35 Quotes by Maxwell King

Fred was deeply wounded when one of those friends decided that it offended his sense of ethics to socialize with people who came from a background of privilege and wealth. He dropped Fred, which, to Joanne’s annoyance, further worried Fred about his family’s money.

Academics who’ve studied Rogers’s work often marvel at how young children calm down, pay attention, and learn so much from this television production – and how they remain calm and centered for some time after watching The Neighborhood. Rogers himself put great care into the pacing of the program to help children slow down and steady themselves.

Fred Rogers never – ever – let the urgency of work or life impede his focus on what he saw as basic human values: integrity, respect, responsibility, fairness and compassion, and of course his signature value, kindness.

His lesson is as simple and direct as Fred was: Human kindness will always make life better.

Children raised on the ethic of the ‘Neighborhood’, though less likely to make millions on an innovative hedge-fund scheme on Wall Street, are more likely to grow up with the kind of social and emotional understanding that can lead to a happy balanced life.

To Fred Rogers, every child required special attention, because every child needed assurance that he or she was someone who mattered.

Good people aren’t always good. They just try to be.

Our job in life,” he said at a graduation ceremony at Thiel College in Greenville, Pennsylvania, early in his career, in 1969, “is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is – that each of us has something that no one else has – or ever will have – something inside which is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness, and to provide ways of developing its expression.