.

You can’t tell a 6-year-old your sister is going to die.

The personal things should be left out of, in my opinion, out of platforms and conventions.

Three publishers came to me at the White House after George lost and said, ‘We would like to publish your book.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t have a book,’ and they said well it’s a well known fact that you have kept diaries.

I hate the fact that people think ‘compromise’ is a dirty word.

I’m tired now of the elections.

It was the dumbest thing I had ever seen, but it’s a family thing, and I guess it’s clean.

When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.

I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell this to my children, they just about throw up.

You just don’t luck into things as much as you’d like to think you do. You build step by step, whether it’s friendships or opportunities.

If human beings are perceived as potentials rather than problems, as possessing strengths instead of weaknesses, as unlimited rather that dull and unresponsive, then they thrive and grow to their capabilities.

I want to still be able to garden while I can bend over.

I mean Afghanistan is a very rugged, complicated country.

I really built myself up, darn it, to be very strong.

I’ve done it all.

Raising five boys is a handful, trust me.

I have a pig valve.

I’m taking a vow not to advise.

The personal things should be left out of platforms at conventions. You can argue yourself blue in the face, and you’re not going to change each other’s minds. It’s a waste of your time and my time.

I hate abortions, but just could not make that choice for someone else.

You have to love your children unselfishly. That’s hard. But it’s the only way.

Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the president’s spouse. I wish him well!

Let’s judge a man on what he’s done.

I really feel very strongly that the person who runs for office is the courageous one, and the one who everybody has to know.

I’m worried about parents who aren’t parenting.

People who worry about their hair all the time, frankly, are boring.

You try to do something every single day that will help an American or maybe someone overseas.

You may think the president is all-powerful, but he is not. He needs a lot of guidance from the Lord.

Nobody likes a child to die or losing an election.

You don’t just luck into things as much as you would like to think you do. You build step by step, whether it is friendships or opportunities.

The winner of the hoop race will be the first to realize her dream, not society’s dream, her own personal dream.