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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

It always helps to have people we love beside us when we have to do difficult things in life. – FRED ROGERS.

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news,” Rogers had told his young viewers, “my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.