Hayden Panettiere

I was planning to go into law or politics. I was well known for my public speaking. I went to an all-girl boarding school with uniforms. It was very posh for someone like me who came from a world where my parents showed beagles and sold dog products out of a yellow caravan.

If you’re bringing up kids, you just want to smother them with love and praise and enthusiasm. So I don’t think you can mollycoddle your kids too much really.

I was born on a plantation, and things weren’t so good. We didn’t have any money. I never thought of the word ‘poor’ ’til I got to be a man, but when you live in a house that you can always peek out of and see what kind of day it is, you’re not doing so well. And your rest room is not inside the house.

I realized that kids everywhere go for the same stuff; and seeing as we’d done it in England, there’s no reason why we couldn’t do it in America too.

They say that every child learns from their mother – it’s ingrained from babyhood.

The more risks you allow children to take, the better they learn to take care of themselves. If you never let them take any risks, then I believe they become very prone to injury.

We all acquire damage as infants and children and we work on removing those scars all of our lives. You won’t heal everything, but what’s important is the work.

As a kid, I was making a building with blocks in our playroom. I didn’t have enough. So I asked my younger brother Robert if I could borrow some of his. He said, ‘Okay, but you have to give them back when you’re done.’ I used all of my blocks, then all of his blocks, and when I was done I had a great building, which I then glued together. Robert never did get those blocks back.

I was shy when I was a kid, I was very shy, but now I think I’ve improved a lot. I can speak OK with the media and with the people. My English is still bad but I feel a little bit better now than before.

Kids instinctively know – although they will argue to the contrary – that they really are not mature enough to make good decisions on some important issues.

I have so much more to go through as a young lady. But oh my God. I feel like I can do anything.

You don’t want to be with a boy who is too stupid to appreciate a smart young lady. There is no boy who is cute enough or interesting enough to stop you from getting your education.

I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don’t make up their minds, someone will do it for them.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

Cotton was a force of nature. There’s a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.