‘All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.’ – Abraham Lincoln

‘Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.’ – William Makepeace Thackeray

‘The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father.’ – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

‘The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.’ – Theodore Hesburgh

‘My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.’ – Mark Twain

‘Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.’ – George Eliot

‘We are born of love; Love is our mother.’ – Rumi

‘Mama was my greatest teacher, a teacher of compassion, love and fearlessness. If love is sweet as a flower, then my mother is that sweet flower of love.’ – Stevie Wonder

‘Mother’s love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.’ – Erich Fromm

‘My mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.’ – Pablo Picasso

‘A mother’s arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.’ – Victor Hugo

‘The influence of a mother upon the lives of her children cannot be measured. They know and absorb her example and attitudes when it comes to questions of honesty, temperance, kindness, and industry.’ – Billy Graham

‘I do not like broccoli. And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m President of the United States and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.’ – George H. W. Bush

‘In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.’ – Alice Walker

‘My mother is black, from Grenada, so my blackness was always there, but It wasn’t until I started hanging with the upperclassmen black actors at my high school that I really got my roots in being a black American, which is a distinctly different identity and experience.’ – Amanda Seales

‘When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.’ – Sophia Loren

‘It may be possible to gild pure gold, but who can make his mother more beautiful? – Mahatma Gandhi’ – Mahatma Gandhi

‘Sooner or later, we will have to recognise that the Earth has rights, too, to live without pollution. What mankind must know is that human beings cannot live without Mother Earth, but the planet can live without humans.’ – Evo Morales

‘If a country is to be corruption free and become a nation of beautiful minds, I strongly feel there are three key societal members who can make a difference. They are the father, the mother and the teacher.’ – A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

‘A mother’s happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.’ – Honore de Balzac

‘My mother’s wonderful. To me she’s perfection.’ – Michael Jackson

‘The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom.’ – Henry Ward Beecher

‘When I was born I was so ugly the doctor slapped my mother.’ – Rodney Dangerfield

‘The natural state of motherhood is unselfishness. When you become a mother, you are no longer the center of your own universe. You relinquish that position to your children.’ – Jessica Lange

‘Whatever you do, do with determination. You have one life to live; do your work with passion and give your best. Whether you want to be a chef, doctor, actor, or a mother, be passionate to get the best result.’ – Alia Bhatt

‘Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life.’ – Sophocles

‘My mother used to tell me man gives the award, God gives the reward. I don’t need another plaque.’ – Denzel Washington

‘A good wife is one who serves her husband in the morning like a mother does, loves him in the day like a sister does and pleases him like a prostitute in the night.’ – Chanakya

‘My mother is a walking miracle.’ – Leonardo DiCaprio

‘A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.’ – Robert Frost

‘An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.’ – Rudyard Kipling

‘I was a queen, and you took away my crown; a wife, and you killed my husband; a mother, and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long.’ – Marie Antoinette

‘Peace is the beauty of life. It is sunshine. It is the smile of a child, the love of a mother, the joy of a father, the togetherness of a family. It is the advancement of man, the victory of a just cause, the triumph of truth.’ – Menachem Begin

‘You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer.’ – Thich Nhat Hanh

‘My mother had a saying: ‘Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you’re not the last.’ – Kamala Harris’ – Kamala Harris

‘My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent.’ – Ruth Bader Ginsburg

‘When your mother asks, ‘Do you want a piece of advice?’ it is a mere formality. It doesn’t matter if you answer yes or no. You’re going to get it anyway.’ – Erma Bombeck

‘If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.’ – Sigmund Freud

‘I owe much to mother. She had an expert’s understanding, but also approached art emotionally.’ – David Rockefeller

‘I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.’ – Eleanor Roosevelt

‘The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.’ – Albert Ellis

‘No man succeeds without a good woman behind him. Wife or mother, if it is both, he is twice blessed indeed.’ – Godfrey Winn

‘My mother thinks I am the best. And I was raised to always believe what my mother tells me.’ – Diego Maradona

‘The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it.’ – Chief Joseph

‘My mother tongue is Telugu. I was born and brought up in Tamil Nadu.’ – Aishwarya Rajesh

‘Necessity… the mother of invention.’ – Plato

‘My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.’ – Maya Angelou

‘Poverty is the mother of crime.’ – Marcus Aurelius

‘Memory is the mother of all wisdom.’ – Aeschylus

‘If you can’t be in awe of Mother Nature, there’s something wrong with you.’ – Alex Trebek

‘I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.’ – Marguerite Duras

‘Diligence is the mother of good luck.’ – Benjamin Franklin

‘I have six brothers and sisters. My mother has six kids from two different marriages. And we would just sit around making fun of each other’s dad, and all our dads had real problems.’ – Michael Che

‘Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.’ – Ralph Waldo Emerson

‘Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.’ – Francisco Goya

‘I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.’ – Emily Dickinson

‘Expectation is the mother of all frustration.’ – Antonio Banderas

‘Education commences at the mother’s knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character.’ – Hosea Ballou

‘Mother Nature is always speaking. She speaks in a language understood within the peaceful mind of the sincere observer. Leopards, cobras, monkeys, rivers and trees; they all served as my teachers when I lived as a wanderer in the Himalayan foothills.’ – Radhanath Swami

‘Fear is the mother of morality.’ – Friedrich Nietzsche

‘Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.’ – Freeman Dyson

‘Being a mother adds an enormous amount of stress to your life. You need to make sure you’re there for everything.’ – Kate Spade

‘Most people marry their mother. I married my father.’ – Wayne Gretzky

‘The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.’ – Frank Lloyd Wright

‘My doctor told me I would never walk again. My mother told me I would. I believed my mother.’ – Wilma Rudolph

‘A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother’s love endures through all.’ – Washington Irving

‘Water is life’s matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.’ – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

‘Silence is the mother of truth.’ – Benjamin Disraeli

‘I was born by myself but carry the spirit and blood of my father, mother and my ancestors. So I am really never alone. My identity is through that line.’ – Ziggy Marley

‘A child’s first teacher is its mother.’ – Peng Liyuan

‘Every mother is like Moses. She does not enter the promised land. She prepares a world she will not see.’ – Pope Paul VI

‘The mob is the mother of tyrants.’ – Diogenes

‘For when a child is born the mother also is born again.’ – Gilbert Parker

‘A mother is not a person to lean on but a person to make leaning unnessary.’ – Dorothy Canfield Fisher

‘My mother loved children – she would have given anything if I had been one.’ – Groucho Marx

‘That strong mother doesn’t tell her cub, Son, stay weak so the wolves can get you. She says, Toughen up, this is reality we are living in.’ – Lauryn Hill

‘Hypocrisy is the mother of all evil and racial prejudice is still her favourite child.’ – Don King

‘Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother.’ – Oprah Winfrey

‘I can always tell when the mother in law’s coming to stay; the mice throw themselves on the traps.’ – Les Dawson

‘I am a daughter, a sister, a wife and a mother. I am a friend of women and I am their advocate.’ – Carre Otis

‘All the riches in the world do not come close to the happiness of having children and being a mother.’ – Jocelyn Wildenstein

‘Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.’ – Ambrose Bierce

‘Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am.’ – Henry Louis Gates

‘When I pray, I always thank Mother Nature for all the beauty in the world. It’s about having an attitude of gratitude.’ – Miranda Kerr

‘My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, ‘You’re tearing up the grass’; ‘We’re not raising grass,’ Dad would reply. ‘We’re raising boys.” – Harmon Killebrew

‘Ladies and gentlemen, my mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you!’ – George M. Cohan

‘Mother Nature is the great equalizer. You can’t get away from it.’ – Christopher Heyerdahl

‘My mother’s love has always been a sustaining force for our family, and one of my greatest joys is seeing her integrity, her compassion, her intelligence reflected in my daughters.’ – Michelle Obama

‘The severe household has no fierce slaves, but it is the affectionate mother.’ – Han Fei

‘Mother’s Day is a bittersweet day for many of us. We all have mothers, but some of us have lost them.’ – Faith Salie

‘My mother is a Chitrapur Saraswat from Mangalore and half-Telugu, and my father is a Bohri Muslim. My mother’s father, J Rameshwar Rao, was the Raja of Wanaparthy, a principality of Hyderabad. He was influenced by the socialist movement and became the first Raja to give up his title.’ – Aditi Rao Hydari

‘Women have always been the strong ones of the world. The men are always seeking from women a little pillow to put their heads down on. They are always longing for the mother who held them as infants.’ – Coco Chanel

‘I don’t think children’s inner feelings have changed. They still want a mother and father in the very same house; they want places to play.’ – Beverly Cleary

‘Don’t forget Mother’s Day. Or as they call it in Beverly Hills, Dad’s Third Wife Day.’ – Jay Leno

‘Every girl should use what Mother Nature gave her before Father Time takes it away.’ – Laurence J. Peter

‘Leisure is the Mother of Philosophy.’ – Thomas Hobbes

‘The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.’ – Mother Teresa

‘I basically started performing for my mother, going, ‘Love me!’ What drives you to perform is the need for that primal connection. When I was little, my mother was funny with me, and I started to be charming and funny for her, and I learned that by being entertaining, you make a connection with another person.’ – Robin Williams

‘Being a mother is the best thing that ever happened to me. Before you have your first baby you are a girl and then you become a mother. There is no transition into being a woman; you literally become a mum and being a mum means you always love someone else more than yourself and it is an unexplainable situation.’ – Brigitte Nielsen

‘Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.’ – Voltaire

‘I grew up to have my father’s looks, my father’s speech patterns, my father’s posture, my father’s opinions, and my mother’s contempt for my father.’ – Jules Feiffer

‘I want to make as much money as I possibly can so that when my day comes, my mother and sister is fine. My close friends are fine. They don’t have to worry about anything ever again.’ – Tyler, The Creator

‘I’m not Mother Teresa, but I’m not Charles Manson, either.’ – Mike Tyson

‘My mother made me truly appreciate women.’ – Drake

‘My mother is a strong woman. Her strength comes from being tested by life’s unpredictability. It comes from soldiering on for her children, even when she might rather have given up. I know it hasn’t always come easily, but I also know it’s her greatest gift.’ – Matt Lauer

‘My father Baldev Pathak was a Punjabi, and mother, Dina Pathak, a Kathiawadi Gujarati.’ – Supriya Pathak

‘I was eating in a Chinese restaurant downtown. There was a dish called Mother and Child Reunion. It’s chicken and eggs. And I said, I gotta use that one.’ – Paul Simon

‘I don’t consider myself Jewish. I am half-Jewish by race but not through my mother.’ – Ben Elton

‘Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.’ – Anne Lamott

‘The scab is a traitor to his God, his mother, and his class.’ – Jack London

‘A people’s relationship to their heritage is the same as the relationship of a child to its mother.’ – John Henrik Clarke

‘My beauty icon is the love between my mother and father.’ – Stella Maxwell

‘I got to grow up with a mother who taught me to believe in me.’ – Antonio Villaraigosa

‘I’m proud of my hard work. Working hard won’t always lead to the exact things we desire. There are many things I’ve wanted that I haven’t always gotten. But, I have a great satisfaction in the blessings from my mother and father, who instilled a great work ethic in me both personally and professionally.’ – Tamron Hall

‘My mother always used to say, ‘Well, if you had been born a little girl growing up in Egypt, you would go to church or go to worship Allah, but surely if those people are worshipping a God, it must be the same God’ – that’s what she always said. The same God with different names.’ – Jane Goodall

‘A lazy man works twice as hard. My mother told that to me, and now I say it to my kids. If you’re writing an essay, keep it in the lines and in the margins so you don’t have to do it over.’ – Gary Oldman

‘Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure.’ – Petrarch

‘I had a mother who prayed for me, and prayer changes everything.’ – Dennis Edwards

‘My dad is Dominican, my mother’s Puerto Rican, and I got into bachata at the age of 10 or 11. When I started listening, it had a reputation for being music for hick people. I thought that had to be changed. I was born and raised in the Bronx, and I knew you make something cool if you’re cool.’ – Romeo Santos

‘There are only two things a child will share willingly; communicable diseases and its mother’s age.’ – Benjamin Spock

‘My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‘Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?’ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‘I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?” – LeBron James

‘My mom has always been kind of my backbone. She keeps me strong. She is a mother, a friend. She is really everything to me.’ – Aerin Lauder

‘Fear is the mother of foresight.’ – Thomas Hardy

‘My biological dad was Armenian. My last name is Lopez, and I have a darker complexion, which throws people for a loop. My mother’s first husband is Mexican. That’s where I got Lopez.’ – Seth Rollins

‘I’ll be a wife and mother first, then First Lady.’ – Jackie Kennedy

‘I was a gift to my mother. She was a remarkable person. God or nature, or whatever those forces are, smiled on her, then passed me the best of her.’ – Sidney Poitier

‘At the end of the day, I mean, I love my father, but I was always a mama’s girl growing up. I’m from the South, so there’s always something about me when I’m just with my girls or even my mother. There’s just a strong connection there.’ – Britney Spears

‘The only thing I want is to awaken all humans on the planet that we are living on Mother Earth.’ – Afrika Bambaataa

‘With a Catholic mother and a Muslim father, I’ve always had a great interest in religion, but I’ve never practiced one myself. After I received a diagnosis of an aggressive form of leukemia at the age of 22, I put my faith in medicine.’ – Suleika Jaouad

‘Once vigorous measures appear to be the only means left of bringing the Americans to a due submission to the mother country, the colonies will submit.’ – George III of the United Kingdom

‘My mother taught me that when you stand in the truth and someone tells a lie about you, don’t fight it.’ – Whitney Houston

‘Hope… is the companion of power, and the mother of success; for who so hopes has within him the gift of miracles.’ – Samuel Smiles

‘I am who I am today because of my mother.’ – Kevin Hart

‘Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.’ – Khalil Gibran

‘My father is Jewish, and I look exactly like him… My mother is British, but she’s of French extraction.’ – Joan Collins

‘My mother always called me an ugly weed, so I never was aware of anything until I was older. Plain girls should have someone telling them they are beautiful. Sometimes this works miracles.’ – Hedy Lamarr

‘I credit my success to my mother. Her prayers and support are everything to me. I know all she does for me, and I know nothing I do can ever pay back the amount of support she has given me.’ – Dimitar Berbatov

‘I’m 23 years old. I might just be my mother’s child, but in all reality, I’m everybody’s child. Nobody raised me; I was raised in this society.’ – Tupac Shakur

‘My daughter’s name is Neesyn Dacey but everyone calls her Dacey. Her mom chose Neesyn and I chose Dacey after she was born. The mother is a good friend of mine who I was seeing a while ago. We are no longer together.’ – Bode Miller

‘I felt unhappy and trapped. If I left baseball, where could I go, what could I do to earn enough money to help my mother and to marry Rachel? The solution to my problem was only days away in the hands of a tough, shrewd, courageous man called Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers.’ – Jackie Robinson

‘I’m very inspired by nature – you could say Mother Nature. I look at things around me and get all kinds of inspiration daily.’ – Martha Stewart

‘Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, producing varied fruits with coloured flowers and herbs.’ – Francis of Assisi

‘Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.’ – James Joyce

‘Who ran to help me when I fell, And would some pretty story tell, Or kiss the place to make it well? My mother.’ – Jane Taylor

‘If necessity is the mother of invention, urgency is the uncle of change. Without it, progress slows and then stops and then reverses.’ – Nell Scovell

‘God Bless my mother and father for all the hard work they’ve done for our family.’ – Coy Bowles

‘I couldn’t be more proud of my little sister and the mother she is and am also incredibly proud of my mom and the huge influence she’s had on myself, my sisters, and now her grandchildren.’ – Natalya Neidhart

‘Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.’ – Norman Finkelstein

‘Be patient. Patience is the mother of all virtues.’ – Hrithik Roshan

‘I applaud my mother now for getting me through that time and making me believe in myself.’ – Leah Remini

‘Free expression is the base of human rights, the root of human nature and the mother of truth. To kill free speech is to insult human rights, to stifle human nature and to suppress truth.’ – Liu Xiaobo

‘My mother is black and my father is Filipino. I got the best of both worlds.’ – Cassie Ventura

‘Mother Nature made me the way I am, and I should be happy.’ – Karolina Kurkova

‘I did meet ‘The Everly Brothers’ once, and we talked for awhile. Then we figured out we were first cousins! My late mother was the sister of Don and Phil’s father, Ike Everly.’ – James Best

‘Mother Earth needs us to keep our covenant. We will do this in courts, we will do this on our radio station, and we will commit to our descendants to work hard to protect this land and water for them. Whether you have feet, wings, fins, or roots, we are all in it together.’ – Winona LaDuke

‘When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn’t believe that we were mortal.’ – Lana Del Rey

‘That’s the thing about Mother Nature, she really doesn’t care what economic bracket you’re in.’ – Whoopi Goldberg

‘After the abrupt death of my mother, Jane, on Sept. 5, 1991, of a disease called amyloidosis, my dad took up golf at 57. He and my mother had always played tennis – a couples’ game of mixed doubles and tennis bracelets and Love-Love. But in mourning, Dad turned Job-like to golf, a game of frustration and golf widows and solitary hours on the range.’ – Steve Rushin

‘Motherhood was the great equaliser for me; I started to identify with everybody… as a mother, you have that impulse to wish that no child should ever be hurt, or abused, or go hungry, or not have opportunities in life.’ – Annie Lennox

‘A chef’s palate is born out of his childhood, and one thing all chefs have in common is a mother who can cook.’ – Marco Pierre White

‘I never smoked in my life. Neither did my mother. And so many women I meet whose mothers or aunts or whoever who have gotten lung cancer were no-time smokers.’ – Valerie Harper

‘My father was frightened of his mother; I was frightened of my father, and I am damned well going to see to it that my children are frightened of me.’ – King George V

‘A mother deserves a day off to care for a sick child or sick parent without running into hardship – and you know what, a father does, too. It’s time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a ‘Mad Men’ episode.’ – Barack Obama

‘Women have always ruled my life, be it my mother, my wife, my assistant, or my daughter, so I don’t really fight with them. I relinquished control years ago.’ – Jon Bon Jovi

‘An oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household… carries discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.’ – Susan B. Anthony

‘My mother is not a woman of ordinary culture. She knows literature and speaks Spanish better than I do. She even corrected my poems and gave me advice when I was studying rhetoric.’ – Jose Rizal

‘A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi… has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It’s not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.’ – Thurgood Marshall

‘Anybody who doesn’t see the impact of climate change is really, I would say, myopic. They don’t see the reality. It’s so evident that we are destroying Mother Earth. This is not the problem of one country or a few countries: it is the problem of mankind. We need to work together to stop this. Otherwise, our future generations will simply disappear.’ – Juan Manuel Santos

‘I was born and brought up in South Mumbai. My father, Jagdeep, is a businessman and a Sindhi. My mother is half Brit and half Muslim. I am thus a cocktail of mixed blood. From the time I remember, I wanted to be an actress.’ – Kiara Advani

‘Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She’s not a symbol.’ – Mahmoud Darwish

‘My mother was a churchgoing lady, so I always heard about God at home.’ – Smokey Robinson

‘I was raised by a mother who told me I was great every day of my life.’ – Adam Sandler

‘I have skinny genes. My mother weighs 90 pounds.’ – Ellen Barkin

‘They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.’ – Sitting Bull

‘I loved my mother, but I don’t like her.’ – Mickey Rourke

‘I am truly my mother’s son.’ – David Geffen

‘Mother Nature just gave me the ultimate physique.’ – Lee Haney

‘When my mother had to get dinner for 8 she’d just make enough for 16 and only serve half.’ – Gracie Allen

‘I think that’s the most beautiful thing about being confident – just loving yourself, not caring what everybody else thinks. Because you could be Mother Theresa, and people are still going to try to find some imperfection.’ – Joanna Krupa

‘Good food and a warm kitchen are what makes a house a home. I always tried to make my home like my mother’s, because Mom was magnificent at stretching a buck when it came to decorating and food. Like a true Italian, she valued beautification in every area of her life, and I try to do the same.’ – Rachael Ray

‘Middle age is the awkward period when Father Time starts catching up with Mother Nature.’ – Harold Coffin

‘Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother’s womb a fanatic heart.’ – William Butler Yeats

‘I’ve always dreamed of becoming a mother. I thought I would get married and do it all the traditional way, but life kept going on, my career kept me busy – and I had not stopped to become a mommy.’ – Kym Whitley

‘There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.’ – Lao Tzu

‘Happy is the son whose faith in his mother remains unchallenged.’ – Louisa May Alcott

‘At age 11, I went to a Jewish school. I speak Yiddish. I’m Church of England Protestant. My father was Catholic, and my mother was Protestant. My wife is a Muslim.’ – Michael Caine

‘My mother, whom I love dearly, has continually revised my life story within the context of a complicated family history that includes more than the usual share of divorce, step-children, dysfunction, and obfuscation. I’ve spent most of my adult life attempting to deconstruct that history and separate fact from fiction.’ – Melissa Gilbert

‘The woman is uniformly sacrificed to the wife and mother.’ – Elizabeth Cady Stanton

‘The great lesson my mother and father gave me was almost invisible. It was a strong sense of being rooted.’ – Dan Rather

‘My mother grew up during the sunset of British colonialism and attended English schools, where she was not allowed to be called Tin Swe Thant, but was instead required to have a Western ‘school name.” – Alex Wagner

‘My mother made soft polenta often, and as a child, I would watch her stir until she looked like her arm would fall off.’ – Leo Buscaglia

‘My mother taught me about the power of inspiration and courage, and she did it with a strength and a passion that I wish could be bottled.’ – Carly Fiorina

‘Night is the mother of thoughts.’ – John Florio

‘My grandmother and mother were from Italy, so I was raised Catholic. That kind of just meant going to church on Easter and Christmas. I saw a radical transformation in my family when they started going to a Christian church. I watched them fall in love with God.’ – Sonny Sandoval

‘Getting caught is the mother of invention.’ – Robert Byrne

‘Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.’ – Wallace Stevens

‘Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.’ – Arnold Bennett

‘My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.’ – Steve Jobs

‘My first injury ever was a broken toe, and my mother made me run laps around the mat for the rest of the night. She said she wanted me to know that even if I was hurt, I was still fine.’ – Ronda Rousey

‘This is a moment that I deeply wish my parents could have lived to share. My father would have enjoyed what you have so generously said of me-and my mother would have believed it.’ – Lyndon B. Johnson

‘My parents waited to have me and my sister – my dad was 43 when my mother had me, and my mom was 38. They purposefully waited until they had had their adventures in life so that we wouldn’t represent the end of their freedom.’ – Christian Borle

‘Time is the father of truth, its mother is our mind.’ – Giordano Bruno

‘Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.’ – Paul Auster

‘My mother taught me to be honest, to be selfless, and to touch people in a positive way.’ – Scott Eastwood

‘I don’t have a bank account because I don’t know my mother’s maiden name.’ – Paula Poundstone

‘I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.’ – Shirley Temple

‘To be a good father and mother requires that the parents defer many of their own needs and desires in favor of the needs of their children. As a consequence of this sacrifice, conscientious parents develop a nobility of character and learn to put into practice the selfless truths taught by the Savior Himself.’ – James E. Faust

‘When I first found out that Superman wasn’t real, I was about maybe eight. And I was talking to my mother about it. And she was like, ‘No, no, no. There’s no Superman.’ And I started crying. I really thought he was coming to rescue us. The chaos, the violence, the danger. No hero was coming.’ – Geoffrey Canada

‘I’ve been through it all, baby, I’m mother courage.’ – Elizabeth Taylor

‘My mother, I suppose, is still a main figure in my life because her life was so sad and unfair, and she so brave, but also because she was determined to make me into the Sunday-school-recitation little girl I was, from the age of seven or so, fighting not to be.’ – Alice Munro

‘I think we were born 6 feet tall and then started to grow from there. My dad’s not particularly tall – only 5 feet, 11 inches – but his mother was almost 6 feet and straight as a ramrod: a German woman who used to scare the hell out of me.’ – Peter Graves

‘My mother is Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and she lived on her home reservation. My father taught there. He had just been discharged from the Air Force. He went to school on the GI Bill and got his teaching credentials. He is adventurous – he worked his way through Alaska at age seventeen and paid for his living expenses by winning at the poker table.’ – Louise Erdrich

‘I was raised as a Catholic and as an Ismaili. My father felt that I should have some training in Islam, but my mother was a Catholic, so really, I was raised with both.’ – Yasmin Aga Khan

‘My mother taught me to treat a lady respectfully.’ – Chris Brown

‘Mother Nature comes up against reality, and the reality is that the system doesn’t work.’ – John Garamendi

‘Your most important friendships should be with your own brothers and sisters and with your father and mother. Love your family. Be loyal to them. Have a genuine concern for your brothers and sisters.’ – Ezra Taft Benson

‘When I was a kid, my mother told me that if you could not be a good loser, then there’s no way you could be a good winner.’ – Halle Berry

‘Would not obeying to my mother’s warnings, who is at least 25 years older than me, be returning to the past? And rebelling against her would mean ruining my mother’s, who, I am convinced that, is a virtuous high woman, heart and evaluations. I do not find this right, either.’ – Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

‘I do not believe in God because I do not believe in Mother Goose.’ – Clarence Darrow

‘My mother took great relish in introducing me as ‘This is my son – he’s a doctor but not the kind that helps people.” – Randy Pausch

‘For me, my sister is like a second mother to me anyway. Mothering comes naturally to my sister.’ – Shamita Shetty

‘You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of a family. Just do your job right and your kids will love you.’ – Ethel Waters

‘My mother tongue is Punjabi, but my first language is Urdu, which was the case with the people in undivided Punjab.’ – Gulzar

”Madea’ is a Southern term. It’s short for ‘mother dear.’ So there are a lot of Madeas out there.’ – Tyler Perry

‘People need to be cautious because anything built by man can be destroyed by Mother Nature.’ – Russel Honore

‘At the end of the day, don’t forget that you’re a person, don’t forget you’re a mother, don’t forget you’re a wife, don’t forget you’re a daughter.’ – Indra Nooyi

‘My mother was against me being an artist. She just wanted me to marry a rich man.’ – Yayoi Kusama

‘Being raised by a Catholic father, a Protestant mother, and marrying the Muslim father of my three children, I encourage people to respect and at least try to understand different religions.’ – Yolanda Hadid

‘I’m a Christian, a wife, a mother, a homeschooler, a conservative, a citizen journalist, a talk radio host, an insatiable music nerd who plays a poor rhythm guitar, a blogger, a proud granddaughter of a sailor, and a proud tea partier in awe of the potential and the people in this movement.’ – Dana Loesch

‘God hears a mother’s prayer.’ – Victoria Gotti

‘Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.’ – John Dewey

‘Obviously, I got very lucky that even though I lost my mother, I lost her later in life, but it’s still had a profound effect on me.’ – Jennifer Love Hewitt

‘And I say the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father.’ – Black Elk

‘Every daughter is a shadow of her mum. I respect that, but there’s a limit. There’s a certain line that needs to be drawn, which every mother and daughter understands.’ – Pulkit Samrat

‘Fashion is more about taste than money – you have to understand your body and tailor clothes to your needs; it’s all about the fit. I do the alterations myself – I’m quite a seamstress – it’s the influence of my Hungarian mother.’ – Carmen Dell’Orefice

‘My grades put me in about 5,000th place in all of South Korea. If I kept going down that path, I would’ve become a successful man with a regular job. However, I was positive I’d be number one in the country as a rapper. So I asked my mother whether she wanted to have a son who was a first-place rapper, or a 5,000th-place student.’ – RM

‘I am a nice human, but I’ve also got Italian in my family. My mom’s side is Italian and my mom is a very scary human being. I get a lot of that intensity and snap straight into it from her. She’s legit terrifying. Lovely girl. Lovely mother but when she gets angry, she’s absolutely terrifying. She’s a damn monster.’ – Rhea Ripley

‘My mom said to me: ‘Sonny, you need to study English.’ And I replied to her: ‘Mom, I do not need it. I’m going to be horse-boy, would I speak English with horses?’ Mom said: ‘Darling, you need to.’ But I did not listen to my mother.’ – Oleksandr Usyk

‘Athletics is the mother of all sport and every child must try out it once during his school days.’ – Milkha Singh

‘My mother encouraged me to be artistic. It was written in a contract at an early age that I would be an artist.’ – Kurt Cobain

‘I owe a lot to my parents, especially by mother and my father.’ – Greg Norman

‘A dog is a vehicle, you know; a dog is a window to Mother Nature, and that’s the closest species we have.’ – Cesar Millan

‘One day, when I was still living at home, a friend told ‘Texas’ Jean Valli about me. She was originally from Syracuse, N.Y., and lived in New Jersey but sang country. One night, she had me come up on stage where she was performing. I sang ‘My Mother’s Eyes,’ and she was knocked out.’ – Frankie Valli

‘My family is everything. I am what I am thanks to my mother, my father, my brother, my sister… because they have given me everything. The education I have is thanks to them.’ – Ronaldinho

‘A mother becomes a true grandmother the day she stops noticing the terrible things her children do because she is so enchanted with the wonderful things her grandchildren do.’ – Lois Wyse

‘Who’s a boy gonna talk to if not his mother?’ – Donald E. Westlake

‘Beware of monotony; it’s the mother of all the deadly sins.’ – Edith Wharton

‘My father is a businessman, and my mother is a schoolteacher.’ – Kangana Ranaut

‘My mother told me one day I walked in to her and said, ‘Mom, I’m not going to be sick anymore,’ and she said ‘Why?’ and I said ‘Because an angel told me so.’ Now, I don’t remember saying it; that’s just what she told me.’ – Prince

‘No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.’ – Margaret Sanger

‘What greater aspiration and challenge are there for a mother than the hope of raising a great son or daughter? – Rose Kennedy’ – Rose Kennedy

‘Yes, it’s true I once knocked out a horse. It was at a fiesta in my mother’s home town of Guarare. Someone bet me a bottle of whiskey that I couldn’t do it.’ – Roberto Duran

‘Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness, its opposite, never brought a man to the goal of any of his best wishes.’ – Miguel de Cervantes

‘My mother was a Sunday school teacher. So I am a byproduct of prayer. My mom just kept on praying for her son.’ – Steve Harvey

‘I am happier when I love than when I am loved. I adore my husband, my son, my grandchildren, my mother, my dog, and frankly, I don’t know if they even like me. But who cares? Loving them is my joy.’ – Isabel Allende

‘As youngsters, my mother taught her children that while we might not be the smartest people around, we could be courteous, polite and considerate of others.’ – Zig Ziglar

‘My father was 91 when he passed away of natural causes, and my mother died aged 88. She had a heart condition and had many heart attacks throughout her life, but she had ten children, so that would have put a strain on her body.’ – Engelbert Humperdinck

‘I wish I could relive those days when I was 8 and my mother bought all the gifts I gave to people. I loved watching people open them. It was a surprise for me and then.’ – Emily Hampshire

‘I was labeled a troublemaker, my mom an unfit mother, and I was not welcome anywhere.’ – Ryan White

‘Abortion is part of being a mother and of caring for children, because part of caring for children is knowing when it’s not a good idea to bring them into the world.’ – Katha Pollitt

‘I’m a strange mixture of my mother’s curiosity; my father, who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family, who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility; and my mother’s father, who was always in trouble with gambling debts.’ – Rupert Murdoch

‘I have a very non-existent, dysfunctional relationship with my biological mother.’ – Antoni Porowski

‘When I was born, my parents and my mother’s parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age – was, in a sense, me.’ – John Updike

‘I come from Texas, and my grandmother and mother were born in Arkansas.’ – Carol Burnett

‘His mother should have thrown him out and kept the stork.’ – Mae West

‘Without Cambodia, I may never have become a mother. Part of my heart is and will always be in this country. And part of this country is always with me: Maddox.’ – Angelina Jolie

‘I kiss the soil as if I placed a kiss on the hands of a mother, for the homeland is our earthly mother. I consider it my duty to be with my compatriots in this sublime and difficult moment.’ – Pope John Paul II

‘No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.’ – Florida Scott-Maxwell

‘My mother as a young girl went out with a young SS officer and she didn’t really know what was going on – she just liked the uniform. When he told her about the things that he did, she was disgusted and broke up with him.’ – Michael Haneke

‘I met Gemma, my wife, when she was 12. She had a schoolgirl crush on me and her dad had arranged for her to meet me. Later, she started coming to my concerts, but I only got to know her well after her mother died. I rang to see how she was, and that’s how it started.’ – Gary Numan

‘I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it’s such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her.’ – Ellen DeGeneres

‘My mother’s a Peruvian Indian from Lima who raised me and my four brothers and sisters as a single mom.’ – Benjamin Bratt

‘When we recognise the virtues, the talent, the beauty of Mother Earth, something is born in us, some kind of connection, love is born.’ – Thich Nhat Hanh

‘My father was born on Christmas Day in 1934. He grew up in what is now part of North Korea. When the Korean War began, my father was 16, and he found passage on an American refugee ship,thinking he’d be gone for just a few days, but he never saw his mother or his sister again.’ – Min Jin Lee

‘Now, as always, the most automated appliance in a household is the mother.’ – Beverly Jones

‘My greatest pleasure is spending time with my family: my husband and daughter, but also my mother, my three sisters, and their families.’ – Siri Hustvedt

‘Being a housewife and a mother is the biggest job in the world, but if it doesn’t interest you, don’t do it – I would have made a terrible mother.’ – Katharine Hepburn

‘Nobody loves me but my mother, and she could be jivin’, too.’ – B. B. King

‘My mother wrote a teen column for the South China Morning Post in the 1950s when she was growing up in Hong Kong. Her name was Lily Mark, but she sometimes wrote under her confirmation name, Margaret Mark. That was how she met my father.’ – Celeste Ng

‘My father is a doctor and my mother ran the local pharmacy. Growing up, I saw firsthand the difference they made to our community.’ – Rishi Sunak

‘There’s always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself – whether it’s Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc.’ – Audre Lorde

‘What I am defending is the real rights of women. A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother.’ – Phyllis Schlafly

‘The interesting thing about being a mother is that everyone wants pets, but no one but me cleans the kitty litter.’ – Meryl Streep

‘There is nothing in the world of art like the songs mother used to sing.’ – Billy Sunday

‘My mother was a beauty queen in her hey day. That’s where I learnt a little about makeup and hair… I had never picked up or even seen a ‘Vogue’ before I was 17. I had no idea about fashion, magazines, models or designers. No idea.’ – Kylie Bax

‘I could not tell you the date of my mother’s death. I could not tell you the date of my dad’s death. These are not dates that I find significant.’ – O. J. Simpson

‘In 1967, my mother – then Francie Weinman – graduated from Northwestern University with a degree from the prestigious Medill School of Journalism. But because she is a woman, the only television news job she could get in her hometown of Chicago was as a secretary at a network affiliate.’ – Dana Bash

‘I had such high expectations of myself. I was going to be the best mother, the best housewife, the best entertainer, the best nurse, you know – what it was, I was going to be the best. And I could never live up to my expectations.’ – Ann Richards

‘When I started getting so many haters and closed doors, I decided to prove that it could be done. I was a divorced single mother of three at the time and a size 12 – not your typical model artist that labels feel work for the music industry.’ – Jenni Rivera

‘You cannot put a contaminant in the ground and just think that Mother Nature whips it up and runs it off somewhere else and we never see it again.’ – Erin Brockovich

‘Well, my first languages are German and Spanish because I was brought up by a Spanish mother and a German father, so I always spoke both languages at home. I’m very thankful that I was brought up in a bilingual house.’ – Daniel Bruhl

‘Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated.’ – Wassily Kandinsky

‘Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother’s strong suit.’ – Anne Lamott

‘Mother always said that even when I was 3, I used to get the 6- and 7-year-old kids on the block and punch them and say, ‘Listen to me.” – Shirley Chisholm

‘I think God made a woman to be strong and not to be trampled under the feet of men. I’ve always felt this way because my mother was a very strong woman, without a husband.’ – Little Richard

‘I have made so many mistakes as a mother. But the one thing that I know I do is I make sure my children know how much I love them and they are absolutely secure in that.’ – Ayelet Waldman

‘My mother’s father was from Brazil – a painter, and not a famous one – and was always broke. But he was a free spirit, a great grandfather.’ – Claire Denis

‘One of Rani Ma’am friend told my mother, ‘Thank you for taking birth’ because of which we get to see this actor. That, for me, is the most beautiful compliment ever.’ – Vishal Jethwa

‘My mother was a professional sick person; she took a lot of pain pills. There are many people like that. It’s just how they are used to getting attention. I always remember she’s the daughter of alcoholics who’d leave her alone at Christmas time.’ – Jim Carrey

‘I’ve always had this female-empowerment thing in the back of my mind – because I wanted my mother to be stronger, and she couldn’t be.’ – Nicki Minaj

‘When my, British-Church of England mother married my, Canadian-Jewish Father, the deal was that she would embrace Judaism, but wouldn’t give up her Christmas tree. So, I grew up with Christmas every year. I loved it then and I love it now.’ – Hilary Farr

‘Cancer has affected my family; my mother and father have battled cancer. I know how tough it is.’ – Stone Cold Steve Austin

‘The States is run by the Federal Reserve, an institution that answers only to itself and to a few large banks. It’s modelled on the Bank of England. Ben Franklin said that one of the main reasons America revolted was to get away from the Bank of England, the mother of all central banks – the most pernicious and insidious of all.’ – Max Keiser

‘Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother’s face, her aspect and her attitude.’ – Beck

‘People will ask, ‘Are you famous?’ And I always answer, ‘My mother thinks so.” – Yo-Yo Ma

‘When I look back on my life, I wonder how I survived – my mother said I had a guardian angel.’ – Micky Dolenz

‘Women are the victims of this patriarchal culture, but they are also its carriers. Let us keep in mind that every oppressive man was raised in the confines of his mother’s home.’ – Shirin Ebadi

”The Exorcist’ is absolutely my favorite horror film, and I watched it when I was, like, seven years old with my mother for the first time. I don’t know why my mom let me watch that. I couldn’t go to the bathroom by myself. I couldn’t go upstairs by myself. I couldn’t sleep.’ – Odette Annable

‘For a long time, men weren’t respecting women. They weren’t understanding Mother Earth, Mother Nature, the Motherland, all the motherly stuff. And now we are.’ – Skepta

‘The mother cannot expect her daughter to understand the mysteries of housekeeping without education. She should instruct them patiently, lovingly, and make the work as agreeable as she can by her cheerful countenance and encouraging words of approval. If they fail once, twice, or thrice, censure not.’ – Ellen G. White

‘Being a mother and grandmother is the best of the best in my life. My grandchildren multiply the joy my daughters bring me.’ – Alexandra Stoddard

‘I’m a mother myself, and sometimes mothers get a bad rap just because they’ve tried to do their job. Some people have more of a knack for it than others do, but almost all of it falls to, ‘My mother’s suffocating me.’ Whatever.’ – Annie Potts

‘I don’t really see why some of those topical lines have to be crossed to get a point across. I want a mother and daughter, a teenage girl and her mom, to be able to come to the show and both enjoy it on the same level.’ – Brett Young

‘Being a mother is the most beautiful thing happened to me. I am enjoying every bit of it.’ – Sridevi

‘I hid my heart under my bed because my mother said if you’re not careful someday somebody’s going to break it. Take it from me, under the bed is not a good hiding spot.’ – Shane Koyczan

‘The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.’ – Honore de Balzac

‘Every Fourth of July, our Declaration of Independence is produced, with a sublime indignation, to set forth the tyranny of the mother country and to challenge the admiration of the world. But what a pitiful detail of grievances does this document present in comparison with the wrongs which our slaves endure!’ – William Lloyd Garrison

‘I have always been a flirt. My mother says whe I was a child, I used to stand outside the house and just smile at everyone who walked by. Like, ‘Please take me with you!” – bell hooks

‘I was raised by a single mother who made a way for me. She used to scrub floors as a domestic worker, put a cleaning rag in her pocketbook and ride the subways in Brooklyn so I would have food on the table. But she taught me as I walked her to the subway that life is about not where you start, but where you’re going. That’s family values.’ – Al Sharpton

‘From the time I was wee big, my mother was one of the first members of Mary Kay Cosmetics. Women going door-to-door and letting housewives have their own business – that was really a breakthrough. It was huge.’ – Robin Wright

‘I grew up in a family of strong women and I owe any capacity I have to understand women to my mother and big sister. They taught me to respect women in a way where I’ve always felt a strong emotional connection to women, which has also helped me in the way I approach my work as an actor.’ – Ryan Gosling

‘My father is Chinese, Spanish, and Filipino; my mother is half-Irish and half-Japanese; Greek last name; born in Hawaii, raised in Germany.’ – Mark Dacascos

‘When I had nothing else, I had my mother and the piano. And you know what? They were all I needed.’ – Alicia Keys

‘I was an only child, and Mother was always right with me all my life. I used to get very angry at her when I was growing up-it’s a natural thing.’ – Elvis Presley

‘My mother was an artist, and I was fairly good at art as a child. I was always the best drawer in class, except in second grade when an artistic genius passed through our school!’ – Natalie Babbitt

‘For my confirmation, I didn’t get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift.’ – Wernher von Braun

‘You are ugly when you love her, you are beautiful and fresh, vital and free, modern and poetic when you don’t… you are more beautiful as an orphan than as your mother’s son.’ – Witold Gombrowicz

‘If your mother cooks Italian food, why should you go to a restaurant?’ – Martin Scorsese

‘My mother and our pastor always said you have to pray for your enemies and people who do you wrong, and that’s what I did.’ – Ruby Bridges

‘When the mother of the race is free, we shall have a better world, by the easy right of birth and by the calm, slow, friendly forces of evolution.’ – Charlotte Perkins Gilman

‘As the mother of two daughters, I have great respect for women. And I don’t ever want to lose that.’ – Vera Wang

‘I was brought up a strict Christian. My father was a lay preacher, my mother a church warden. The rhythm and ritual of the Anglican Church was part of our lives.’ – Monty Don

‘I was born Pauline Matthews and grew up in Bradford as one of three children – I had an older brother, David, and an older sister, Betty. My father Fred worked in the mills as a textile weaving supervisor, and my mother, Mary, was a housewife.’ – Kiki Dee

‘Even the people who come our way look upon us in amazement, that we run only for the healing of Mother Earth.’ – Dennis Banks

‘My mother was against me being an actress – until I introduced her to Frank Sinatra.’ – Angie Dickinson

‘As a devoted mother and private person, and with complete awareness that my daughter will one day be old enough to read the news about herself, I would only like to say that I will never, ever be commenting on the dissolution of my marriage.’ – Scarlett Johansson

‘My sisters have been baptized and my dad is a deacon at his church now. Sadly my mother passed away but what I can say is that the Jehovah Witnesses took very good care of her up until she died.’ – Sherri Shepherd

‘At Christmas, I am always struck by how the spirit of togetherness lies also at the heart of the Christmas story. A young mother and a dutiful father with their baby were joined by poor shepherds and visitors from afar. They came with their gifts to worship the Christ child.’ – Queen Elizabeth II

‘Always a godmother, never a mother. That sucks. I’ve got to get me one of those little accessories.’ – Courteney Cox

‘I don’t think my mother and father ever had any doubts about what I was to be punished for or not. My parents come from a very strictly defined culture.’ – B. F. Skinner

‘The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children.’ – Nancy Friday

‘My parents are psychologists. My father is a specialist with schizophrenia and my mother works with mostly children.’ – Mikey Madison

‘I have always been a mother. When I was kid, I mothered my younger brother. I mothered my parents and even my boyfriends.’ – Sushmita Sen

‘I’m a woman, a mother, a daughter, a sister. I’m a real person operating in the world. For me to discuss the most private thing feels wrong. It feels like I’m betraying myself and my children.’ – Nicole Kidman

‘My mother, Ms. Nippy Carville, was a woman of many talents.’ – James Carville

‘Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.’ – Dan Quayle

‘After all, my mother is a Maharashtrian, and I have grown up in Girgaum, amidst a lot of Maharashtrians and I have even danced on the streets during the Ganpati processions.’ – Kashmira Shah

‘A lot of people don’t understand the Black Panthers Party’s relationship with white mother country radicals.’ – Fred Hampton

‘The sword is very handsome. I am too old and infirm, as you see, to ever use a sword again, but I am glad that my old mother state has not entirely forgotten me.’ – George Rogers Clark

‘I’ve known I wanted to do this ever since I was a little kid and I used to get in trouble at church for goofing off all the time: mocking the preacher, imitating people and the things they did. I later learned my mother used to be just as goofy as I was when she was younger. I mean, Eddie Murphy in ‘Coming to America?’ My hero.’ – Lamorne Morris

‘I am a very strict mother, and as a mother, it’s my responsibility to guide my kids and tell them to go how far and no further. There should be rules and guidelines for the kids, and they should know their limits.’ – Kajol

‘I am most attached to my mother, who always travels with me when I am on an outdoor location or abroad. She is my friend, who I share everything with.’ – Kajal Aggarwal

‘No matter how old we become, we can still call them ‘Holy Mother’ and ‘Father’ and put a child-like trust in them.’ – Desmond Morris

‘We all have special numbers in our lives, and 4 is that for me. It’s the day I was born. My mother’s birthday, and a lot of my friends’ birthdays, are on the fourth; April 4 is my wedding date.’ – Beyonce Knowles

‘Now that I understand that I’m an addict, I definitely have compassion for my mother. I get it.’ – Eminem

‘The first classroom is in a mother’s womb.’ – Eric Adams

‘My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.’ – Quentin Crisp

‘If your mother did not know how to love herself, or your father did not know how to love himself, then it would be impossible for them to teach you to love yourself. They were doing the best they could with what they had been taught as children.’ – Louise L. Hay

‘I’ve never sold widely enough to be able to relax about money. I had two kids and their mother to support and my own life. So there was never an option of cutting out.’ – Leonard Cohen

‘Those of us raised in modern cities tend to notice horizontal and vertical lines more quickly than lines at other orientations. In contrast, people raised in nomadic tribes do a better job noticing lines skewed at intermediate angles, since Mother Nature tends to work with a wider array of lines than most architects.’ – Sam Kean

‘My mother was the greatest example to me of anyone I’ve ever known. She didn’t have an easy life. I adored her. She worked hard all her life, and she was the one who set my values. She was quite an amazing woman, although she wasn’t tough at all.’ – Lauren Bacall

‘Invention is the mother of necessity.’ – Thorstein Veblen

‘My parents loved each other. I was raised in a house of total love and respect. My dad worked very hard and my mother was incredibly devoted to him. I can unequivocally, without any peradventure of doubt, tell you that I was raised with the kind of love that we only dream of.’ – James Woods

”My country, right or wrong’ is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.” – Gilbert K. Chesterton

‘My mother never breast fed me, she told me she only liked me as a friend.’ – Rodney Dangerfield

‘Ignorance is the mother of all evils.’ – Francois Rabelais

‘I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.’ – Narendra Modi

‘Whether you are pro-choice or strongly pro-life, as I am, there should be common ground that abortion ceases to be an option when a baby can live outside the mother’s womb or experience excruciating pain from a procedure.’ – Kevin Brady

‘I realized that my mother was at the center of my work, because now that my mother is no longer there, there’s nobody left.’ – Chantal Akerman

‘My father is a taxi driver, and my mother ran a small business. I hadn’t even met a barrister before I got my first shot at the legal profession. But back then, I was lucky enough to be given a break – I can’t help but wonder if I would be so lucky today.’ – Robert Rinder

‘My mother had a Spanish upbringing. She was an excellent cook. Everything was home-made. We didn’t eat food with smiley faces on it. My Mum passed away in 1994. I miss her. I miss her cooking. It would be nice to have a meal with her again.’ – Jo Frost

‘I lost my mother and my brother when I was 15 in two separate car accidents. I was doing well at school. I was a good sportsperson, but at that point, I gave up on all of those things that were there to be done. I couldn’t deal with them.’ – Manu Bennett

‘My parents, especially my mother, were no influence on me whatsoever.’ – Andy Partridge

‘I’m actually the son of Mary Guibert. My mother was born in the Panama Canal zone and came to America when she was five with my grandmother and grandfather, and that was the family I knew. Everybody sang; everybody had songs all the time, and they loved music.’ – Jeff Buckley

‘My father was a great example of a strong and good man and Christian man, and my mother taught all my six sisters how to be young ladies and mothers and how to take care of your family. And so I think they were – they still are – great examples for all of us to their kids and to the world, too.’ – Magic Johnson

‘The real cure for our environmental problems is to understand that our job is to salvage Mother Nature. We are facing a formidable enemy in this field. It is the hunters… and to convince them to leave their guns on the wall is going to be very difficult.’ – Jacques Yves Cousteau

‘My mother is half Malayali and half Tamilian. I can speak Bengali and Tamil, but can’t read or write.’ – Anoushka Shankar

‘My mother is from Chennai, and I have a lot of relatives here.’ – Vivek Oberoi

‘My mother was an elementary school teacher for 35 years and taught at the Nixon School in New Jersey. I was raised as a very liberal Democrat, and she was protesting Nixon when he was in office.’ – Peter Dinklage

‘My mom was a lot of a stage mother.’ – Betty Buckley

‘Avoid sloth, the mother of all vices!’ – Toussaint Louverture

‘I wanted to write something in a voice that was unique to who I was. And I wanted something that was accessible to the person who works at Dunkin Donuts or who drives a bus, someone who comes home with their feet hurting like my father, someone who’s busy and has too many children, like my mother.’ – Sandra Cisneros

‘I have learned so many things from my mother about the right upbringing, the right values, value for money, value for elders, for family members. I think these things only a parent can teach you.’ – Karisma Kapoor

‘I wasn’t born to a wealthy or powerful family – mother from Puerto Rico, dad from the South Bronx.’ – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

‘I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn’t breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children’s mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.’ – Alice Munro

‘Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.’ – Margaret Atwood

‘My mother’s mother is a very tough cookie. She buried three husbands. Two of them were just napping.’ – Rita Rudner

‘Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is certainly the father.’ – Roger von Oech

‘Since I was a little girl, I have witnessed the strength and courage that energized my mother, who left every sorrow and pain in the past, who would work unyieldingly to obtain her goals, who was the great warrior from whom I learned all the values that are today fundamental pillars of my every day.’ – Thalia

‘My mother is from another time – the funniest person to her is Lucille Ball; that’s what she loves. A lot of times she tells me she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I know if I wasn’t her son and she was flipping through the TV and saw me, she would just keep going.’ – Steven Wright

‘My wife knows me as Vermin. My mother knows me as Vermin. For all intent and purposes, that’s my name.’ – Vermin Supreme

‘The man in our society is the breadwinner; the woman has enough to do as the homemaker, wife and mother.’ – Dorothy Fields

‘My mother was Catholic, my father was Protestant. There was always a debate going on at home – I think in those days we called them arguments – about who was right and who was wrong.’ – David Bowie

‘At the end of the day, you can’t compete with Mother Nature. If you’ve got a great tomato, just a pinch of sea salt is all you need.’ – Zac Posen

‘My mother was 45 when she had me, so when I was in high school my parents were the same age as my friends’ grandparents.’ – Jack White

‘My mother was a teacher.’ – Hugh Grant

‘My mother always cooked, every day, proper food. We didn’t have fast food. It was probably pretty much meat and two veg, but as time went on and new things came into the culture, she embraced all of that. I grew up with mealtimes and sitting around the table with proper cooking and eating.’ – Lesley Manville

‘I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness – to save oneself trouble.’ – Agatha Christie

‘It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.’ – Erma Bombeck

‘My mother has been my mentor in my life. The number one attribute was discipline. To be on time to school, never miss a day at school, and then checking out homework and making sure I was doing it correctly and signing me up for lots of activities, extra tests and classes.’ – Ram Shriram

‘Of all the roles I’ve played, none has been as fulfilling as being a mother.’ – Annette Funicello

‘I take after my mother more than my father in terms of personality. My mother’s a worrier, and I’m a worrier. Both were very good with numbers and mathematics, so I kind of got that from both of them.’ – Michael Mina

‘My mother – who’s from Iowa – owns and runs her own day-care centre, while my father’s a developer. And my musical influences, I think, came from my father’s side of the family.’ – Keri Hilson

‘My father was a farmer and my mother was a farmer, but, my childhood was very good. I am very grateful for my childhood, because it was full of gladness and good humanity.’ – Roberto Benigni

‘Some people are born good-looking. Some have the gift of gab. And some are lucky enough to be born smarter than the rest of us. Whether we like it or not, Mother Nature does not dole these characteristics out evenly.’ – Simon Sinek

‘A circus is like a mother in whom one can confide and who rewards and punishes.’ – Burt Lancaster

‘I was like the class clown in school so I guess I would say I did like the attention. In church I did a lot of plays, my mother made me play characters, do a lot of drama and acting, trying to become someone else. So it helped me create who I am, to create Snoop Dogg.’ – Snoop Dogg

‘Mother Nature may be forgiving this year, or next year, but eventually she’s going to come around and whack you. You’ve got to be prepared.’ – Geraldo Rivera

‘Nature is our eldest mother; she will do no harm.’ – Emily Dickinson

‘I spent almost all my life in poverty, raised by a single mother who had to raise three children on minimum wage, which in the 1990s was $4.25 an hour. And I grew up in public housing, in conditions of mold and mildew, leaks and lead, without reliable heat and hot water in the winter.’ – Ritchie Torres

‘A woman must combine the role of mother, wife and politician.’ – Emma Bonino

‘It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder.’ – Joseph Wood Krutch

‘When I was a kid, I used to pretend to be Bond; I used to make up scenarios and irritate my sister and annoy my mother and father pretending to be someone else, so I kind of was already acting when I was a child. I just didn’t really know it.’ – Aneurin Barnard

‘I grew up in a family full of strong women. A great aunt on my mother’s side had been a matron on a hospital ship in World War II, and one on my father’s side had served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service.’ – Nick Earls

‘I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.’ – Stephen King

‘All European tradition, Marxism included, has conspired to defy the natural order of all things. Mother Earth has been abused, the powers have been abused, and this cannot go on forever. No theory can alter that simple fact. Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated.’ – Russell Means

‘Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.’ – Karl Kraus

‘I remember my mother’s prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.’ – Abraham Lincoln

‘Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when I went to bed. This was the best time of day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go.’ – Sylvia Plath

‘No mother would ever willingly sacrifice her sons for territorial gain, for economic advantage, for ideology.’ – Ronald Reagan

‘Who deserves more credit than the wife of a coal miner? Mother was one.’ – Merle Travis

‘In Jenny Offill’s remarkable first novel, ‘Last Things,’ 7-year-old Grace Davitt watches her mother, Anna, descend into madness and tries to make sense of the claustrophobic world that Anna has created for her.’ – Nancy Willard

‘The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.’ – Calvin Trillin

‘The suburb in the 1950s was a bedroom community. The father worked in the city, and the mother stayed home. Now people live and work in the suburbs, and businesses have grown up or moved from cities to certain pockets of what was once the suburbs and created these places that are like cities.’ – Richard Hayne

‘I am closest to my mother, as she is my rock, my pillar of strength, and my world. Not only has she stood by me through all times – happy, sad, and otherwise – but there have even been moments when I had completely lost hope, and her immense belief in me had lifted me up.’ – Amruta Khanvilkar

‘I am not Superwoman. The reality of my daily life is that I’m juggling a lot of balls in the air trying to be a good wife and mother, trying to be the prime-ministerial consort at home and abroad, barrister and charity worker, and sometimes one of the balls gets dropped.’ – Cherie Blair

‘I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.’ – Rachel Cusk

‘My mom was my mother and father. My father lost his mind when I was about 4 years old. And my mom did everything she could to make sure that we was brought up right.’ – Anthony Ray Hinton

‘I was really close to my father since I was young. He always told me that I had to work in order to become a man, so I had to stay with him when my mother left. He always took me to work to help him as a bricklayer. I was just a kid, so I did what I could do to help him.’ – Jose Aldo

‘Whatever is said about roles drying up, I intend to keep working. Certainly now the roles couldn’t be more interesting – playing mothers, divorcees. I think it’s going to be exciting to play a mother of teenagers. The longer your life, the deeper it gets.’ – Naomi Watts

‘In ‘Laurence Anyways,’ Nathalie Baye is Laurence’s mother, and she is quite an awful mother. Still, she is the only one in the end who truly accepts her daughter.’ – Xavier Dolan

‘My mom was a terrible parent of young children. And thank God – I thank God every time I think of it – I was sent to my paternal grandmother. Ah, but my mother was a great parent of a young adult.’ – Maya Angelou

‘I picked up the Puerto Rican accent from my father, and my sister picked up my mother’s very clear, concise, and slow Mexican-Spanish. So, when she does speak, she speaks with diction. She pronounces every word.’ – Alanna Ubach

‘I have two young children, and I will say that motherhood is its own peak, just like in the process of writing: one climbs and is continuously moving with each book. Becoming a mother is the greatest connection I’ve ever felt to being spiritual.’ – Jhumpa Lahiri

‘My father died when I was 14, and my mother juggled two jobs so she could make sure my sister and I were OK.’ – Irina Shayk

‘Only God Himself fully appreciates the influence of a Christian mother in the molding of character in her children.’ – Billy Graham

‘Like Barack Obama’s father, Trump’s mother was an immigrant. But Trump doesn’t often bring up his Scottish ancestry on the campaign trail.’ – Mary Pilon

‘There’s all kinds of mothers, so to use the label ‘mother’ and to think you really understood all that a human being is because she’s a mother, is a mistake.’ – Phylicia Rashad

‘You want a lesson? I’ll give you a lesson. How about a geography lesson? My father’s from Puerto Rico. My mother’s from El Salvador. And neither one of those is Mexico.’ – Jennifer Esposito

‘I think that the best way to explain that is that my mother gave me all the color and character and flare and liveliness, and my father gave me all the sanity and nature and all the things that helped me be a more rounded human being.’ – Julie Andrews

‘As far back as I can remember, my mother would have me down by the bed at night with her, praying. I can still hear her voice calling my name to God and telling him that she wanted me to follow him in whatever he called me to do.’ – Charles R. Swindoll

‘I was born 50 years after slavery, in 1913. I was allowed to read. My mother, who was a teacher, taught me when I was a very young child. The first school I attended was a small building that went from first to sixth grade. There was one teacher for all of the students. There could be anywhere from 50 to 60 students of all different ages.’ – Rosa Parks

‘My deep emotional connection to my mother, a remarkable woman who made a hard choice to save her children, and who valiantly struggled to care for us as a single parent, is the current that has driven my entire life. Everything I’ve accomplished is a testament to her fortitude.’ – Mazie Hirono

‘When I was 15, I came downstairs one morning, picked up mother’s newspaper and, oh, what a shock! The Titanic had gone. The ‘unsinkable’ ship – but it had gone down so simple.’ – Henry Allingham

‘I can’t find anything in the Constitution that says you prefer the life of the mother, or the convenience of the mother if it’s an abortion by choice, over the potential life of the fetus. Look, I think women, if they’re required to not have abortions, could die and could – so I favor a woman’s right to choose.’ – Alan Dershowitz

‘My mother always told me it wasn’t polite to ask what people make.’ – Clint Eastwood

‘The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.’ – Adrienne Rich

‘My father is from Bosnia, and my mother is from Croatia, but I was born in Sweden.’ – Zlatan Ibrahimovic

‘If I wasn’t bound to Brooklyn, due to my own personal reasons like taking care of my mother and the fact that this is where the band is based, I would probably move to Iceland.’ – Peter Steele

‘A child too, can never grasp the fact that the same mother who cooks so well, is so concerned about his cough, and helps so kindly with his homework, in some circumstance has no more feeling than a wall of his hidden inner world.’ – Alice Miller

‘My mother and dad were big animal lovers, too. I just don’t know how I would have lived without animals around me. I’m fascinated by them – both domestic pets and the wild community. They just are the most interesting things in the world to me, and it’s made such a difference in my lifetime.’ – Betty White

‘My mother always taught us that if people don’t agree with you, the important thing is to listen to them. But if you’ve listened to them carefully and you still think that you’re right, then you must have the courage of your convictions.’ – Jane Goodall

‘Actually, my mother and Alfie came for three weeks’ Christmas vacation and stayed for 21 years. I guess my mother never went back because she was lonely.’ – Frank McCourt

‘The movies saved my life. I grew up in the great depression, the only child of a pair of star crossed lovers. My father lost his job. My mother drank. They fought. The movies were my escape.’ – Orson Bean

‘A few years ago, I found out that there’s a lot of Gypsy blood on my mother’s side. I’m wild in that way – I’ve been brought up to do my own thing.’ – FKA twigs

‘Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.’ – Christopher Marlowe

‘I used to think it a pity that her mother rather than she had not thought of birth control.’ – Muriel Spark

‘Most people, throughout history, haven’t learned one language to the exclusion of another. You learn to speak differently to a peasant and to a shoemaker. You speak differently to your mother, who comes from Burgundy, and to your father, who comes from Swabia.’ – Ivan Illich

‘My mother inspired me to treat others as I would want to be treated regardless of age, race or financial status.’ – Tommy Hilfiger

‘But then my mother, who’s a very selfless, stoic person from a family of Marines, would tell us that what was good for our father was good for us – he would make more money; therefore, we’d be able to get better educations.’ – Patricia Richardson

‘If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby ‘it.” – T. S. Eliot

‘A suburban mother’s role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.’ – Peter De Vries

‘My mother never gave up one me. I messed up in school so much they were sending me home, but my mother sent me right back.’ – Denzel Washington

‘My mother is an incredibly beautiful woman who has laughed at every single thing my father’s ever said. At a young age, my brother and I understood that if you can make girls laugh, you can punch well above your weight class.’ – Seth Meyers

‘Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.’ – Alice Walker

‘I learnt to sing in Bengali, my mother tongue, then went on to sing in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati and every possible Indian language.’ – Shreya Ghoshal

‘A mother cooking exclusively for her child might be preparing just rice and buttermilk, but it will be immensely tasty. Fast food, on the other hand, may be very tasty, but it has not been prepared exclusively for you, you see.’ – Ilaiyaraaja

‘It’s something my mother believed in: If you are in a position of privilege, if you can put your name to something that you genuinely believe in, you can smash any stigma you want, and you can encourage anybody to do anything.’ – Prince Harry

‘I love my mother and father. The older I get, the more I value everything that they gave me.’ – Liev Schreiber

‘When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” – Fred Rogers

‘What is Americanization? It manifests itself, in a superficial way, when the immigrant adopts the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here. Far more important is the manifestation presented when he substitutes for his mother tongue the English language as the common medium of speech.’ – Louis D. Brandeis

‘A baby comes with such responsibility. Once you become a mother, you always have a guilt trip. You always try to do the best, but you feel you can always be better.’ – Gal Gadot

‘I’m a product of this visionary mother and father.’ – Kiran Bedi

‘When peaceful reunification comes, the first thing I want to do is to take my 90-year-old mother and go to her home town.’ – Moon Jae-in

‘I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.’ – Anna Quindlen

‘I don’t join the New Atheists. So, for example, I wouldn’t have the arrogance to lecture some mother who hopes to see her dying child in Heaven – that’s none of my business, ultimately. I won’t lecture her on the philosophy of science.’ – Noam Chomsky

‘I gave three years of my life to take care of my dying mother who had Alzheimer’s disease. Being there for her every need for three years might have looked codependent but it wasn’t because it was what I wanted to do.’ – Melody Beattie

‘The fastest way to break the cycle of perfectionism and become a fearless mother is to give up the idea of doing it perfectly – indeed to embrace uncertainty and imperfection.’ – Arianna Huffington

‘No one is going to try to fill my mother’s shoes, what she did was fantastic. It’s about making your own future and your own destiny and Kate will do a very good job of that.’ – Prince William

‘There’s something about compassion that causes society to say, ‘We’re going to take this person seriously.’ Take Mother Teresa. She was confrontational on abortion, but she wasn’t rejected by society.’ – Max Lucado

‘Every woman’s path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is, sadly, true. An unhealthy mother’s love is withering.’ – Anne Lamott

‘I feel that heterosexual marriage is the more excellent way, and it surely is approved holy by the Holy Bible, and it holds so many more possibilities: the possibilities of having children of both the mother and father, the male and the female.’ – Robert H. Schuller

‘I was scared when I lost my mother, my father, my brother, my sister.’ – Israel Kamakawiwo’ole

‘For a long time I was scared I’d find out I was like my mother.’ – Marilyn Monroe

‘Necessity, the mother of invention.’ – George Farquhar

‘Busta Rhymes is my brother from another mother.’ – Xzibit

‘My mother did not raise me to ask for permission to lead.’ – Ayanna Pressley

‘My mother does not give up and she never has on anything. I love her zest for life. She has never ever let me accept defeat when it comes to goals that I’ve had or even if it is just making sure that I never lose my zest for life.’ – Sameera Reddy

‘Mother Angelica is proof that we are not limited by other’s perceptions, and that God sometimes calls the most unlikely people to great things.’ – Raymond Arroyo

‘Every Mother Counts is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making pregnancy and childbirth safe for every mother. We inform, engage, and mobilize audiences to take action and raise funds that support maternal health programs around the world.’ – Christy Turlington

‘Married at 23, a mother at 24, and blindsided by divorce at 28, I found myself struggling, like many young women I meet today, to strike a balance between my personal life and my career.’ – Gail Sheehy

‘We have a responsibility to Mother Earth to protect it as much as possible.’ – Wes Studi

‘I believe strongly in the rights of women… my mother is a woman, my sister is a woman, my daughter is a woman, my wife is a woman.’ – Abdullah of Saudi Arabia

‘It was a very scary place to be. I don’t think any mother or father would like to have their five year old wandering alone in the slums and train stations of Calcutta.’ – Saroo Brierley

‘My mother and father met through climbing and it was totally natural that I would become a climber too.’ – Adam Ondra

‘In my ‘Big Dinners’ cookbook, I recreated my mother’s recipe for crab dip. The creamy dressing for this dip, made with mayonnaise, tomato paste, a touch of honey, sliced chives, lemon juice and zest, horseradish and Tabasco, is reminiscent of Thousand Island dressing.’ – Tom Douglas

‘I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what’s comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes.’ – Amy Tan

‘My mother taught me how to apply my own makeup at 13 years old, and the most important lesson I learned is to never touch my eyebrows and to cleanse, tone, and moisturize twice a day.’ – Emilia Clarke

‘We’ve had a humble upbringing. You know, my father came through as a political refugee; my mother comes from a hard-working-farmers family. We’ve had humble upbringing.’ – Vincent Kompany

‘We must teach science in the mother tongue. Otherwise, science will become a highbrow activity. It will not be an activity in which all people can participate.’ – C. V. Raman

‘But I got drafted out of high school, and my mother wasn’t having it. She was like, you’re not about to think that you can just play ball, because if you get hurt, you’re going to be out of luck.’ – Shemar Moore

‘My mother and brother made me strive to get good grades and get through school.’ – Kyle Lowry

‘I lost my mother when I was 7 and they put her in a mental hospital. My brother and I watched her being taken away in a strait jacket. That’s something you never forget. And my stepmother was like in the movie ‘Precious.’ I couldn’t handle it. So I said to myself, ‘I don’t have a mother. I don’t need one. I’m going to let music be my mother.” – Quincy Jones

‘My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her.’ – Jacob Rothschild

‘My mother is my biggest role model, and she showed me how to do it right. She was very present in our lives and has a great career of her own. Same with my father. So I knew it was possible going in to stay closely connected to my children while also chasing big dreams. And it’s given me great perspective.’ – Kerri Walsh Jennings

‘If my mother knew I did this for a living, she’d kill me. She thinks I’m selling dope.’ – Henny Youngman

‘My mother, Dr Nalini Dutta. She was and will always be my everything.’ – Divya Dutta

‘I am a woman. I definitely have a woman’s perspective. I’m also a mother, and I think, because of that, I feel responsible to try and make a difference.’ – Nadine Labaki

‘In 1969, I wrote a musical called ‘Mother Earth.’ It was a rock musical with an ecology theme. We did it at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Southern California where I was a member. It was a smash hit in this small theater.’ – Toni Tennille

‘There were times my mom and I butted heads – over my curfew, over something like that. Whenever we would hit these moments of emotional backfire, she would say, ‘You just don’t understand what it’s like to be a mother… I could never handle losing you.’ I was like, ‘OK, but just, like, chill out.” – Brie Larson

‘My mother was a real tough cookie. She raised the three of us, and she worked at the same time.’ – Teri Garr

‘I grew up in poverty and my mother had to sacrifice a lot for us to eat and get an education – just imagine in a house where we were more than six children! But hard work and dedication is what it took for me to be here today.’ – Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce

‘I find families intriguing, perhaps because I did not grow up in one. I was raised by a feminist, independent, single mother, a divorcee.’ – Elif Safak

‘My mother works in a bank, and my dad is the head of my management team and also works in finance.’ – Henry Cavill

‘In Hindu societies, especially overprotected patriarchal families like mine, daughters are not at all desirable. They are trouble. And a mother who, as mine did, has three daughters, no sons, is supposed to go and hang herself, kill herself, because it is such an unlucky kind of motherhood to have.’ – Bharati Mukherjee

‘As a woman leader, I thought I brought a different kind of leadership. I was interested in women’s issues, in bringing down the population growth rate… as a woman, I entered politics with an additional dimension – that of a mother.’ – Benazir Bhutto

‘I had a very normal childhood, and my mother cooked very normal food.’ – Ferran Adria

‘My mother always told me that as you go through life, no matter what you do, or how you do it, you leave a little footprint, and that’s your legacy.’ – Jan Brewer

‘My mother was a very sweet soul and a beautiful person, but she had a lot of fear.’ – John Grant

‘My accent… my father’s from Cleethorpes and my mother’s from Manchester and I was born in the Midlands and brought up in London, so I’ve got an element of that.’ – Jason Watkins

‘My mother told me never explain, never complain. Even as a young actress, I determined I would never give personal interviews, since they made me so uncomfortable.’ – Jennifer Jones

‘I still feel as if I weren’t a good enough mother. I didn’t break any rules.’ – Mary Tyler Moore

‘My family comes from Panama, and I grew up in a single parent household with my mother, who barely spoke English. She couldn’t get a good job, yet there were four of us for her to raise.’ – Bobby Lashley

‘My siblings and I grew up on Indian food. My mother, though of Slovenian descent, learned to cook Indian delicacies for my father after their wedding.’ – Sunita Williams

‘My father used to sing to me in my mother’s womb. I think I can name about any tune in two beats.’ – Yancy Butler

‘My mother was my biggest role model. She taught me to hate waste. We never wasted anything.’ – W. Edwards Deming

‘My mother read me biblical stories at night.’ – Malcolm Gladwell

‘My mother, sister and I watched through the windows as my father gambled.’ – Tom Berenger

‘She’s my mother and the Queen.’ – Princess Anne

‘I was raised by a strong single mother.’ – Jason Momoa

‘I have a sense of destiny because of my mother, who was an extraordinary person but a terrible candidate for mother. She was like the god Cronus, who gave birth to his children in the morning and then ate them at night.’ – Jamaica Kincaid

‘My mother gave me my drive but my father gave me my dreams.’ – Liza Minnelli

‘My mother, Laura Sumner, had cerebral palsy. She was born absolutely fine, but after about three days, she started having convulsions that left her with a condition that would confine her to a wheelchair her entire life.’ – Bernard Sumner

‘My mother always said don’t marry for money, divorce for money.’ – Wendy Liebman

‘You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment.’ – Thich Nhat Hanh

‘My mother is a very strange woman… She doesn’t understand me in the least and doesn’t love me much either. If she had either love or understanding she would be prepared to make sacrifices.’ – Egon Schiele

‘My dream was to play football for the Oakland Raiders. But my mother thought I would get hurt playing football, so she chose baseball for me. I guess moms do know best.’ – Rickey Henderson

‘Don’t be fooled. Looks can be deceptive. Like every working mother, I’m paddling away like a duck beneath the water.’ – Katherine Kelly

‘Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to know the sense of it.’ – Augustus Hare

‘It is not the thing you fear that you must deal with: it is the mother of the thing you fear.’ – David Whyte

‘I was not a very good mother. I was always running out to do a movie or something. If I had to do it over, I would either have a career or children. I wouldn’t do both unless I could work in my home. I spent 20 years feeling guilty, which is not a very nice emotion.’ – Joanne Woodward

‘Night is the mother of counsels.’ – George Herbert

‘My mother took me to the British Museum aged five. I had thought people from the past weren’t as good as we were, and then I saw the Elgin marbles. Suddenly, the world seemed more complicated.’ – Mary Beard

‘My mother raised three kids on her own, so I was taught that to be a working mom was a good thing.’ – Sarah Shahi

‘My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady and the other was to be independent, and the law was something most unusual for those times because for most girls growing up in the ’40s, the most important degree was not your B.A. but your M.R.S.’ – Ruth Bader Ginsburg

‘A lot of women say to me, ‘You know, I really hated you because my kids wanted you to be their mother.” – Florence Henderson

‘As a kid, I had a lot of energy; but the ballet lessons made me calm – this pleased my mother.’ – Penelope Cruz

‘I come from a mixed family, where my mother is art house cinema and my father is B-movie genre cinema. They’re estranged, and I’ve been trying to bring them together for all of my career to one degree or another.’ – Quentin Tarantino

‘Being a mother is a little like ‘Groundhog’s Day.’ It’s getting out of bed and doing the exact same things again and again and yet again – and it’s watching it all get undone again and again and yet again. It’s humbling, monotonous, mind-numbing, and solitary.’ – Glennon Doyle Melton

‘I learned to draw everything except glamorous women. No matter how much I tried to make them look sexy, they always ended up looking silly… or like somebody’s mother.’ – Norman Rockwell

‘The women I love most are Latina – my sister, mother, and daughter. They’re spontaneous but spend a majority of their time trying to make others happy.’ – William Levy

‘So it was a thing that my mother always taught me to go for your goals and never give up no matter what they are, and I started believing that later on in life.’ – Michael Clarke Duncan

‘You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s.’ – Robert Frost

‘I didn’t care for school much – it was very strict, corporal punishment in the form of the ‘tawse’ was common and unpredictable, and I was often afraid – but I believe that I did well enough; indeed, my mother always regretted that I had not stayed long enough to become the ‘dux,’ as the best pupil was called.’ – Angus Deaton

‘My – both my sisters died with pancreatic cancer. My brother died with pancreatic cancer. My daddy died of pancreatic cancer. My mother died with breast cancer.’ – Jimmy Carter

‘Religion is no more the parent of morality than an incubator is the mother of a chicken.’ – Lemuel K. Washburn

‘I’ve been a medical and public health professional as well as a mother. I became skilled at juggling a number of priorities and competing interests. Like many other female leaders, I’ve tried to serve as a role model for the young women at my organization who are trying to balance a high-level leadership position and a family.’ – Margaret Hamburg

‘My mother’s passion for something more, to write a different destiny for a dirt-poor farmer’s daughter, was to shape my entire life.’ – Faye Dunaway

‘My parents were singularly uninterested in me. My father was too self-centered and too busy with his own practice to pay a lot of attention to me, and my mother was probably deflected more by my sister.’ – Rainer Weiss

‘I didn’t like to stop playing for a second to bother with eating or going to the bathroom. I was a really skinny kid, and I remember my mother always telling people, ‘I don’t know how she’s alive. I think she gets all of her nutrients from air pollution.” – Tig Notaro

‘For me, my body image struggle started very young. All that I heard from my mother, my aunts, and my mom’s friends was, ‘I gotta lose five pounds.’ At 5 years old, I learned a size 2 is not thin enough. It was, ‘Don’t eat carbs! Don’t eat sugar! Drink Diet Coke! You always diet!’ So that was engrained in my brain at a very early age.’ – Whitney Cummings

‘Actually, my mother turned me on to the blues. We had Lightnin’ Hopkins as well as Elvis Presley records.’ – Dusty Hill

‘Dad was a longshoreman, a docker, and my mother scrubbed pub floors.’ – David Essex

‘When I was a young man, my mother said to me, ‘You can’t be a communist without being a militant atheist.’ So I had to be a militant atheist because I wanted to be a communist.’ – Norman Finkelstein

‘The mother of a family should look upon her housekeeping and the planning of meals as a scientific occupation.’ – Eleanor Roosevelt

‘Barack Obama was elected during my second year of college, and save for his skin color, he had much in common with Bill Clinton: Despite an unstable life with a single mother, aided by two loving grandparents, he had made in his adulthood a family life that seemed to embody my sense of the American ideal.’ – J. D. Vance

‘I’m a mother lion when it comes to protecting my children.’ – Joanna Cassidy

‘Bollywood is where I started from and learnt acting, whereas Bhojpuri cinema has got me superstardom. So, for me Bollywood is like a father and Bhojpuri cinema is my mother – there can’t be a choice.’ – Ravi Kishan

‘My mother was in the Army Reserve for six years. She taught me the importance of following rules, finishing what I start, never giving up, leadership skills, teamwork, staying positive, motivated and how to pack the military way when I’m traveling!’ – Laurie Hernandez

‘I didn’t know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student – and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin – suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life.’ – Eavan Boland

‘My mother said I was a little odd as a kid. I was alone a lot, but I didn’t feel alone.’ – Cyndi Lauper

‘My father was a world-class scientist and my mother was a prolific painter. I could see that my parents had completely different ways of knowing and understanding the world, and relating to it. My father approached things through scientific inquiry and exploration, while my mother experienced things through her emotions and senses.’ – Jon Kabat-Zinn

‘The mother-in-law came round last week. It was absolutely pouring down. So I opened the door and I saw her there and I said, ‘Mother, don’t just stand there in the rain. Go home.” – Les Dawson

‘Marriage is the mother of the world. It preserves kingdoms, and fills cities and churches, and heaven itself.’ – Jeremy Taylor

‘My mother raised me as a vegetarian, but when I turned 18, I decided to expand my palate.’ – Hannah Bronfman

‘Until I got married, when I used to go out, my mother said good bye to me as though I was emigrating.’ – Thora Hird

‘I inherited depression from my mother’s side of the family.’ – Buzz Aldrin

‘If you’re 90 and look good in a mini-skirt, go for it. What is ‘age appropriate’? Such nonsense. My mother lived to 106, so what’s middle-age? Seventy is the new 50.’ – Loretta Swit

‘I grew up in Chicago with a single mother. I’m the youngest of six kids, and my older siblings are much older than me. When your siblings are that much older, you never get to ride in the front seat of the car, you never get the chicken breast.’ – Mellody Hobson

‘Sleep is Mother Nature’s best effort yet to counter death.’ – Matthew Walker

‘My mother has a very big family in Shanghai, so I have, like, almost 40 cousins, so we stayed together all the time. So by the time I get to Hong Kong, I become the only child and the only one surrounded by adults, you know.’ – Wong Kar-wai

‘Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother’s womb.’ – Jean Arp

‘I got into sports, thankfully, because I didn’t listen to my mother.’ – Dat Nguyen

‘My father was a tailor. He worked from seven o’clock in the morning until seven at night. At least when he got home, my mother always cooked him a very good dinner. Lots of potatoes, I remember; he used to knock them down like a dose of salts. He needed it, after a 12-hour day.’ – Harold Pinter

‘My mother has a lot of sisters. They had very, very interesting conversations. Because I was a quiet child, I would sit in the room and listen to these stories. I think I developed a curiosity about the life of other people from that, and an interest in looking at what was lying beneath the layer of what people present in public.’ – Ayobami Adebayo

‘Oh I had crushes on all my leading men, I think. Oh, you know who I really had fun with? In this movie ‘Mother, Jugs & Speed,’ I really liked working with Harvey Keitel.’ – Raquel Welch

‘To grow up with the loss of your mother is a scar that never goes away.’ – Maya Rudolph

‘Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.’ – Ann Oakley

‘My mother was a big influence. She kept pushing me because I was very shy and inhibited. And schoolwork was very difficult for me because I couldn’t concentrate. I was failing almost every subject. To this day, I’m not too good at reading a book. But I was the president of my high school comedy group, and they treated me like a king.’ – Don Rickles

‘The support of my mother has made such a difference in my life, sacrificing everything to make sure that we went to school, did our homework, got an education. That was one person supporting me, and it takes more than one person in our community to help raise our children.’ – Adam Goodes

‘My mother was a dominant force in our family. And I always saw her as the leader. And that was great for me as a young woman, because I never saw that women had to be dominated by men.’ – Dolores Huerta

‘My mother used to pack me Filipino food for lunch, and I would get made fun of because of the way it smelled. Kids would make fun of me because of the way I looked and call me ‘Ling Ling.” – Bella Poarch

‘My mother and I were born in Mieres, Asturias, the most beautiful region you’ll ever see in Europe and the home of Cabrales, a great blue cheese made in the Asturian mountains. When I was young, we moved to Barcelona. Whenever my mother was homesick for Asturias, she’d eat a little piece of Cabrales to bring her closer to Mieres.’ – Jose Andres

‘The Dalai Lama said that he thinks mother’s love is the best symbol for love and compassion, because it is totally disinterested.’ – Richard Gere

‘My father is an engineer, and my mother raised the three children.’ – Yasmine Hamdan

‘My mother Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck was a pianist who studied with Dame Myra Hess and Tobias Matthey. As a child in California I used to listen to her play Chopin.’ – Dave Brubeck

‘My father never really encouraged me or even took an interest after I walked away from the family business. No one did except my mother and my grandfather. To be truthful, I cannot remember one meaningful conversation I had with my father.’ – Juergen Teller

‘How could I have been a wife, a mother and a singer? Who takes care of the piccolini when you go around the world? Your children would not call you ‘Mama,’ but ‘Renata.’ – Renata Tebaldi’ – Renata Tebaldi

‘That is something that my mother instilled in me at a very young age – to know my self-worth. And I have had times again and again in the fashion industry where all of that was tested and I rose to the occasion because I was told that I am worthy and I should be able to walk away from something that is not worthy of me.’ – Iman

‘Hollywood was a detour, although my mother was an aristocrat from Tokyo who ran away to join the theatre, so acting is in my genes.’ – Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa

‘I bought a place in Milan, but Missoni headquarters are out in the country, in Sumirago. My whole family eats out of the same vegetable garden; my mother raises chickens. I love the city, but if you’re always bombarded with stimulation, you get numb to it. I need to get bored to create.’ – Margherita Missoni

‘Becoming a mother has been the best thing ever for me. It’s become my life’s work. Not just parenting, but sharing information and encouraging other women to be receptive to the basic nature of motherhood.’ – Anna Getty

‘I have an unending desire to be better and make myself a better person, better mother.’ – Tanya Tucker

‘I think, when you are growing up, you have to pull apart from what your mother wants or needs. You’ve got to go your own way, and that’s what I did.’ – Alice Munro

‘Postpartum depression is a very real and very serious problem for many mothers. It can happen to a first time mom or a veteran mother. It can occur a few days… or a few months after childbirth.’ – Richard J. Codey

‘I’m strong. I like to mother people, look after people. I lead the gang.’ – Vicky McClure

‘My dad was a Muslim and would pray five times a day. I would pray with him as much as I could, in the morning before school. Sometimes he would tell us moralistic tales about genies, magic carpets and wondrous lands. My mother is not religious – she’s just English.’ – Bat for Lashes

‘We all come to the point where it’s time to get yourself straight, as a businesswoman, a mother, whatever you are in life. It’s tough love but it’s also being real with yourself. It’s important to take those rose-coloured glasses off and see what’s going on.’ – Kelly Rowland

‘My mother was and will always remain my greatest hero.’ – Kamala Harris

‘My mother and father didn’t love each other, so they were always fighting.’ – Tina Turner

‘I’m the middle man. I try to keep people happy. I go out of my way to get a smile. That’s the way my mother raised me.’ – Donald Dunn

‘My mother speaks of my step being a source of life-long pain to her, that it is a living death, etc. By the same post I had several letters from anxious relatives, telling me that it was my duty to come home and thus ease my mother’s anxiety.’ – Elizabeth Garrett Anderson

‘My father was a banker, and my mother worked for the state government.’ – Urmila Matondkar

‘I told God, ‘I don’t want a man. I don’t want more gold albums. The only thing I want is the love, friendship, and presence of my mother.’ And God gave it to me.’ – La India

‘I think the biggest reason I was able to express myself and not be intimidated was by not having a mother. For example, mothers teach you manners. And I absolutely did not learn any of those rules and regulations.’ – Madonna Ciccone

‘My mother was a schoolteacher and very keen that I go to a city school, so although it was fairly impoverished times, I traveled every day to the Auckland Grammar School.’ – Edmund Hillary

‘I had difficult mother, difficult childhood like she had. She is Sagittarius like I am. I almost died from broken heart because of love. And she really did.’ – Marina Abramovic

‘While I’m generally silent on the affairs of my biological mother, her recent tirade has taken a gross turn.’ – Frances Bean Cobain

‘My mother, who is nearly ninety now, still talks continually about my father. All my life, I’ve been aware of her grief about his absence and her strong pride in his conduct.’ – Derek Walcott

‘God has given you your country as cradle, and humanity as mother; you cannot rightly love your brethren of the cradle if you love not the common mother.’ – Giuseppe Mazzini

‘So many people ask, ‘How could you forgive your mother for the way you were raised?’ It’s really not forgiveness, in my opinion. It’s acceptance. She’s never going to be the sort of mother who wants to take care of me.’ – Jeannette Walls

‘I had a father and mother, who were devout and feared God. Our Lord also helped me with His grace. All this would have been enough to make me good, if I had not been so wicked.’ – Saint Teresa of Avila

‘An unhappy mother does not raise a happy child.’ – Joni Mitchell

‘The inspiration came suddenly again to surrender to the Mother. It was quite unexpected: And so somehow I made a surrender to the Mother. Then I had an experience of overwhelming love. Waves of love sort of flowed into me.’ – Bede Griffiths

‘Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.’ – Annie Dillard

‘My mother was the president of the PTA at every school I attended.’ – Vernon Jordan

‘I used to say that if something happened to my mother, I wanted to die with her. That’s because I loved her so much. I want to live so I can carry out the essence of what she has shown me: kindness and goodness.’ – Stevie Wonder

‘Not many people know this about me, but I’m a natural blonde. My hair went from light blonde naturally to a darker kind of blonde. My mother dyed my hair dark when I was a child, as I loved the look then. So I’m basically a natural blonde.’ – Angelina Jolie

‘As a former teacher and a mother and grandmother, I know firsthand the importance of a quality education.’ – Sue Kelly

‘My mother grew up with each of her children – whatever your age, that’s the age she’d be when she listened to your stories. She never belittled our problems. It made for something permanent and reliable.’ – Esther Rolle

‘You can be cool and at the same time respect your woman, who will hopefully become your wife, who will hopefully become the mother of your kids. America needs to get back to family values.’ – Martin Lawrence

‘My parents took an interest in nothing, at home no books, no records. My mother and my father are the emblem of indifference, dryness and bad taste. My father is also terribly stingy, in life as well as in feelings: I have never seen him filling up the bathtub.’ – Vincent Gallo

‘I think it’s a mother’s dream come true to see it work out that way. Not just the mother, but certainly parents, to know that their children have a very solid moral foundation and religious foundation.’ – Erika Slezak

‘I thought I wanted to be a pediatrician because, as a second job, my mother would clean up a pediatrician’s office. So I was like, ‘Oh, OK, baby doctor.’ Until I got to college, and all the courses of science with the blood, guts and cadavers? I was like, ‘Mm, no.” – Angela Bassett

‘A mother is neither cocky, nor proud, because she knows the school principal may call at any minute to report that her child had just driven a motorcycle through the gymnasium.’ – Mary Kay Blakely

‘My mother was a Bohemian – in the good sense of the word. A searcher. And she investigated various religions.’ – Madeline Kahn

‘My father was stationed at Clark Air Base in the Philippines, which had a hospital where they brought casualties straight from the battlefield. My mother was kind of a sophisticated bohemian, and my father was in the military to make a living.’ – Annie Leibovitz

‘Well, I’m half Australian, half English and I live in London. That is the only reason I came upon this story. My Australian mother, Meredith Hooper, was invited in late 2007 by some Australian friends to make up a token Australian audience in a tiny fringe theater play reading of an unproduced, unrehearsed play called ‘The King’s Speech.” – Tom Hooper

‘I didn’t know my mother had it. I think a lot of women don’t know their mothers had it; that’s the sad thing about depression. You know, you don’t function anymore. You shut down. You feel like you are in a void.’ – Marie Osmond

‘My father had a real short fuse. He had a tough life – had to support his mother and brother at a very young age when his dad’s farm collapsed. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one. My father was full of terrifying anger.’ – Sam Shepard

‘The Rock now the hottest thing. He come from wrestling background. Father, mother, grandfather all from wrestling business: 2-3 generations. I watch his movie. He great movie star, and I be wrestling with his father Rocky Johnson. I love them.’ – The Iron Sheik

‘My mother taught children to love to dance.’ – Abby Lee Miller

‘I didn’t have parents, so I lived in people’s homes… And because I grew up with no parental role models, I learned to become my own friend, eventually my own father and my own mother.’ – John Lone

‘I remember my mother had this deck of cards that her mother had given her and that she passed on to me. It was a gypsy tarot deck that I used to carry everywhere.’ – David Blaine

‘My mother had no end of tragedy in her life. She would make herself get up and take a deep breath and go out and do laundry. Hang up sheets.’ – Patti Smith

‘When I was a kid, my father didn’t really have much hope for me. He thought I was a dreamer; he didn’t think I would amount to anything. My mother also.’ – Frank Gehry

‘I’ve always been kind of a mom. I was out of my house when I was 18, and my friends used to call me ‘mother’ and ‘care unit.” – Pamela Adlon

‘My mother and I have always had a very close relationship, so I wanted to honor my mom by naming my daughter Julia as well.’ – Lacey Chabert

‘My mother lived through the Great Depression. Her family of 11 children pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and moved to wherever there was work at the time. And in rural Oklahoma, that wasn’t easy to find.’ – Chuck Norris

‘I feel very passionately that we need to take care of the planet and everything on it. Whether it’s saving the Amazon or just being kind to those around you, we need to take care of each other and Mother Earth.’ – Olivia Newton-John

‘When you’re interviewing someone, even your mother – you have to sort of deal with you have to get some objective space from yourself and the person but you also have to find what’s the best way to get the information from that person.’ – James McBride

‘My mother was the most amazing person. She taught me to be kind to other women. She believed in family. She was with my father from the first day they met. All that I am, she taught me.’ – Sidney Poitier

‘I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.’ – Laurence Sterne

‘No one understands my ills, nor the terror that fills my breast, who does not know the heart of a mother.’ – Marie Antoinette

‘I was one of those children forced into fighting at the age of 13, in my country Sierra Leone, a war that claimed the lives of my mother, father and two brothers. I know too well the emotional, psychological and physical burden that comes with being exposed to violence as a child or at any age for that matter.’ – Ishmael Beah

‘If necessity is the mother of invention, it’s the father of cooperation. And we’re cooperating like never before.’ – John Ashcroft

‘My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.’ – Orson Welles

‘When I was a child I wanted to be a vet. I’d come home with “lost” kittens and dogs. My mother would tell me to put them back.’ – Philippa Gregory

‘I have been tied up with music for about as long as I can remember. By the time I was four I was picking out little tunes my mother played on the reed organ in the living-room.’ – Mary Lou Williams

‘Did your mother never tell you not to drink on an empty head?’ – Billy Connolly

‘A man never sees all that his mother has been to him until it’s too late to let her know that he sees it.’ – William Dean Howells

‘My mother gave me the discipline to follow my dreams. You know: you can do what you want as long as you put your back into it. Just keep ploughing away.’ – George Clinton

‘I used to watch my mother cooking when I was a child; she influenced me a lot.’ – Nobu Matsuhisa

‘My mother and my father have always supported me. Now in their eighties, they actually clamor onto the tour bus with me once or twice a year so they can watch the performances and hear the crowds. Traveling with eighty-something-year-olds on a tour bus… there has to be some sort of reality show in that.’ – Jeff Dunham

‘Every so often, I’ll look at myself in the mirror and go, ‘You’re a bad mother,’ you know? Like, ‘You’re a bad dude, man, and you’re gonna show the world who you are when the time is right.” – Phil Heath

‘My father was a dentist. And my mother was a – do we still say ‘housewife’? A home engineer.’ – Laurie Simmons

‘I am the grandson of immigrants from Japan who went to America, boldly going to a strange new world, seeking new opportunities. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. They met and married in Los Angeles, and I was born there.’ – George Takei

‘My mother was a very hard-working maid, and their stories are worth telling.’ – Judy Reyes

‘My mother gave birth to me on the floor of our apartment in Mecca with only my toddler sister to help her because my father was at work and no male guardian was available to take her to a hospital.’ – Manal al-Sharif

‘When my mother passed away, we knew what she wanted on her tombstone, so I asked my father, so there wouldn’t be any argument among us children, ‘Daddy, what do you want on your tombstone?’ He thought about that. He said, ‘preacher.’ So that’s what’s going to be on his tombstone. Preacher.’ – Franklin Graham

‘I found myself in the doldrums in the early Nineties. I was too old to play the dolly bird any longer and I looked too young to play a woman of my real age. No one ever saw me as the aunt, mother or grandmother.’ – Barbara Windsor

‘I love cooking. My Italian mother is a genius cook, and I picked that up from her. I make my own sauce, which takes four hours, from a recipe that’s been refined over many years. I won’t tell anybody what it is.’ – Josh Fox

‘That MySpace is the story of the year. Everyone but my mother is on it.’ – Dane Cook

‘My mother was crazy.’ – Logic

‘I’ve always wanted to throw a party where everyone comes with their mother’s meatloaf. Everybody could evoke their mother’s memory through her meatloaf.’ – Diane Sawyer

‘My father’s from Australia and my mother was born in India, but she’s actually Tibetan. I was born in Katmandu, lived there until I was eight, and then moved to Australia with my mother and father. So yeah, I’m very mixed up, been to many different schools.’ – Dichen Lachman

‘I love art. My sister is an artist and my mother is a painter, so it is very much in the family. I haven’t ever wanted to be a fine artist myself – my sister robbed me of my artistic talent, I think.’ – Douglas Booth

‘Well, knowledge is a fine thing, and mother Eve thought so; but she smarted so severely for hers, that most of her daughters have been afraid of it since.’ – Abigail Adams

‘When I was growing up, there was nobody in my family – not even my mother – who I could look to and be like, ‘I know you’ve never said anything homophobic.’ So, you know, you worry about people in the business who you’ve heard talk that way. Some of my heroes coming up talk recklessly like that.’ – Frank Ocean

‘My mother has been the greatest influence on my life, morally. When I get right down to it, my mother and father are two people I can count on no matter what.’ – Jack Wagner

‘I took the role of Rochelle in ‘Everybody Hates Chris,’ and that was it. I was going to play mother roles all the time. Once you do one mother role, it’s always a trickle down effect.’ – Tichina Arnold

‘I know my father believed and my mother believed in and supported the suffrage movement, and I remember my mother taking me to suffrage meetings held in the home of a Quaker family that lived not far from us.’ – Alice Paul

‘And I come here as a daughter, raised on the South Side of Chicago – by a father who was a blue-collar city worker and a mother who stayed at home with my brother and me.’ – Michelle Obama

‘My father was a construction worker most of his life. My mother, when she came from Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, to the United States, never had a chance to go to college either and became a clerical worker. But they did nothing but build this country.’ – Xavier Becerra

‘My mother is an amazing woman. Not only did she manage the entire household, she noticed a gift in each of her kids and instilled confidence in all of us that that gift would take us wherever we wanted to go.’ – Barbara Corcoran

‘My father is a chemist, my mother was a homemaker. My parents instilled in us the feeling that learning was the most exciting thing that could happen to you, and it never ends.’ – Rita Dove

‘A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive.’ – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

‘I lost my mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and we had to relocate my dad after 58 years in the family home. That was tough.’ – Doug Davidson

‘My Italian granny and my mother made great spaghetti, but it wasn’t a kind of southern Italian, Godfather-esque kind of thing – it was a wonderful, big mixing pot of all kinds of people – when you came home from school and your mum wasn’t in, there were lots of people you could go to.’ – Peter Capaldi

‘The importance of inclusive behavior was modeled for me early in life. I have many childhood memories of my mother – an entrepreneur and business owner – drawing people to herself and inspiring them with the genuineness of her interest in them.’ – Lynne Doughtie

‘My mother, all of her sisters and my siblings all went through a stage from the age of about 15 to 19 where they widened and then lengthened. Had I not been modelling, that would have been a phase that was in a family photo album rather than in Vogue.’ – Sophie Dahl

‘Sitting around the house playing the wife and mother is driving me crazy.’ – Patsy Cline

‘I’ve got very little grey hair. It’s to do with the genes. My mother and father were the same.’ – Prunella Scales

‘As a former competitive athlete and a mother to a daughter who is a D1 collegiate athlete, I staunchly oppose biological males in girls/women’s sports, locker rooms, and bathrooms.’ – Marjorie Taylor Greene

‘I had played the Virgin Mary in ‘Jesus of Nazareth,’ and I had done ‘Juliet’ at the age of 15. People said, ‘Where do you go from playing Juliet and the Virgin Mary?’ And I said, ‘Mother Teresa of Calcutta.” – Olivia Hussey

‘There was nothing girlish about me. I wore clothes hand-stitched by my mother… I had only one ear pierced and preferred loose shirts and trousers. I think I was imitating my father!’ – Divyanka Tripathi

‘My mother and father were middle-class, and my grandmother lived in the ghetto, so I used to spend my summers at her house.’ – Sisqo

‘Being a mother by far is my favorite and most important career.’ – Jenni Rivera

‘You know, I used to warm the thermometer on the light bulb… I was really good at being sick. I could forge my mother’s signature on a sick note so well I was hardly ever at school.’ – Graydon Carter

‘When I was 13 I asked my mother if it was possible for this to end – I’d had enough of it. And that was right about the time that we got a call for ‘The Exorcist’ interview.’ – Linda Blair

‘Modern parents want to nurture so skillfully that Mother Nature will gasp in admiration at the marvels their parenting produces from the soft clay of children.’ – George Will

‘I consider myself lucky to be an only child because if I had other siblings, my mother would not have been able to take me to every audition and be so supportive of my career.’ – Lea Michele

‘Education is the mother of leadership.’ – Wendell Willkie

‘My mother didn’t try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.’ – Alan Alda

‘Even though my mother had told me growing up that, ‘If you win, nobody cares what color you are,’ that wasn’t necessarily true in the N.F.L.’ – Warren Moon

‘My mother’s not a political person. She just doesn’t want me to be mean… sometimes I have to be mean. It’s like a parent or a teacher. Sometimes for the good of everybody you have to be a little bit strong, a little bit confrontational.’ – Bill O’Reilly

‘There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.’ – Ralph Waldo Emerson

‘My mother has done a great job with her kids. The daily struggle of raising three daughters with a very limited income yet seeing to it that they get a good upbringing, giving her daughters wings even after not being so educated – that person is my hero.’ – Sonali Bendre

‘My mom, she wasn’t like a baseball mother who knew everything about the game. She just wanted me to be happy with what I was doing.’ – David Ortiz

‘Obedience is the mother of success and is wedded to safety.’ – Aeschylus

‘My mother always told me, even if a song has been done a thousand times, you can still bring something of your own to it. I’d like to think I did that.’ – Etta James

‘I am so proud to be my mother’s son.’ – Justin Trudeau

‘As a war correspondent and a mother, I’ve learned to live in two different realities… but it’s my choice. I choose to live in peace and witness war – to experience the worst in people but to remember the beauty.’ – Lynsey Addario

‘When new cooks come to work for me, they obviously make mistakes at the beginning or there’s some messiness to the presentation. What I always say to them is: ‘If you were cooking this for your mother or your girlfriend, would you make those mistakes?” – Joel Robuchon

‘I am an average mother in almost every way, so yes, much to my regret, I do yell at my children.’ – Kelly Corrigan

‘I’ve always been inspired by small details that make me wander. My mother would ask me, ‘What are you looking at so intensely?’ I would answer, ‘Everything and nothing.’ She really supported my wanderings, called me Marco Polo.’ – Mark Bradford

‘Necessity may well be called the mother of invention but calamity is the test of integrity.’ – Samuel Richardson

‘I want to buy my mother a huge house in New Orleans so she can open up a bed and breakfast.’ – Luke James

‘My mother, Nancy Dickerson, was a reporter for CBS and NBC and the first female star of television news; my father, Wyatt Dickerson, was a successful businessman. Their parties, from the ’60s to the ’80s, attracted cabinet officials, movie stars, and presidents.’ – John Dickerson

‘There are many ways to be a mother. I have a lot of young actors I mentor, and my nieces and my nephews need a lot of love.’ – Kim Cattrall

‘God pardons like a mother, who kisses the offense into everlasting forgiveness.’ – Henry Ward Beecher

‘Necessity is the mother of taking chances.’ – Mark Twain

‘Tell me, Connie, is your mother still dead?’ – Ed Sullivan

‘I was fourteen years old when I went to my first suffrage meeting. Returning from school one day, I met my mother just setting out for the meeting, and I begged her to let me go along.’ – Emmeline Pankhurst

‘I grew up speaking Spanish and English. My mother can speak Spanish, English, French and Italian, and she’s pretty good at faking Portuguese. I wish that I spoke more languages than I do.’ – Sebastian Arcelus

‘I am Dominican American. My father was born and raised in the U.S. and his heritage is German and Eastern European, and my mother hails from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.’ – Monica Raymund

‘I knew I wanted to sing when I was a very small boy. When I was probably 4 years old. My mother played a guitar and I would sit with her and she would sing and I learned to sing along with her.’ – Johnny Cash

‘I had good parents. My mother had morals and standards and she brought us up to be good kids – some of the families around were just laws unto themselves, it was really tribal.’ – Jimmy Somerville

‘I know Mother named me after a railroad man, but it’s too late now, I’m afraid. Much, much too late.’ – Hoagy Carmichael

‘My father is a visual artist, so I was influenced by him, and my mother is an English teacher who forced me to read a lot of books and poetry and get involved in theatre. I developed a varied taste for different arts.’ – Taika Waititi

‘My mother told me once that she had her talk with God whenever she started a new sweater: ‘Please don’t take me in the middle of the sweater.’ And as soon as she finished knitting a sweater, and it was blocked and put together, she already had the wool to start the next sweater so that nothing bad would happen.’ – Judy Blume

‘The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother’s side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.’ – Erich Fromm

‘My mother had lots and lots of children who didn’t survive.’ – Dom DeLuise

‘I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends’ mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing.’ – Anne Lamott

‘That’s nice, to be compared to Joanna Lumley. She played my mother once in ‘Ella Enchanted.’ I was one of the ugly sisters, and she was the stepmother, so that was great. I’ll take that comparison, thank you.’ – Lucy Punch

‘I love my mother. She’s my first love. She has been through a lot and is a sole survivor.’ – Missy Elliott

‘I always feel, as a mother does, that I protect her. Who will do that when I’m gone?’ – Debbie Reynolds

‘I used to steal my father’s cologne, and it was so strong. My mother would always know when I did because it was so intrusive. That’s why I like Evolution – it’s a strong yet subtle scent.’ – Trey Songz

‘Oh, my God. I want to be a mother, and I anticipate loving my children quite fiercely. I think about it all the time, though it’s a silly thing to think about because the kind of mother I’ll be depends on the kind of children I have. I can’t wait to meet them.’ – Anne Hathaway

‘A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.’ – Sigmund Freud

‘My father was on the faculty in the Chemistry Department of Harvard University; my mother had one year of graduate work in physics before her marriage.’ – Kenneth G. Wilson

‘The biggest and the most important thing my mother told me is to be a good actor you first need to be a really good human being and an honest person.’ – Janhvi Kapoor

‘My ‘Chili Palmer’ was my mother. Her name is Carmen Milian, and she’s my manager. Before getting into music, we actually educated ourselves, and I went to college for music as a business and learned the business side, and she read a lot of books.’ – Christina Milian

‘Like my mother, I was always saying, ‘I’ll fix my life one day.’ It became clear when I saw her die without fulfilling her dreams that my time was now or maybe never.’ – Liz Murray

‘When my mother died, I fell apart. My father wanted to control me. As a consequence, I ran away to America.’ – Louise Bourgeois

‘To be a mother you must be strong. Even if you don’t feel it, you have to pretend.’ – Sade Adu

‘Berta Caceres, a Lenca woman, grew up during the violence that swept through Central America in the 1980s. Her mother, a midwife and social activist, took in and cared for refugees from El Salvador, teaching her young children the value of standing up for disenfranchised people.’ – Greg Grandin

‘Working with Will Smith was one of the highlights of my career. He is so talented and has a tremendous work ethic. We are still friends, and I reach out to him and his partner to pitch ideas. He loves my mother. In fact, my mother was his son Jaden’s acting coach for the movie ‘Pursuit of Happiness.” – Kim Fields

‘I think a mother deserves the highest respect and when you talk about salary, it’s not always about cash, but I feel it’s the love and respect that you give to someone.’ – Manushi Chhillar

‘I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and I honestly started performing for my family when I was around three. I would jump up on the coffee table and I would get in the closet and ask that they introduce me to come out, and from that point on, my mother stuck me in dance class and children’s theater.’ – Erika Jayne

‘I’m considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family – father, mother, children – is fundamental to our civilisation.’ – Rupert Murdoch

‘My mother never married my father. She was married to and divorced from another man, then she married and divorced my stepfather and then, ultimately, they ended up getting back together.’ – Jesse Metcalfe

‘The mother’s love for her child is very strong in Korean society – almost on the borderline of being an obsession.’ – Bong Joon-ho

‘Shondaland is my company. I run that mother. I am in charge. I am the leader. It’s fantastic. It’s also really hard. As it should be.’ – Shonda Rhimes

‘If I were dammed of body and soul, I know whose prayers would make me whole, mother o’ mine o mother o’ mine.’ – Rudyard Kipling

‘Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them.’ – Rita Rudner

‘I’m living my life for an audience of one. I live my life to please God. And I believe if He’s pleased, that people like my mother and my daddy, my grandparents, you know, my husband, my children, they’ll be pleased.’ – Anne Graham Lotz

‘When Hindustan Motors rolled out the first Ambassador Car in 1957 its sturdy body, rounded contours and Mother Earth simplicity immediately bagged it a place in our collective consciousness.’ – Barkha Dutt

‘My mother raised me in the church. I was not allowed to stay home on Sunday; there was no option. I sang in the choir all the way up until I went to college.’ – Steve Harvey

‘My mother was a full-time mom, and Dad started his own business. He was a mini-American dream story. Came from Russia at age 4, started his own pen business in Brooklyn. The company isn’t around now, but he created his own healthy little world, leaving a decent legacy. My dad taught at Cooper Union but was never fully graduated himself.’ – Bonnie Hammer

‘When my mother got home from work, she would take me to the movies. It was her way of getting out, and she would take me with her. I’d go home and act all the parts. It had a tremendous influence on my becoming an actor.’ – Al Pacino

‘Becoming a mother doesn’t always change every aspect of your personality.’ – Anna Torv

‘Let every mother realize that she has no greater blessing than the children who have come to her as a gift from the Almighty; that she has no greater mission than to rear them in light and truth, in understanding and love.’ – Gordon B. Hinckley

‘My eyes are at different levels, and my right ear’s a bit bigger than my left – which showed up particularly in school photographs – so my mother used to call me her ‘little Picasso.” – Michael Portillo

‘The truth is that no matter how old we are, as long as our mothers are alive, we want our mother. And it’s a very powerful relationship if it’s healthy.’ – Goldie Hawn

‘An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke – although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness.’ – Sonia Sotomayor

‘What is free time? I’m a single mother. My free moments are filled with loving my little girl.’ – Roma Downey

‘Maybe it’s because my mother divorced and my grandmother divorced, so maybe I’m frightened deep down. But then I also feel there is no real need. Why do I need to get married? To reassure me? No I don’t need reassurance.’ – Juliette Binoche

‘I grew up in the sixties watching B.B. King and Tito Puente and Miles Davis and Coltrane, everybody, Marvin Gaye, Jimi. And at the same time, with my left eye I was watching Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mother Teresa.’ – Carlos Santana

‘I have two sisters and a mother, obviously, so I grew up with a household of girls. Maybe I have a greater respect for women because of it.’ – Hayden Christensen

‘I wanted to be an attorney. My mother would say I never stopped talking. I always had a lot of questions to ask, and I was never satisfied with the answer. A lot of things I wasn’t satisfied by.’ – Claudette Colvin

‘Every one of us is, even from his mother’s womb, a master craftsman of idols.’ – John Calvin

‘My mother was a phoenix who always expected to rise from the ashes of her latest disaster. She loved being Judy Garland.’ – Lorna Luft

‘Here’s a thing about the death of your mother, or anyone else you love: You can’t anticipate how you’ll feel afterward. People will tell you; a few may be close to right, none exactly right.’ – Mary Schmich

‘There are things that you cannot talk to your mother and father about, there are things that you cannot talk to your children about.’ – Shirley Knight

‘I lost my girl a couple years back, Aaliyah, in a plane crash. I wasn’t expecting that, and also, my mother died, and at the time, my father wasn’t in my life; the only person that took care of me was my mom.’ – Damon Dash

‘My mother’s idea of natural childbirth was giving birth without makeup. She was hyper-positive – the world is a wonderful place, rainbows and unicorns. If you said anything contrary to her, you were basically exiled.’ – Robin Williams

‘I was the seventh child in a family of eight siblings. We lost our father very young, and my mother had pretty much single-handedly brought us up.’ – Shiv Nadar

‘When you grow up your mother says, ‘Wear rubbers or you’ll catch cold.’ When you become an adult you discover that you have the right not to wear rubbers and to see if you catch cold or not. It’s something like that.’ – Diane Arbus

‘If you try singling me out to my mother, she’ll be down your throat. She has three sons, and she’s equally proud of us all.’ – Lee Pearson

‘I was born in South Africa during apartheid, a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother’s a black woman, South African Xhosa woman… and my father’s Swiss, from Switzerland.’ – Trevor Noah

‘Oh, my goodness, when you’re a mother and you just give birth to a child with spina bifida and – or Down’s Syndrome or cerebral palsy, there’s a bit of a shock you’re going to have to go through, a bit of an adjustment curve.’ – Joni Eareckson Tada

‘In my divorce, I stood up and said to my ex-wife, ‘Hey, I messed up. This had nothing to do with you. I didn’t understand what marriage was. I cheated. I was wrong. We couldn’t fix it; it got worse. I stepped away because I didn’t want it to get any worse. You’re the mother of my kids – I don’t want to hate you.” – Kevin Hart

‘I perceived how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth except the Scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue.’ – William Tyndale

‘My mother was the concert master of the symphony. Absurdity and eccentricity were not criticized.’ – Martin Short

‘There’s a definition of narcissism that when a parent is narcissistic, instead of the child seeing himself reflected in the mother’s face and the mother’s joy, the child of the narcissistic parent feels like, ‘What can I do to make her okay, to make her happy?” – Susan Sullivan

‘I am still the same village girl from Dhing who used to help my father in the paddy field, help mother in household chores, run for hours on the streets of Dhing, play football with my Mon Jai group friends.’ – Hima Das

‘We can not have equilibrium in this world with the current inequality and destruction of Mother Earth. Capitalism is what is causing this problem and it needs to end.’ – Evo Morales

‘Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.’ – Gloria Steinem

‘It’s nice to have a few names. I use a few names myself. I use a few different surnames. I call myself James sometimes. I actually use my mother’s name as a professional name. But if someone calls me Mr. Murphy or Mr. Gillen, I don’t like that. I don’t like being called ‘mister,’ and I don’t like being called ‘sir.” – Aidan Gillen

‘I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.’ – Emily Dickinson

‘The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.’ – Germaine Greer

‘My mother liked Jim Reeves. I hated his records. He was unbearable.’ – Diane Abbott

‘We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.’ – F. H. Bradley

‘My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.’ – Nora Ephron

‘It is only when parental feelings are ineffective or too ambivalent or when the mother’s emotions are temporarily engaged elsewhere that children feel lost.’ – Anna Freud

‘Just as a mother finds pleasure in taking her little child on her lap, there to feed and caress him, in like manner our loving God shows His fondness for His beloved souls who have given themselves entirely to Him and have placed all their hope in His goodness.’ – Alphonsus Liguori

‘When it came to my childhood – growing up in a single-parent home, often struggling financially – my mother definitely instilled in me and my siblings this strength, this will, to just continue to survive and succeed.’ – Misty Copeland

‘I told Mother of my decision to study medicine. She encouraged me to speak to Father… I began in a roundabout way… He listened, looking at me with that serious and penetrating gaze of his that caused me such trepidation, and asked whether I knew what I wanted to do.’ – Rita Levi-Montalcini

‘Being a mother is magical.’ – Ellen Pompeo

‘When I was born, that was the music my mother was listening to. Michael Jackson is a third parent to me.’ – The Weeknd

‘The maternal duty of suckling her own children, prescribed to mothers by hygienists, is based on a physiological principle: the mother’s milk nourishes an infant more perfectly than any other.’ – Maria Montessori

‘Why do grandparents and grandchildren get along so well? The mother.’ – Claudette Colbert

‘The severe household has no fierce slaves, while it is the affectionate mother who has the prodigal son.’ – Han Fei

‘When your mother dies, you’re not a little girl any more.’ – Kate Bush

‘I became a novelist because of ‘Gone With the Wind,’ or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a ‘Southern’ novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word ‘Southern’ because ‘Gone With the Wind’ set my mother’s imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta.’ – Pat Conroy

‘I do have a nickname with my family; I’m called Snappy, because I do get to be a bit snippy at times. They call me Snappy Bear. That’s from New Hampshire. My dad’s called Crazy, my mother’s Happy – it’s a whole thing.’ – Eliza Coupe

‘If you truly get in touch with a piece of carrot, you get in touch with the soil, the rain, the sunshine. You get in touch with Mother Earth and eating in such a way, you feel in touch with true life, your roots, and that is meditation. If we chew every morsel of our food in that way we become grateful and when you are grateful, you are happy.’ – Thich Nhat Hanh

‘When I was younger, my mother wanted me to look like Claudia Schiffer. I was like, ‘We’re not even German, but all right.” – Keala Settle

‘In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head.’ – Edvard Munch

‘When my mother was born on 14 April, he named her after a Latin American holiday, the Day of Americas, that nobody knew about. My due date also happened to be 14 April.’ – America Ferrera

‘My mother had lived in London since I was little, so she never got to see my school plays and stuff.’ – Lauren Graham

‘To understand how black projects began, and how they continue to function today, one must start with the creation of the atomic bomb. The men who ran the Manhattan Project wrote the rules about black operations. The atomic bomb was the mother of all black projects, and it is the parent from which all black operations have sprung.’ – Annie Jacobsen

‘There are co-ed schools in Saudi, but those are American or British. My dad, of course, believed in the good old CBSE Indian school system and thus, my younger brother Ishmeet and I were put in an all-boys CBSE school. My mother could move out only if she wore a burkha.’ – Karan Singh Grover

‘All human beings are inherently good, so when someone goes off the rails, there must be some mitigating factor – he was bullied, was a loner, had an abusive father, or a domineering mother, etc.’ – Ray Comfort

‘I think about my parents all the time, especially on Sunday when I’m at Mass. My mother always said, ‘We do not pray to win elections. We pray for people’s health, we pray that God’s will be done, we pray that we do our best. But we do not pray to win elections.” – Nancy Pelosi

‘I grew up singing. My mother was a music teacher.’ – Connie Britton

‘Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things, like even his own mother and father.’ – Marcel Duchamp

‘My mother insisted that her children read.’ – Jimmy Buffett

‘A little girl who finds a puzzle frustrating might ask her busy mother (or teacher) for help. The child gets one message if her mother expresses clear pleasure at the request and quite another if mommy responds with a curt ‘Don’t bother me – I’ve got important work to do.” – Daniel Goleman

‘The same way you can see me sit at a table in a movie and be six different people, the mother and the uncle and all these different things, when I’m in the studio, I can do that, too. I’m not trying to be a recording artist and have a certain type of music for the radio.’ – Eddie Murphy

‘My mother gave me a pair of diamond earrings when I was 13. It symbolised becoming a teenager. I also remember getting a collection of costume jewellery from my grandmother when I was in high school.’ – Erin Wasson

‘I woke up one day and thought: ‘I want to write a book about the history of my body.’ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.’ – Paul Auster

‘Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.’ – Saul Alinsky

‘I love my children, but I don’t really want to talk about them. I’m not that much of a freakish middle-aged mother, I’m just very lucky, and there isn’t much more to say. I’d like not to be constantly expected to be a spokesman for things that are part of the natural rhythm of a woman’s life.’ – Mariella Frostrup

‘My mother worked in a school canteen – then worked in the canteen of a chicken factory. Every Friday, the pay packet money would be allocated to cover bills.’ – Ian Rankin

‘Having a child doesn’t make a woman a mother any more than owning a paintbrush makes her Frida Kahlo.’ – Koren Zailckas

‘My mother told me I should be a secretary, but I wanted to be an actress from when I was very young.’ – Barbra Streisand

‘A woman has two smiles that an angel might envy, the smile that accepts a lover before words are uttered, and the smile that lights on the first born babe, and assures it of a mother’s love.’ – Thomas Chandler Haliburton

‘My mother had morning sickness after I was born.’ – Rodney Dangerfield

‘I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was ‘call attention to yourself,’ or ‘think you were smart.’ My mother was an exception to this rule and was punished by the early onset of Parkinson’s disease.’ – Alice Munro

‘We have a lion, tiger, liger, which is the father is a lion and the mother is a tiger, black and spotted leopard, mountain lion, Asian leopard cats. Weve got a tremendous number of the exotic feline.’ – Tippi Hedren

‘My mother was a dancer, so I like to use the body as part of the instrument of acting.’ – Nicolas Cage

‘It was probably my parents who inspired me most. My father was a scientist and answered my scientific questions, while my mother took me on walks and showed me birds and plants. She also took me out at night and showed me the constellations and the aurora.’ – Nancy Roman

‘My mother’s death brought me to my knees. She was my hero, my role model, my very best friend. I spoke to her every single day of my life. I really tried hard when I grew up to make her proud of me.’ – Maria Shriver

‘The problems of rebellious youth can be traced to homes where the mother disobeyed the father or showed lack of respect for his authority.’ – Helen Andelin

‘My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women’s education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor.’ – Antonia Fraser

‘One of my biggest gifts ever, my mother made a Yankee uniform for me as a little boy, and I wore it to bed dreaming I could pitch in the major leagues and then be a Yankee.’ – Dick Vitale

‘Basically, my parents messed up because it was the Sixties, and they both had affairs, but they had a great love for each other. I saw that when my father flew over from Los Angeles when he knew my mother was going to die.’ – Saffron Aldridge

‘I lost my mother to cancer, so once Masaba was born, my father moved from Old Delhi to live with me in Mumbai.’ – Neena Gupta

‘I think football saves many people. It can give you a life of luxury, but people don’t see all the effort that goes in behind the scenes. That might mean not seeing your family or missing your mother’s birthday; many players are so focused that they miss the birth of their children.’ – Alexis Sanchez

‘Asher Roth lived on my couch for six months to build up a following. With Justin Bieber, I moved him and his mother to a town house a block away from me.’ – Scooter Braun

‘I learned reading and writing from my mother.’ – Sudha Murty

‘I’m really simple. I’m just like, wash your face, keep it hydrated, moisturize every night, whether it’s a cream or serum or overnight thing. My mother’s trick – who looks amazing and has no wrinkles under her eyes – is to wear eye cream every night.’ – Camila Morrone

‘When I was a child, my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll end up as the Pope.’ Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.’ – Pablo Picasso

‘My mother, she passed away when I was 28 years old. She fought cancer for more than 10 years. She had breast cancer, and I miss her.’ – Jason Chaffetz

‘I have good genes. My father is Danish and my mother is Irish and Native American. They both have good skin.’ – Virginia Madsen

‘When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels.’ – Sylvia Plath

‘My mother came from a very affluent background, very Westernized, while my father was more Eastern. So I’ve had a very good blend of the East and the West. I guess this has been extremely helpful in making my career and the way I function.’ – Amitabh Bachchan

‘The word’s out: I’m a woman, and I’m going to have trouble backing off on that. I am what I am. I’ll go out and talk to people about what’s happening to their families, and when I do that, I’m a mother. I’m a grandmother.’ – Elizabeth Warren

‘My father, who was from a wealthy family and highly educated, a lawyer, Yale and Columbia, walked out with the benefit of a healthy push from my mother, a seventh grade graduate, who took a typing course and got a secretarial job as fast as she could.’ – George Weinberg

‘My mother was right: When you’ve got nothing left, all you can do is get into silk underwear and start reading Proust.’ – Jane Birkin

‘I watched my mother be one of the most vibrant, happy women every day. She loved to smile, all the time. She was a smile; she was pure sunshine. And with ALS in her last few months of her life, she lost her ability to smile.’ – Tabitha Brown

‘I was very much in love with my mother. She was a very warm and a very cold woman. When she was warm, I tried to come close to her. But she could be very cold and rejecting.’ – Ingmar Bergman

‘As it turns out, my grandmother, my mother, my wife, and my daughter are all women, and I like those people. I’m concerned about the issues that they face in their lives. So I’m a feminist, but that’s not all I am.’ – Tommy Lee Jones

‘I have a lot of scars, man. My mother said that a man is not a man unless he has a scar on his face. And what she meant by a scar was some kind of battle that you had to go through, whether it was psychological or physical. To her, a scar was actually beautiful and not something that marred you.’ – Nick Nolte

‘To a billion people around the world surviving on just a dollar a day, the question of what to eat tonight is more about life and death than about recipes. The struggle of poor people around the globe weighs heavily on me, especially now that I am a mother, which is why I work with Oxfam.’ – Giada De Laurentiis

‘My father offered his life so our democracy could live. My mother devoted her life to nurturing that democracy. I will dedicate my life to making our democracy reach its fullest potential: that of ensuring equality for all. My family has sacrificed much, and I am willing to do this again if necessary.’ – Benigno Aquino III

‘I have three brothers and they’re all into computers. They’re all intellects. My mother would pay me a quarter a page to read a book and I couldn’t make 50 cents. I just couldn’t do it.’ – Josh Holloway

‘David Holdaway was my stage name. I was an actor for about eight years in the ’90s. I had to change my name because there was another David Nicholls, and I thought if I changed it to my mother’s name, she’d be touched.’ – David Nicholls

‘One of the many things that I learnt from my mother is to never regret.’ – Shriya Saran

‘My uncle used to fight Vale Tudo, and my mother even cornered him in some of his fights.’ – Amanda Nunes

‘As a kid, I remember my mother always experimenting with bizarre combinations of food such as gulab jamun and pickle! Surprisingly, many years down the line, I have adapted the same.’ – Sidharth Malhotra

‘I am not quite sure where home is right now. I do have places in London and Milan, and a house in Spain. I guess I would say home is where my mother is, and she lives in Spain.’ – Sarah Brightman

‘The belief when your mother gives you away is that there’s something deeply wrong. Mothers don’t give babies away. There’s something wrong with me, something unlovable, something seriously flawed in me. It’s a fundamental thing; it’s precognitive. You feel it rather than think it. How could you not?’ – Mary Gauthier

‘I used to draw a lot. If my mother would ask me to do something else, I’d have a hairy conniption. I’d just go crazy.’ – Jim Carrey

‘I don’t know what my mother was thinking, but she entered me in a Little Miss contest – Little Miss Orange Blossom, I think it was. And I don’t remember anything about that, except I have one flash-bulb memory of standing on the stage and thinking, ‘This is not where I should be.” – Kate DiCamillo

‘My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.’ – J. Robert Oppenheimer

‘Of the thousands of people, celebrated and unknown, who have sat before my camera, I am often asked who was the most difficult subject, or the easiest, or which picture is my favorite. This last question is like asking a mother which child she likes the most.’ – Philippe Halsman

‘What created democracy was Thomas Paine and Shays’ Rebellion, the suffragists and the abolitionists and on down through the populists and the labor movement, including the Wobblies. Tough, in your face people… Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie… Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez. And now it’s down to us.’ – Jim Hightower

‘We should honor Mother Earth with gratitude; otherwise our spirituality may become hypocritical.’ – Radhanath Swami

‘Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.’ – Friedrich Nietzsche

‘When I was nine years old, living on the south side of Chicago, my father was a minister and my mother used to scrub floors. I had seven brothers and four sisters. I told my mama, ‘One of these days I’m going to be big and strong and buy you a beautiful house.’ That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do with my life, is to take care of my mother.’ – Mr. T

‘My father never liked me or my sister, and he never liked our mother either, after an initial infatuation, and in fact, he never liked anyone at all after an hour or two, no, no one except a stooge.’ – Aram Saroyan

‘I am the ultimate Jewish mother.’ – Karen Katz

‘My mother had a marvelous talent for mishandling money – mine.’ – Judy Garland

‘A mother has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.’ – Sophia Loren

‘I have stood on the shoulders of giants like Billie Jean King, Hillary Clinton, my mother – people who have really empowered and influenced my life in an incredible way.’ – Michelle Kwan

‘My mother made countless sacrifices so that her children – and all children – could grow up in a better nation and world.’ – Bernice King

‘I once worked with Emma Thompson’s mother, Phyllida Law. I worked with her on a BBC drama, and she was hilarious. I loved her so much, and she was great to work with.’ – Thomas Brodie-Sangster

‘When my mother took her turn to sit in a gown at her graduation, she thought she only had two career options: nursing and teaching. She raised me and my sister to believe that we could do anything, and we believed her.’ – Sheryl Sandberg

‘I have family in Italy that my mother keeps in contact with, but I don’t because I don’t speak Italian.’ – Pauly D

‘There are people and nations, Mother, that I would like to say to you by name. I entrust them to you in silence, I entrust them to you in the way that you know best.’ – Pope John Paul II

‘My youngest sister, Cindy, has Down syndrome, and I remember my mother spending hours and hours with her, teaching her to tie her shoelaces on her own, drilling multiplication tables with Cindy, practicing piano every day with her. No one expected Cindy to get a Ph.D.! But my mom wanted her to be the best she could be, within her limits.’ – Amy Chua

‘My father was a businessman, but my mother was an intellectual. She cared about culture, politics, and philosophy, so I became interested in the protest aspect of Latin American art.’ – Jorge M. Perez

‘I’d just sit with Dee Dee on the corner off of Queens Boulevard and drink and insult people and stuff. That’s when I got kicked out of my house. My mother told me it was for my own good.’ – Joey Ramone

‘I have always known my mother as an agnostic, less certain than my father that the universe hadn’t been created by some great intelligence. But she would get even more annoyed than my father did when she thought that people were invoking God to do their jobs for them – for example, when she saw a bus with a sticker saying ‘Allah Protect Us.” – Elif Batuman

‘My father was a Methodist and my mother was a Baptist.’ – T. D. Jakes

‘I had to come out to my mother three times over a twelve-year period, but I first came out to her when I was sixteen. It didn’t go over so well, because I grew up in the Pentecostal Church. It was a very strict environment. She has since done a lot of work and has really blown my mind. She has learned about my life and has changed her mind.’ – Billy Porter

‘Growing up, I loved looking at the photos in my mother’s old Betty Crocker cookbook: the chocolate cakes, the cookie house, even the cheese balls and fondues.’ – Celeste Ng

‘My mother, Agnes Dereon Beyince, was a seamstress and designer, and her passion passed down to me.’ – Tina Knowles

‘I’ve learned a lot since I was a new mother. My approach to struggle and shame now is to talk to yourself like you’d talk to someone you love and reach out to tell your story.’ – Brene Brown

‘The film is about Joe discovering who his mother and father are and his relationship with them, and the identity crisis he goes through once he finds out who his parents are.’ – Christopher Eccleston

‘My mother is a fighter. After she battled polio and learned to walk again, the doctors told her she would be a cripple her entire life. Instead of accepting defeat, she refused this fate and went on to become the West African Women’s Singles tennis champion in college.’ – Uzo Aduba

‘Those of us who were fortunate enough to know my mother – her family and friends – knew her to be a genuine, warm and loving woman – a woman who always put her family first.’ – Albert II, Prince of Monaco

‘I am very domesticated. Some of my favorite things in life are being a mother and a wife. That’s where I get the most enjoyment from.’ – Sable

‘Don’t believe bands who say it’s all about the fans and they want to give their music away for free. The result is they will continue to live in their mother’s basement.’ – Gene Simmons

‘The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.’ – Lao Tzu

‘My stepfather was mean to me and caused many an argument between my mother and myself. Once he even bawled me out for using one of my cars.’ – Jackie Coogan

‘I am what I am thanks to my mother, my father, my brother, my sister… because they have given me everything. The education I have is thanks to them.’ – Ronaldinho

‘I wish my mother had left me something about how she felt growing up. I wish my grandmother had done the same. I wanted my girls to know me.’ – Carol Burnett

‘Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway.’ – Anne Lamott

‘On December 17, 1984, I had surgery to remove two inches of my left lung due to pneumonia. After two hours of surgery the doctors told my mother I had AIDS.’ – Ryan White

‘If I walked into the kitchen without washing my hands as a kid, I’d hear a loud ‘A-hem!’ from my mother or grandmother. Now I count on other people to do the same.’ – Maya Angelou

‘My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa, even though everyone else did because we didn’t have any money, because Africa was the ‘dark continent’, and because I was a girl.’ – Jane Goodall

‘My mother says I didn’t open my eyes for eight days after I was born, but when I did, the first thing I saw was an engagement ring. I was hooked.’ – Elizabeth Taylor

‘My family – my mother and father had gone through such a hard time that by the time I graduated from sixth grade, they were separated.’ – Ruby Bridges

‘I was born two months early, and everyone had given up on me. But my mother insisted on my life.’ – Sidney Poitier

‘I believe there’s no proverb but what is true; they are all so many sentences and maxims drawn from experience, the universal mother of sciences.’ – Miguel de Cervantes

‘My mother was a full-time mother. She didn’t have much of her own career, her own life, her own experiences… everything was for her children. I will never be as good a mother as she was. She was just grace incarnate. She was the most generous, loving – she’s better than me.’ – Angelina Jolie

‘My father was a bricklayer, and my mother was a housewife. It was complicated, obviously, because of our humble origin, but thank God we were all focused.’ – Jose Aldo

‘Mind you, I’ve always been musical… Mother used to sit me on her knee and I’d whisper, ‘Mummy, Mummy, sing me a lullaby do,’ and she’d say: ‘Certainly my angel, my wee bundle of happiness, hold my beer while I fetch me banjo.” – Les Dawson

‘I come from a long line of below-stairs maids and gardeners. Good ol’ peasant stock. My mother and her sister made a quantum leap out of that life. Then I made another quantum leap.’ – Julie Andrews

‘I write a letter to my mother every day, because in that letter, I write down my day. And if I don’t write it down, then tomorrow I will forget it and it’s gone.’ – Isabel Allende

‘I grew up in a Hindu household but went to a Roman Catholic school. I grew up with a mother who said, ‘I’ll arrange a marriage for you at 18,’ but she also said that we could achieve anything we put our minds to an encourage us to dream of becoming prime minister or president.’ – Indra Nooyi

‘Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.’ – Erma Bombeck

‘I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.’ – Meryl Streep

‘I think a child should be allowed to take his father’s or mother’s name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.’ – James Joyce

‘When you are young, you cannot imagine being disabled. You imagine you would conquer it somehow. As I’ve got older, I can imagine it; I can see how life narrows in. I feel compassion for my mother now.’ – Alice Munro

‘I had time with my mother, but I really lived with my father. One time he gave all his salary so I could travel to a training camp. He couldn’t pay the rent, but he did that.’ – Zlatan Ibrahimovic

‘Macaroni and cheese was my mother’s special dish. She’d also make jambalaya and dirty rice and bake a ham that would be incredible. And greens. But if you were looking for vegetables and healthy things, there weren’t a lot of those.’ – Tyler Perry

‘My mother was totally different from the mothers of my friends. She would never separate from me. In a way, my life belongs to her. When I was a child, she complained that I was anorexic, so they sent me to places to get me to eat. When I look at pictures of myself, I was just a normal-looking child. It was her fantasy.’ – Chantal Akerman

‘A mother who is really a mother is never free.’ – Honore de Balzac

‘I have a characteristic since my childhood. I don’t like living together with my mother, sister, or friends at my home. I have always preferred to be alone and independent and lived according to that.’ – Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

‘It’s true – my mother kicked me out the house at 14. I had to go live with my sister. I had some problems. I was very rebellious as a kid. I don’t even know why or where it came from, but I had a lot of anger. Me and my mom clashed a lot because she didn’t tolerate that, as she shouldn’t from a 14-year-old.’ – Michael Che

‘My father, Prince Aly Khan, and mother divorced when I was only 3. I used to spend summers with him in the South of France.’ – Yasmin Aga Khan

‘My mother is such an incredibly strong woman. She raised a family of five boys extremely well. She made us all strong, loving, caring people. We all support each other. I’m really thankful to her.’ – Henry Cavill

‘I’ve said it before, but it’s absolutely true: My mother gave me my drive, but my father gave me my dreams. Thanks to him, I could see a future.’ – Liza Minnelli

‘When I was a child I thought I saw an angel. It had wings and kinda looked like my sister. I opened the door so some light could come into the room, and it sort of faded away. My mother said it was probably my Guardian Angel.’ – Denzel Washington

‘For me, already being part of a single parent household and knowing it was just me and my mom, you’d would wake up times and hope that the next day you’d be able to be alongside your mother because she was out trying to make sure that I was taken care of. But all I cared about was her being home.’ – LeBron James

‘I was an only child and I had a mother and father who were just – there wasn’t a straight man in the house, and I mean that in a very nice way. They were fun, and we would laugh a lot.’ – Betty White

‘Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap – let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in primers, spelling books, and in almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.’ – Abraham Lincoln

‘I always say I stumbled on the information about the poison in Hinkley’s drinking water because I was sort of stumbling about in my life at that time generally, as a single mother.’ – Erin Brockovich

‘The last time I saw my mom was in 1997. My mom started getting sick, and my mom finally passed away in 2002. My mom was my world. My mom was everything to me. We didn’t have money. We didn’t have a whole lot of materialistic things, but one thing I can truly say, that my mother loved me and all of her children unconditionally.’ – Anthony Ray Hinton

‘An Editor becomes kind of your mother. You expect love and encouragement from an Editor.’ – Jackie Kennedy

‘I think all Americans believe in human rights. And health is an often overlooked aspect of basic human rights. And it’s one that’s easily corrected. The reason I say that is that many of the diseases that we treat around the world, I knew when I was a child. My mother was a registered nurse. And they no longer exist in our country.’ – Jimmy Carter

‘My dad was like a stage mother he always pushed me to do what I wanted.’ – Jim Carrey

‘When I was a little girl, I used to walk around with a towel on my head, pretending I was a nun. And then one day my mother said, ‘Why don’t you just become an actress, and then you can pretend you’re a nun.” – Olivia Hussey

‘My original interest in the Nazi holocaust was personal. Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.’ – Norman Finkelstein

‘There would be more sense in insisting on man’s limitations because he cannot be a mother than on a woman’s because she can be.’ – Elizabeth Cady Stanton

‘Usually, when a young girl is pregnant, she drops out of school and concentrates on being a mother. I thought that’s what I had to do, but my counselors told me there was no way they would let me drop out. I had too much promise.’ – Jenni Rivera

‘Diligence is the mother of good fortune.’ – Benjamin Disraeli

‘What a mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin.’ – Henry Ward Beecher

‘No one ever had a better father than I did. Father was a disciplinarian, and Mother was a very loving woman who taught us out of the scriptures. The Book of Mormon was her favorite.’ – James E. Faust

‘I didn’t marry to have children. I married to have a relationship, and I was blessed with one child. I was an only child, too – my mother was smarter than most women today; she just had me.’ – Carmen Dell’Orefice

‘My mother had a rule, obviously, that I couldn’t go across the street by myself, but I had to find a way of doing it.’ – Stevie Wonder

‘I do not think that I am a natural born mother… If I ever wanted to mother anyone, it was my father.’ – Eleanor Roosevelt

‘When my mother and I walked to the grocery store, men would circle the block in cars. It was very, very scary, especially as a young boy. Very predatory – a hunt.’ – Ryan Gosling

‘My mother never made me do anything for my brothers, like serve them. I think that’s an important lesson, especially for the Latino culture, because the women are expected to be the ones that serve and cook and whatever. Not in our family. Everybody was equal.’ – Dolores Huerta

‘If we didn’t need eight hours of sleep and could survive on six, Mother Nature would have done away with 25 percent of our sleep time millions of years ago. Because when you think about it, sleep is an idiotic thing to do.’ – Matthew Walker

‘I did not raise my son, Sam, to celebrate Mother’s Day. I didn’t want him to feel some obligation to buy me pricey lunches or flowers, some annual display of gratitude that you have to grit your teeth and endure.’ – Anne Lamott

‘My mother had just died, and I had to walk a long way behind her coffin, surrounded by thousands of people watching me while millions more did on television. I don’t think any child should be asked to do that under any circumstances.’ – Prince Harry

‘My mother was very good at encouraging me to dress however I wanted to dress. My sisters would sometimes think, ‘Oh my God, you let her buy that fuzzy leopard coat at that vintage store?’ I thought, of course, I looked like Audrey Hepburn.’ – Kate Spade

‘When I told my mother I was pregnant, I thought she was going to have a heart attack.’ – Claudette Colvin

‘I remember all too well the premiere of Ecstasy when I watched my bare bottom bounce across the screen and my mother and father sat there in shock.’ – Hedy Lamarr

‘Just as my search for my mother had in some ways shaped my life, her faith that I was alive had shaped hers. She couldn’t search, but she did the next best thing: She stayed still.’ – Saroo Brierley

‘I grew up with a single mother, and I wasn’t out shooting too many guns.’ – Jason Momoa

‘I don’t remember ever not singing. My mother loved music, and she taught me songs, country music, spirituals. I would sing for people and pass the hat when I was 4.’ – Florence Henderson

‘Dependence is not patriotism. A man does not love his mother if he hangs about her to the point of burdening her with a weak, feckless son.’ – Maria Montessori

‘I have my mother who is an Irish-Italian, and my father who is African, so I have the taste buds of an Italian and the spice of an African.’ – Alicia Keys

‘I guess if there is a big spiritual experience in my life, it is me becoming a mother.’ – Liz Murray

‘I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long.’ – Marina Abramovic

‘My mother was born in Sinaloa, and she moved to Los Angeles when she was three years old. My father was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and moved here when he was 19. They met at the Palladium in Hollywood, and they’ve been together from that moment on.’ – Alanna Ubach

‘When I decided to be a singer, my mother warned me I’d be alone a lot. Basically we all are. Loneliness comes with life.’ – Whitney Houston

‘When I stopped seeing my mother through the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself.’ – Nancy Friday

‘I inherited good skin from my mother, and I stay away from soap, which dries it out.’ – Raquel Welch

‘If I were hanged on the highest hill, Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine! I know whose love would follow me still Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!’ – Rudyard Kipling

‘I shall not remind you, Citizen-Directors, of all I have done for the triumph of liberty, the prosperity of St. Domingo, the glory of the French Republic; nor will I protest to you my attachment to our mother country, to my duties; my respect to the constitution, to the laws of the Republic, and my submission to the government.’ – Toussaint Louverture

‘I was so ugly my mother used to feed me with a sling shot.’ – Rodney Dangerfield

‘Mother Earth is very talented. She has produced Buddhas, bodhisattvas, great beings.’ – Thich Nhat Hanh

‘You’re not famous until my mother has heard of you.’ – Jay Leno

‘The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat.’ – Robert Frost

‘Nicole will come up in conversations where it’s in a part of the conversation. Or we may be somewhere and I would tell some story about their mother and I. You know, we always honor her birthday.’ – O. J. Simpson

‘We were never intimate mother and children while she was our mother – but… when she became our child, the affection came.’ – Emily Dickinson

‘I’ve wanted to be a mother since I was 16, but I also just knew I wanted to have a career as well.’ – Anne Hathaway

‘My family didn’t have a lot of money, so I worked my heart out to get my degrees. But the minute I graduated, suddenly everyone was asking me, ‘Well, when are you going to get married and start having kids?’ And the truth is I had no idea how I would balance the expected role of wife and mother with a challenging career.’ – Michelle Obama

‘I don’t know Bengali perfectly. I don’t know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I’ve always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.’ – Jhumpa Lahiri

‘I am lucky. I had a very beautiful mother.’ – Sophia Loren

‘Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.’ – Alice Munro

‘My mother had bought a sewing machine for me. When I went away to college, she gave me a sewing machine, a typewriter and a suitcase, and my mother made $17 a week working as a maid 12 hours a day, and she did that for me.’ – Alice Walker

‘I remember when my mother, Shyamala Harris, bought our first home. I was thirteen. She was so proud, and my sister and I were so excited. Millions of Americans know that feeling of walking through the front door of their own home for the first time – the feeling of reaching for opportunity and finding it.’ – Kamala Harris

‘At Columbia Law School, my professor of constitutional law and federal courts, Gerald Gunther, was determined to place me in a federal court clerkship, despite what was then viewed as a grave impediment: On graduation, I was the mother of a 4-year-old child.’ – Ruth Bader Ginsburg

‘I’m not a good mother at all.’ – Steve Harvey

‘To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother, is not something I could forgive. I could not look at myself in the morning if I did that. I wouldn’t be attracted to a man who would cheat on his wife.’ – Angelina Jolie

‘There’s something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she’s only measured water in it.’ – Erma Bombeck

‘My mother’s face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.’ – Sylvia Plath

‘My mother just died at 103, so that’s a start. You should live 20 years longer than your parents.’ – Rupert Murdoch

‘As a small child in England, I had this dream of going to Africa. We didn’t have any money and I was a girl, so everyone except my mother laughed at it. When I left school, there was no money for me to go to university, so I went to secretarial college and got a job.’ – Jane Goodall

‘I am not a hugely religious person, but I believe that there is a oneness with everything. And because there is this oneness, it is possible that my mother is the principal reason for my life.’ – Sidney Poitier

‘Most turkeys taste better the day after, my mother’s tasted better the day before.’ – Rita Rudner

”Suffering should not make us bitter people,’ my mother once said, ‘it should make us better comforters.’ Young people need to hear this from those who have walked before them, because someday they’ll be walking those same steps, but there may not be anyone following behind.’ – Billy Graham

‘I’m not saying my mother didn’t like me, but she kept looking for loopholes in my birth certificate.’ – Les Dawson

‘You have doubtless heard, my dear mother, the misfortune of Madame de Chartres, whose child is born dead. But I would rather have even that, terrible as it is, than be as I am without hope of any children.’ – Marie Antoinette

‘I have a feeling that I make a very good friend, and I’m a good mother, and a good sister, and a good citizen. I am involved in life itself – all of it. And I have a lot of energy and a lot of nerve.’ – Maya Angelou

‘I praticed making faces in the mirror and it would drive my mother crazy. She used to scare me by saying that I was going to see the devil if I kept looking in the mirror. That fascinated me even more, of course.’ – Jim Carrey

‘Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!’ – Honore de Balzac

‘Mother’s Day celebrates a huge lie about the value of women: that mothers are superior beings, that they have done more with their lives and chosen a more difficult path.’ – Anne Lamott

‘I don’t think that much about my relationship with my mother and what it did to me. I sometimes feel terrible regret about her, what her life must have been like. Often, when I’m enjoying something, I think of how meager her rewards were and how much courage, in a way, she needed to go on living.’ – Alice Munro

‘If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.’ – Thich Nhat Hanh

‘I didn’t write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.’ – Anne Lamott