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Parenting & Family Quote by Nicole Kidman

"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

Kidman’s phrasing has the calm, camera-ready clarity of someone who’s learned to translate private mess into public language without sounding like a Hallmark card. The key move is how she shifts the unit of concern from the couple to the co-parenting partnership: “the person you have children with” isn’t romantic, it’s procedural. Love can evaporate; shared responsibility doesn’t. That’s the subtext of “respect” here - not admiration, but a baseline ethic that keeps the family ecosystem functioning after the relationship story has cracked.

“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

TopicForgiveness
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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.

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About the Author

Nicole Kidman

Nicole Kidman (born June 21, 1967) is a Actress from Australia.

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