"You've just got to have a sense of respect for the person you have children with. Anger doesn't help anybody. Ultimately you have to say forgiveness is important, and honoring what you had together is important. But it's easy to say and harder to do"
About this Quote
“Anger doesn’t help anybody” lands less as therapy-speak than as a tactical assessment. In custody arrangements, holidays, school events, and the endless logistics of raising kids, anger is expensive. It creates paperwork, escalates lawyers, turns children into witnesses. By naming forgiveness and “honoring what you had together,” she’s also refusing the modern pressure to retroactively declare the entire past fraudulent. The relationship may have failed, but it produced something irrefutable: children. “Honoring” becomes a way of protecting them from becoming collateral in the adults’ rewrite.
The last line is the smartest: “easy to say and harder to do.” It punctures the performance of enlightenment that celebrities are expected to deliver. Kidman admits the gap between the correct script and the lived reality, signaling that forgiveness isn’t a vibe - it’s labor. In that honesty, she makes a public-facing moral stance feel earned rather than branded.
Quote Details
| Topic | Forgiveness |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Kidman, Nicole. (2026, January 16). You've just got to have a sense of respect for the person you have children with. Anger doesn't help anybody. Ultimately you have to say forgiveness is important, and honoring what you had together is important. But it's easy to say and harder to do. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/youve-just-got-to-have-a-sense-of-respect-for-the-92725/
Chicago Style
Kidman, Nicole. "You've just got to have a sense of respect for the person you have children with. Anger doesn't help anybody. Ultimately you have to say forgiveness is important, and honoring what you had together is important. But it's easy to say and harder to do." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/youve-just-got-to-have-a-sense-of-respect-for-the-92725/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"You've just got to have a sense of respect for the person you have children with. Anger doesn't help anybody. Ultimately you have to say forgiveness is important, and honoring what you had together is important. But it's easy to say and harder to do." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/youve-just-got-to-have-a-sense-of-respect-for-the-92725/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2026.





