'Don't you be afraid of hurting the boy,' he says.

If one's son begins acting kind of gay, then when he is spanked he'll change his behavior.

When you can't do anything else to a boy, you can make him wash his face.

[P]ain is a marvelous purifier. . . It is not necessary to beat the child into submission; a little bit of pain goes a long way for a young child. However, the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely.

I looked at him and I went [sternly] "Uh, God bless you." Yeah. I said it like that. I said it like, "God bless you." Which, you know, is God bless you, but it kinda sounded like "Cover your fucking mouth." [loud cheer from audience] Yeah. Incognito. I turned to the guy. I say-I say God bless you, by the way, when someone sneezes. I don't say bless you. I don't say that because...I'm not the Lord. I can't do that...I'm just a messenger for big guns up stairs, ya know what I'm saying? And I never go with gesundheit. I don't who even says that. If I say gesundheit, I'll feel like I'm honoring Hitler. Like I should go like, [Nazi salute] "GESUNGHEIT!" I end up on the History Channel because a guy sneezed.

No, I'm just a very naughty boy. I do all sorts of bad things. I kick kittens. I make rude gestures at nuns.

Did you know that when a baby poops its diaper, you're not supposed to hit him with a rolled up newspaper?

[Edith] "If you tell a child he's bad long enough and often enough, he will act it out."

“I've done my best, but the boy is unteachable. He doubts everything, and contests each point of theology as if it were required to meet the same tests of logic and consistency that prevail in the world of science.”
“In other words, he expects your doctrines to make sense.”
“He is unwilling to accept the idea that some things remain mysteries, comprehensible only to the mind of God. Ambiguity makes him saucy, and paradox causes open rebellion.”
“An obnoxious child.”

Beating is the worst, and therefore the last means to be us'd in the correction of children, and that only in the cases of extremity, after all gently ways have been try'd, and proved unsuccessful; which, if well observ'd, there will very seldom be any need of blows.

One of our children when he was two or three years old used to rush at me when he had been naughty, and beat against me, and what he wanted by this monstrous behavior was an affirmation of love. And I would put my arms around him and hold him very tight until the dragon was gone and the loving small boy had returned.

"I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: "He is nothing but a boy — a little boy!

Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers — not the defined.

You can't always be too fussy about what you say to a young boy. Really, sometimes, you should take him into your confidence, into your life, make him a part of your life.