Parents Quotes

‘Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.’ – P. J. O’Rourke

‘Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.’ – Oscar Wilde

‘A child who is allowed to be disrespectful to his parents will not have true respect for anyone.’ – Billy Graham

‘Parents are the ultimate role models for children. Every word, movement and action has an effect. No other person or outside force has a greater influence on a child than the parent.’ – Bob Keeshan

‘At the end of the day, the most overwhelming key to a child’s success is the positive involvement of parents.’ – Jane D. Hull

‘One of the greatest titles in the world is parent, and one of the biggest blessings in the world is to have parents to call mom and dad.’ – Jim DeMint

‘Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.’ – Yogi Berra

‘The biggest thrill a ballplayer can have is when your son takes after you. That happened when my Bobby was in his championship Little League game. He really showed me something. Struck out three times. Made an error that lost the game. Parents were throwing things at our car and swearing at us as we drove off. Gosh, I was proud.’ – Bob Uecker

‘It’s really a testament to my parents, because I was active, curious and creative as a child, and my parents nurtured that. But I wouldn’t say that I was a professional child actor at all. I was never the breadwinner of my family.’ – Sarah Gadon

‘We never know the love of a parent till we become parents ourselves.’ – Henry Ward Beecher

‘So many times, people told me I can’t do this or can’t do that. My nature is that I don’t listen very well. I’m very determined, and I believe in myself. My parents brought me up that way. Thank God for that. I don’t let anything stand in my way.’ – Chantal Sutherland

‘I could tell my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.’ – Rodney Dangerfield

‘The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them.’ – Frank A. Clark

‘I knew I was blessed with a gift of having both parents.’ – Kendrick Lamar

‘My mom passed away when she was 34 years old… And I think in addition to I have to be really good if I’m going to disappoint my parents, I also have that in the back of my head, which is… okay. I may only have until 34 because in addition, my mom’s aunt also died, same cancer, 34. So there’s a pattern.’ – Taylor Tomlinson

‘The first half of our lives are ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.’ – Clarence Darrow

‘Thankfully I have an ecosystem of in-laws, parents and husband, who are my rocks.’ – Chanda Kochhar

‘Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.’ – Peter Ustinov

‘It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.’ – Maya Angelou

‘Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves have poisoned the fountain.’ – John Locke

‘Vaccines save lives; fear endangers them. It’s a simple message parents need to keep hearing.’ – Jeffrey Kluger

‘My parents are my backbone. Still are. They’re the only group that will support you if you score zero or you score 40.’ – Kobe Bryant

‘I grew up conservative because my mum was a conservative, and when I finally realized what conservatives were, I changed my mind immediately. As children, we tend to copy our parents.’ – Elton John

‘Indecision and delays are the parents of failure.’ – George Canning

‘Distrust and caution are the parents of security.’ – Benjamin Franklin

‘I owe my success to Allah and my parents who have sacrificed so much to get me where I am.’ – Javed Ali

‘Both my parents are Scottish, and although I grew up in Canada after moving over, all of my family are proud to be Scots.’ – Callum Keith Rennie

‘I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.’ – Henry Rollins

‘Say, my father runs a business, and today my brother is running it for him. There are people who have worked with him for 30 years, but today, my brother is the boss. That’s not fair, but that’s what parents do, and that’s what a legacy is supposed to be.’ – Sargun Mehta

‘My parents didn’t want to move to Florida, but they turned sixty and that’s the law.’ – Jerry Seinfeld

‘My parents got divorced when I was around a year old. My dad was essentially a nonentity in my life until I got to be about 16 or so. My mom was a flight attendant for PanAm, so I moved all over the world. London, Rio de Janeiro.’ – Tucker Max

‘When I was growing up, my parents were almost involved in various volunteer things. My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that.’ – Bill Gates

‘When I was growing up, my parents told me, ‘Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving.’ I tell my daughters, ‘Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job.’ – Thomas Friedman’ – Thomas Friedman

‘Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.’ – Hosea Ballou

‘I have five older siblings, so we were always sharing stuff. I think my parents did a good job of letting us all discover ourselves and understand what’s truly important to us.’ – Declan McKenna

‘My relationship with God and my parents, that’s what keeps me together. I know that everything could end as soon as it starts.’ – Jordan Fisher

‘If your parents never had children, chances are you won’t either.’ – Dick Cavett

‘The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.’ – Joyce Carol Oates

‘The most valuable investment we can make is in our children’s education. When we make education a priority, we give our children opportunity. Opportunity to learn at higher levels than their parents were able to learn; to earn at higher levels than we were able to earn.’ – Martin O’Malley

‘I grew up upper-class. Private school. My dad had a Jaguar. We’re African-American, and we work together as a family, so people assume we’re like the Jacksons. But I didn’t have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.’ – Beyonce Knowles

‘Every word, facial expression, gesture, or action on the part of a parent gives the child some message about self-worth. It is sad that so many parents don’t realize what messages they are sending.’ – Virginia Satir

‘I grew up Mormon, but after my parents divorced, we stopped going to church.’ – Rubi Rose

‘We believed in our idea – a family park where parents and children could have fun- together.’ – Walt Disney

‘There are uses to adversity, and they don’t reveal themselves until tested. Whether it’s serious illness, financial hardship, or the simple constraint of parents who speak limited English, difficulty can tap unexpected strengths.’ – Sonia Sotomayor

‘For whatever reason, I didn’t succumb to the stereotype that science wasn’t for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did.’ – Sally Ride

‘From birth to age 18 a girl needs good parents. From 18 to 35 she needs good looks. From 35 to 55 she needs a good personality. From 55 on, she needs good cash.’ – Sophie Tucker

‘My parents would always tell you that I was the crazy princess growing up. I was a drama queen.’ – Mallory Jansen

‘Children aren’t happy with nothing to ignore, and that’s what parents were created for.’ – Ogden Nash

‘I am pure Filipino; both my parents are Filipino.’ – Jacob Batalon

‘The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.’ – Edward VIII

‘I’m a Roman Catholic. Or was. I was brought up that way and used to say my prayers every night, but I don’t pray to God any more. I might use the usual phrases I picked up from my parents, ‘Oh, if God spares me next year…’ or ‘Please God…’ but they’re only phrases.’ – Cilla Black

‘My parents taught me about the importance of qualities like kindness, respect, and honesty, and I realize how central values like these have been to me throughout my life.’ – Kate Middleton

‘We need to help students and parents cherish and preserve the ethnic and cultural diversity that nourishes and strengthens this community – and this nation.’ – Cesar Chavez

‘Parents must lead by example. Don’t use the cliche; do as I say and not as I do. We are our children’s first and most important role models.’ – Lee Haney

‘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

‘Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.’ – Plato

‘There are hundreds of millions of gun owners in this country, and not one of them will have an accident today. The only misuse of guns comes in environments where there are drugs, alcohol, bad parents, and undisciplined children. Period.’ – Ted Nugent

‘Both my parents were Democrats. My dad was definitely more of a fiscally conservative traditional Democrat. My mom was more of a feminist Camelot Democrat. They definitely had an idealistic view of life as it should be in the United States. And they had a sense that government had to have some hand in making people’s lives better.’ – Lisa Kennedy Montgomery

‘I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.’ – Steve Jobs

‘Growing up, my parents were my heroes, in the way they conducted their lives.’ – Chris Hemsworth

‘The child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering.’ – Benjamin Spock

‘I believe education should be a right for every child, but tragically in many parts of world it is a privilege for certain children whose parents have money. There are 72 million children in the world who don’t go to school and many of them are in Africa.’ – George Weah

‘No, we don’t control who our parents are. We don’t control what color we are. We don’t control what home we are born into. But we control our attitude. We control our work ethic. We control our drive and our commitment.’ – Dabo Swinney

‘My parents were super strict, so I didn’t have a lot of freedom to hang out at parties or anything like that. I didn’t get invited, and I didn’t have many friends.’ – Melanie Martinez

‘There was an undercurrent of poverty throughout my childhood. We lived with my grandmother in her two-bedroom flat, and I slept with my parents. We had cheap holidays, I had to save for my bike and get a paper round as soon as I was old enough.’ – Bernard Hill

‘The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.’ – Jim Morrison

‘Children learn to smile from their parents.’ – Shinichi Suzuki

‘My parents are left-wing, and I would describe myself as that. But also, you know what? I wouldn’t describe myself as that. Because I don’t have to. Because I’m not a political party. Most people are a little bit of each, and we change our mind on various issues.’ – Daniel Radcliffe

‘My parents said that sitting at home playing video games all day won’t bring you anywhere in life.’ – PewDiePie

‘I feel incredibly lucky to have grown up with creative parents and around creative people, many of whom live with anxiety. My mum would sometimes say that it was a beautiful thing, and that it would come in handy when making music – and it’s made me a more empathetic person.’ – Mabel

‘In terms of diet, my parents had a restaurant business so I don’t eat any junk food – they taught me to appreciate good food.’ – Camille Rowe

‘Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.’ – Samuel Butler

‘I learned the way a monkey learns – by watching its parents.’ – Prince Charles

‘Patriotism is not an abstract concept. It begins from one’s own home. It buds out from the love for one’s parents, spouses and children, the love for one’s own home, village and workplace, and further develops into the love for one’s country and fellow people.’ – Kim Jong-un

‘If at first you don’t succeed, blame your parents.’ – Marcelene Cox

‘My parents are Jamaican immigrants and both have a multiracial background. They’re Jamaican but my genetic makeup is West African, European, Asian.’ – Jaboukie Young-White

‘I don’t believe in nepotism. I don’t much like the idea of parents who interfere.’ – Anthony Hopkins

‘I’m of Russian-Jewish background. Like many Soviet Jews, my parents were engineers. My family migrated from Ukraine to Israel when I was six. They arrived in Israel with very little… Within a year of arriving in Israel, the Yom Kippur War happened.’ – Sasha Roiz

‘As a person, he was wonderful. He really was a great person. He was full of life. He had a great sense of humor. Very talented, of course, but very caring to his parents. There was a very endearing quality about Elvis.’ – Priscilla Presley

‘We are the people our parents warned us about.’ – Jimmy Buffett

‘Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.’ – Alan Watts

‘Education is a shared commitment between dedicated teachers, motivated students and enthusiastic parents with high expectations.’ – Bob Beauprez

‘Peer pressure is something everyone will face in school. You have to really go by what you think is the right thing to do. Turn to the friends you trust the most when you are put in a compromising situation. If your friends are making the wrong decision, then turn to your parents.’ – Madisen Beaty

‘I am an engineer by profession, but I knew I wanted to act. My parents always encouraged me, and when my father shifted to Mumbai for work for a brief while, I came along.’ – Kriti Sanon

‘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

‘Please hug your parents while you have them, tell your children how much you love them every second of the day, and don’t let the petty things in life separate you.’ – Teresa Giudice

‘To maintain a joyful family requires much from both the parents and the children. Each member of the family has to become, in a special way, the servant of the others.’ – Pope John Paul II

‘The biggest thing for me is the passion that I’ve always had for hockey. I remember growing up, no matter what I did in life, my parents always told me to try to do my best at it and be my best. I can say going through different things that that passion is the most important part. It’s not skills or talent or any of that stuff.’ – Sidney Crosby

‘I have no tattoos at all – it was a huge undertaking for me in the ’80s to let my parents know I was piercing my ear when I did ‘L.A. Law.” – Jimmy Smits

‘I was sort of born into a Subud cult that has ties to Islam and Indonesia and Middle Eastern spiritualism. My parents were kind of trial-and-error when it came to religion.’ – Sufjan Stevens

‘It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.’ – Leo Buscaglia

‘In my opinion, animation will continue to thrive as long as there are children, parents, television, movies and the need to laugh.’ – William Hanna

‘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

‘I was born in very sorry circumstances. Both of my parents were very sorry.’ – Norman Wisdom

‘My parents were children during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it scarred them. Especially my father, who saw destitution in his Brooklyn, New York neighborhood; adults standing in so called ‘bread lines,’ children begging in the streets.’ – Bill O’Reilly

‘Popular culture tells you that schools and parents don’t know what’s going on, the police are dogs, politicians are all liars and scum, and any crime that’s not committed by the Mafia is done by the CIA.’ – Stanley Crouch

‘I’d say music runs in my blood. My parents are exceptionally talented singers, so even before I was born, it was a known fact to them that I’d become a singer. Thanks to my genes, I started off at the age of three and since then, music has meant everything to me.’ – Sonu Nigam

‘My parents had some problems of their own that put me in a position of having to deal with very grown-up stuff at a very young age. I needed some help with that, therapy-wise.’ – Dakota Johnson

‘I’m not paid to be a role model, parents should be role models.’ – Charles Barkley

‘I have two homes, like someone who leaves their hometown and/or parents and then establishes a life elsewhere. They might say that they’re going home when they return to see old friends or parents, but then they go home as well when they go to where they live now. Sarajevo is home, Chicago is home.’ – Aleksandar Hemon

‘My parents were very strict Muslims, and they weren’t shy about showing it.’ – Sam Esmail

‘I know certainly that my parents sacrificed a lot to come to America, and to… start a new life for their family and their future families. At least with first-generation Asian-American immigrants, parents put so much risk in work and to provide the best for their children.’ – Jonny Kim

‘I’m actually an only child with very supportive parents, so I didn’t have the sibling rivalry to draw from.’ – Aidan Gallagher

‘My parents wanted me to go to school.’ – SZA

‘Make a choice: continue living your life feeling muddled in this abyss of self-misunderstanding, or you find your identity independent of it. You push for colour-blind casting; you draw your own box. You introduce yourself as who you are, not what colour your parents happen to be.’ – Meghan Markle

‘It is painful to watch children trying to show off for parents who are engrossed in their cell phones. Children are nostalgic for the ‘good old days’ when parents used to read to them without the cell phone by their side or watch football games or Disney movies without having the BlackBerry handy.’ – Sherry Turkle

‘If there is anyone dependent on your income – parents, children, relatives – you need life insurance.’ – Suze Orman

‘You parents of the wilful and the wayward! Don’t give them up. Don’t cast them off. They are not utterly lost. The Shepherd will find his sheep. They were His before they were yours – long before He entrusted them to your care; and you cannot begin to love them as He loves them.’ – Orson F. Whitney

‘My heroes are and were my parents. I can’t see having anyone else as my heroes.’ – Michael Jordan

‘Both my parents are working class and filled me with the things you need to get along; not giving up, working hard, putting in the graft to go out and get something. I’ve seen the way they interact with people and how they treat them. When you have people like that, you don’t have to be told how to behave.’ – Jude Bellingham

‘Before playing with his equals, the child is influenced by his parents. He is subjected from his cradle to a multiplicity of regulations, and even before language he becomes conscious of certain obligations.’ – Jean Piaget

‘When I was 16, I got ‘Jamon, Jamon.’ Of course, I had to lie about my age. And I had to lie to my parents about the content of the script.’ – Penelope Cruz

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

‘The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it.’ – Simon Wiesenthal

‘I am so lucky to have really good parents. They didn’t hesitate to let us go to L.A. They didn’t hesitate, because they knew that they raised their kids the right way: to be able to live by themselves and not get caught up by L.A.’ – Jake Paul

‘A good youth ought to have a fear of God, to be subject to his parents, to give honor to his elders, to preserve his purity; he ought not to despise humility, but should love forbearance and modesty. All these are an ornament to youthful years.’ – Saint Ambrose

‘The relation between parents and children is essentially based on teaching.’ – Gilbert Highet

‘My parents taught me that work ethic is one of the most important keys in life, and I believe it.’ – Kendall Jenner

‘I abide to God’s will and I feel that from up above, God and my parents have guided my career.’ – Vicente Fernandez

‘One of the saddest things in this world is to see a child grow up hating one of their parents because they only got one side of the story.’ – Debbie Rowe

‘My parents couldn’t give me a whole lot of financial support, but they gave me good genes. My dad is a handsome son-of-a-gun, and my mom is beautiful. And I’ve definitely been the lucky recipient. So, thank you, Mom and Dad.’ – Ashton Kutcher

‘Children… are our legacy. Our responsibility. They are our destiny and we are theirs. The extent to which we fail as parents, we fail as God’s children.’ – Dirk Benedict

‘It’s about respect and the morals and the value of life. And treat people how you want to be treated. That’s the biggest thing I was brought up on from my parents.’ – A. J. Green

‘My parents were educated in the Turkish system and went straight from high school to medical school; my mom, who had skipped a grade, was dissecting corpses at age seventeen. Growing up in America, I think I envied my parents’ education. By comparison, everything I did in school seemed so sort of low-stakes and infantilizing.’ – Elif Batuman

‘Whenever a youth is ascertained to possess talents meriting an education which his parents cannot afford, he should be carried forward at the public expense.’ – James Madison

‘It’s not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can’t tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.’ – Joyce Maynard

‘The day I entered St Columb’s College, my parents bought me a Conway Stewart pen. It was a special afternoon, of course. We were going to be parting that evening; they were aware of it, I was aware of it, nothing much was said about it.’ – Seamus Heaney

‘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

‘It’s an extraordinary experience to encounter the two kinds of deaths of my parents, one violent and jagged, it hits you like a tornado, the other, gentle with grace and dignity.’ – Mariette Hartley

‘In the case of ‘The Book Thief,’ my research was hearing the stories of my parents when I was a child. But I started changing the stories when I began moulding the book.’ – Markus Zusak

‘Chance makes our parents, but choice makes our friends.’ – Jacques Delille

‘I spend a lot of my spare time with my family. My sisters, parents, and in-laws all live nearby.’ – Anne Wojcicki

‘When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented out my room.’ – Woody Allen

‘I actually began my career by convincing my parents to let me be an actress when I was 12 with a PowerPoint presentation describing acting and my goals.’ – Sydney Sweeney

‘In the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, there were many gay men who were unable to come out about the fact that their lovers were ill, A, and then dead, B. They were unable to get access to the hospital to see their lover, unable to call their parents and say, ‘I have just lost the love of my life.” – Judith Butler

‘Young people all over the world are very frustrated. They are very disillusioned. Many of them are turning their backs on religion. They are walking away from the faith of their parents, and most of this is because religion has failed them.’ – Myles Munroe

‘Neighbors broke the news that my parents had been taken away by immigration officers, and just like that, my stable family life was over.’ – Diane Guerrero

‘I see my upbringing as a great success story. By disciplining me, my parents inculcated self-discipline. And by restricting my choices as a child, they gave me so many choices in my life as an adult. Because of what they did then, I get to do the work I love now.’ – Amy Chua

‘I’m the product of my parents’ dreams and aspirations.’ – Jensen Huang

‘God made and governs the world invisibly, and has commanded us to love and worship him and no other God; to honor our parents and masters, and love our neighbours as ourselves; and to be temperate, just, and peaceable, and to be merciful even to brute beasts.’ – Isaac Newton

‘When a child does bad things, the parents are always going to love their child even if they do something bad.’ – Selena

‘My parents both had Oxford degrees, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, drank real coffee and went to museums for pleasure. People like that don’t have fat kids: they were cut out to be winners and winners don’t have children who are overweight.’ – Arabella Weir

‘People tell you the world looks a certain way. Parents tell you how to think. Schools tell you how to think. TV. Religion. And then at a certain point, if you’re lucky, you realize you can make up your own mind. Nobody sets the rules but you. You can design your own life.’ – Carrie-Anne Moss

‘My parents are pretty religious, devout, but did they force it on me? No, I don’t think so. I still think of myself as a Lutheran, just one who doesn’t go to church.’ – Kristen Schaal

‘When I was 14 -years-old, I made this PowerPoint presentation, and I invited my parents into my room and gave them popcorn. It was called ‘Project Hollywood 2004′ and it worked. I moved to L.A. in January of 2004.’ – Emma Stone

‘It’s our job – as parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles – to find books our kids are going to like.’ – James Patterson

‘Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.’ – Franz Kafka

‘A lot of my personality was informed by feeling very different in the world I grew up in, feeling that I didn’t fully belong, that my parents didn’t belong.’ – Jhumpa Lahiri

‘My parents are both English. My dad is a plastic surgeon – his name’s Norman Waterhouse, but we call him Normy. And my mom’s a nurse, which is how they met – in a hospital, over decaying bone.’ – Suki Waterhouse

‘I had a simple goal in life: to be true to my parents and our country as an honorable son, a caring brother, and a good citizen.’ – Benigno Aquino III

‘There was no such thing as child abuse. Parents owned their children. They could do whatever they wanted.’ – Ellen Burstyn

‘If you are a parent, you have probably already realized that your children are always watching what you do. And just as children watch their parents and emulate their behavior, so do employees who are watching their bosses.’ – John C. Maxwell

‘My parents are not theatrical people, but my dad took me to the theater.’ – Kate Fleetwood

‘Eid is here! On the first day, it is a custom for all Malaysian Muslims to ask for forgiveness from our parents. We kiss their hands and wish them ‘Selamat Hari Raya’ or ‘Eid Mubarak.’ ‘Maaf Zahir dan Batin’ means ‘to apologize in spirit and actions.” – Yuna

‘It’s been a long comeback. Things were pretty dark for me. But I have a faith now, and it saves my day. I was angry with God for a long time because I was unhappy with me. I hadn’t learned to make the distinction between God and my parents. But there’s a peace now. In the end, I got sick and tired of being sick and tired.’ – William Hurt

‘It is critical that parents and other trusted adults initiate conversations with kids about underage drinking well in advance of the first time they are faced with a decision regarding alcohol.’ – Xavier Becerra

‘No matter when you were born or where, puberty is the same. It’s the same for your parents as it is for you – what’s happening in your body dictates everything.’ – Francine Pascal

‘During the Second World War, we lived in a flat on Whitechapel Road in the East End of London. At one point during the blitz, the air-raid sirens went off every night for 30 nights, and each time, my parents would grab my sister and me and take us to the shelter beneath Whitechapel underground station.’ – Steven Berkoff

‘I looked up to my parents because they were very successful in what they wanted to do. I was lucky; I didn’t have to look far for role models.’ – Derek Jeter

‘So when I got to be about 13 or 14, I started listening – even though my parents music was way cool – to contemporary hard rock at that time, which was Aerosmith, Cheap Trick, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Ted Nugent and all that, and that’s just where I came from.’ – Slash

‘Isn’t it true that the fault of birth rests somewhat on the child? I believe it’s we who led our parents on to bear us, and it’s our unborn children who make our flesh itch.’ – T. E. Lawrence

‘Our children are counting on us to provide two things: consistency and structure. Children need parents who say what they mean, mean what they say, and do what they say they are going to do.’ – Barbara Coloroso

‘I was born in Joliet, Illinois. It was totally Midwestern – small, little house, two great parents, and a sister and a beagle.’ – Paula Pell

‘My parents are Italian and British. They live in Berkeley now – we all moved there four years ago.’ – Claire Forlani

‘I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own.’ – Arthur Rimbaud

‘My parents fled from North Korea during the Korean War because they despised the North Korean Communist regime. They fled to seek freedom and came to South Korea.’ – Moon Jae-in

‘I had great mentors in my parents who always sought to understand the world around them. And they would push me to really think things through.’ – Mae Jemison

‘My parents separated before I was born, but they remained friends, so I was close to both sides of my family, with siblings and cousins and godparents. I’ve had the same best friend since grade six.’ – Winnie Harlow

‘I’m from Connecticut. My Mom is an army brat, and my Dad is a navy brat. My childhood was fun. My parents are still together. My childhood was pretty carefree.’ – Cassie Ventura

‘You must come out. Come out… to your parents… I know that it is hard and will hurt them, but think about how they will hurt you in the voting booth!’ – Harvey Milk

‘Immigrant parents dream that their children will find a place in their new home, and they willingly suffer hardships in service to that dream. That was certainly true of my parents.’ – Gene Luen Yang

‘Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.’ – Kurt Vonnegut

‘I did swimming, gymnastics, dance, and the acting was just a small part. I didn’t have pushy parents; it wasn’t forced upon me. They just said, ‘See if you like it. If you do, great; if you don’t, don’t worry about it.’ I was really fortunate to have that guidance and supportive parents.’ – Aaron Taylor-Johnson

‘Academic achievement was something I’d always sought as a form of reward. Good grades pleased my parents, good grades pleased my teachers; you got them in order to sew up approval.’ – Caroline Knapp

‘I did imitations of anyone who came to my parents’ house, and that was my identity at school – if there were ten minutes to lunch, and the teacher was done with the lesson, he’d say, ‘Okay, Leo, get up there and do something.” – Leonardo DiCaprio

‘I received a lot of complaints from parents who wrote and told me that their kids wouldn’t go to sleep until our show was over. So I went on the air and told all the children watching to ‘listen to their Uncle Miltie and go to bed right after the show.” – Milton Berle

‘Because parents have power over children. They feel they have to do what their parents say. But the love of money is the root of all evil. And this is a sweet child. And to see him turn like this, this isn’t him. This is not him.’ – Michael Jackson

‘People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, ‘Oh, its temporary.’ It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That’s how they work.’ – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

‘However, when my parents married in 1945, China was in turmoil and the possibility of returning grew increasingly remote, and they decided to begin their family in the United States.’ – Steven Chu

‘Do parents sit down and tell their kids everything? I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ve convinced myself – I hope I’m right – that children despair of you if you don’t tell them the truth.’ – Maurice Sendak

‘My parents didn’t care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing.’ – Mary Oliver

‘My parents, especially my father, discussed the question of my brothers’ education as a matter of real importance. My education and that of my sister were scarcely discussed at all.’ – Emmeline Pankhurst

‘I was born in Iran, my parents are Armenian. We fled from Iran to the Netherlands when I was eight years old. We had a lot of family and friends in Iran, so it was hard to leave, especially for my parents. But we managed to settle well in the Netherlands, after a year in refugee camps. But I understood it was a process.’ – Gegard Mousasi

‘We choose our sex, our color, our country, and then we look around for the particular set of parents who will mirror the pattern we are bringing in to work on in this lifetime.’ – Louise L. Hay

‘Education begins at home and I applaud the parents who recognize that they – not someone else – must take responsibility to assure that their children are well educated.’ – Ernest Istook

‘I think that’s exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let’s do a startup in our parents’ garage and try to create a business.’ – Walter Isaacson

‘Liberated from the error of pagan tradition through the benevolence and loving kindness of the good God with the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by the operation of the Holy Spirit, I was reared from the very beginning by Christian parents. From them I learned even in babyhood the Holy Scriptures which led me to a knowledge of the truth.’ – Saint Basil

‘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

‘As a medical doctor, I have known the face of adversity. I have seen much of death and dying, suffering and sorrow. I also remember the plight of students overwhelmed by their studies and of those striving to learn a foreign language. And I recall the fatigue and frustration felt by young parents with children in need.’ – Russell M. Nelson

‘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

‘Parents are one’s companions in life but not partakers of one’s karma.’ – Munshi Premchand

‘I couldn’t have been luckier with my parents.’ – Harry Connick, Jr.

‘I’ve got ‘trust’ tattooed on me, and I have a tattoo on my finger that’s for my parents.’ – Anne-Marie

‘It’s like, remember who you always were, where you came from, who your parents were, how they raised you. Because that authentic self is going to follow you all through life, so make sure that it’s solid so it’s something that you can hold on and be proud of for the rest of your life.’ – Michelle Obama

‘Children are wonderful, but they are not the center of the universe. The sooner their parents make them understand that, the better off we all will be.’ – LZ Granderson

‘I want to thank my parents for somehow raising me to have confidence that is disproportionate with my looks and abilities.’ – Tina Fey

‘I grew up Valley Stream until my parents moved to Florida when I was 20. I graduated from Valley Stream Central High School in 1985. It was the best childhood anyone could ever ask for.’ – Jim Breuer

‘My parents are divorced, but they have and always are there for me. They’ve never missed a ball game or anything else I’ve done, and we’ve always been so close.’ – Eric Winter

‘Parents must not only have certain ways of guiding by prohibition and permission, they must also be able to represent to the child a deep, almost somatic conviction that there is meaning in what they are doing.’ – Erik Erikson

‘From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings.’ – Helen Hayes

‘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

‘Nobody has done more for me than my parents, who devoted untold amounts of time and money that allowed me to play the game I love. It’s no exaggeration to say I never would have gotten anywhere near a World Cup, an Olympics, or even the U.S. national team without them. I have never forgotten that, and I never will.’ – Carli Lloyd

‘At the end of the day, we get to be parents, greeting our lovely, crazy children and talking about their day, making sure they brush their teeth, so all the tension from our day is tabled… until the next.’ – Brad Pitt

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

‘Childhood vaccines are one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. Indeed, parents whose children are vaccinated no longer have to worry about their child’s death or disability from whooping cough, polio, diphtheria, hepatitis, or a host of other infections.’ – Ezekiel Emanuel

‘You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.’ – Harry S Truman

‘My parents instilled a very strong work ethic in me from a young age, fortunately.’ – Matthew Gray Gubler

‘It’s interesting, as I said on the last tour in America, the audience actually came out, they had to have been the kind of fans who listened to my music via their parents, you know what I mean?’ – Joe Cocker

‘Your job is not just to do what your parents say, what your teachers say, what society says, but to figure out what your heart calling is and to be led by that.’ – Oprah Winfrey

‘It is unfortunately true that our generation and that of your parents have left you with a big mess that will now be yours to clean up: wars, budget challenges, pollution, global warming, battles of health care, natural disasters. They’re all there for you. We’re willing those to you. Are you ready?’ – John Morgridge

‘I’m one of nine sisters. My parents were dairy farmers in Wisconsin. My father didn’t believe in girls doing farm work. Girls did housework, and he hired young men to do farm work. I would have preferred to be outside.’ – Diane Hendricks

‘I have parents and family who will never allow me not to be grounded. If I thought for a second that I could possibly lift off the ground, I have a thousand people who will grab my ankles.’ – Zendaya

‘The biggest thing my parents gave me was this feeling of, not ‘dream big,’ but strive big.’ – Lisa Joy

‘I didn’t have time to be anybody’s muse; I was too busy rebelling against my parents and learning to be an artist.’ – Leonora Carrington

‘My parents came from northern Cyprus in 1959 to the U.K. and they started a restaurant. I saw how hard they worked.’ – Touker Suleyman

‘Don’t hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.’ – Evelyn Waugh

‘When we lost Bobby, I would wake up in the morning and think, ‘He’s OK. He’s in Heaven, and he’s with Jack and a lot of my brothers and sisters and my parents.’ So it made it very easy to get through the day thinking he was OK.’ – Ethel Kennedy

‘Both my parents were born in the Philippines. My dad is full Filipino, but my mom looks a little mixed, and her mom’s name is Estelita Coquico.’ – Vincent Rodriguez III

‘With ‘Smoke Signals,’ the character was so much like me growing up. I lost my parents, and I wish I’d had an opportunity to find out where they were. So I was reflecting on how I grew up, that feeling of abandonment. That whole film was a reality that I always held back and kept to myself.’ – Adam Beach

‘Teach love, generosity, good manners and some of that will drift from the classroom to the home and who knows, the children will be educating the parents.’ – Roger Moore

‘My parents both made it to ninth grade and then dropped out, so I just want to have that higher education so when I have kids one day I’ll be able to tell them and I’ll be a better role model for them.’ – Tecia Torres

‘My brother Steve was always considered the naughty one but I used to drive my parents to despair because I had no fear. Id climb a tree without testing the branches and I was always getting into scrapes.’ – Tony Hadley

‘In many Asian households, to not go on to higher education, that’s like a big no-no. I know my parents’ discouragement was for my own protection, and I’m really close to them now, but they didn’t understand that there is value in this. That’s because they didn’t know.’ – Sandra Oh

‘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

‘I was 7 years old when ‘Roots’ was first broadcast, and my parents gathered all us kids around the TV to learn about how we got here. But it wasn’t until I sat down and immersed myself in the research that I got the barest inkling of what it meant to be a slave.’ – Colson Whitehead

‘My parents raised me and my siblings in an armor of advice, an ocean of alarm bells so someone wouldn’t steal the breath from our lungs, so that they wouldn’t make a memory of this skin.’ – Clint Smith

‘A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind.’ – Mary Shelley

‘I lived with my parents in Belarus, and I went to Russian kindergarten, which is where I learned Russian. Belarus had just become an independent country; there was no food in the supermarkets, so it looked very post-war, very Soviet.’ – Yung Lean

‘My parents always told me never be a follower, always be a leader. It’s very difficult to do, to step out and be different and not follow the norm. If you want what’s best for your team, you gotta be different.’ – Jalen Brunson

‘This might be the first generation where kids are dying at a younger age than their parents and it’s related primarily to the obesity problem.’ – Judy Davis

‘My childhood was great, honestly. I have all these incredible memories of my childhood. I was an only child. I always had all my cousins around. I had my grandparents around. I had my parents around. I had my uncles around – whatever.’ – Action Bronson

‘It’s odd the things that people remember. Parents will arrange a birthday party, certain it will stick in your mind forever. You’ll have a nice time, then two years later you’ll be like, ‘There was a pony there? Really? And a clown with one leg?” – David Sedaris

‘It is one of the ironies of the ministry that the very man who works in God’s name is often hardest put to find time for God. The parents of Jesus lost Him at church, and they were not the last ones to lose Him there.’ – Vance Havner

‘As someone who escaped religious persecution in Lebanon and whose parents were kidnapped in Beirut, I fully support the protection of all individuals from institutional discrimination. That said, I am weary of the ethos of victimhood that has parasitized our culture.’ – Gad Saad

‘I’m lucky that I have my family, I’m lucky that my parents are still together. Those are the things that I cherish.’ – Hailey Baldwin

‘As a young child, my family holidays were always in Rock, Cornwall, with my parents, older brother Kim and sister Nicola.’ – Toyah Willcox

‘There are certain things that we take for granted that simply would not have existed without the great migration. Motown, for example, would not have existed – it simply would not, because Berry Gordy, the founder of it, his parents had migrated from Georgia to Detroit where he founded Motown, and where did he get his talent?’ – Isabel Wilkerson

‘Although we didn’t have much when I was growing up in Split, Croatia, my parents always tried to ensure that my sister and I had the things we needed, and it was enough for us.’ – Goran Ivanisevic

‘I was raised in a Jewish family, but since I was adopted, my parents sent me to Hebrew school and Bible chapel, so I got the best of both worlds – singing in both a choir in Bible chapel and a chorus in Hebrew school. It shaped me and my voice.’ – Michelle Visage

‘If I were to give advice, I would say to parents that they ought to be very careful whom they allow to mix with their children when young; for much mischief thence ensues, and our natural inclinations are unto evil rather than unto good.’ – Saint Teresa of Avila

‘It’s true that I’ve never had a burning desire to rebel against my parents.’ – Taylor Swift

‘Whenever my parents got married, my dad had a mullet. Me and my dad are very similar-type people with the way we look and the way we act, and I figured if he could get away with it when he was around 25, then I could try to do the same thing.’ – Morgan Wallen

‘As my parents taught me, by both words and deeds, a life of public services is as much a gift to the person who serves as it is to those he’s serving.’ – Merrick Garland

‘I remember a conversation with my parents about who the people on the TV were, and learning they were actors and they acted out this story and just thinking that was the most fantastic notion, and that’s what I want to do.’ – David Tennant

‘I was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Summit, an upscale town in north Jersey. There was this tiny area of Summit where most of the black families lived. My parents and I lived in a duplex house on Williams Street.’ – Ice T

‘Whether were parents, carers, teachers or anyone working with young children, we know that children move easily and often between free play and structured play. One is not better or worse than another, they each offer different experiences, different ways of thinking, and different kinds of learning.’ – Michael Rosen

‘My mom grew up in Idaho, went to Brigham Young University: they’re very Molly Mormon. And my father is, like, first generation Albanian, and his parents lived in Southey and grew up in downtown Boston. My parents are complete opposites.’ – Eliza Dushku

‘My parents have always encouraged me to follow my dreams and do what makes me happy.’ – Manushi Chhillar

‘I always tried to be the perfect little girl. Always tried to have the perfect little manners. Never wanted to displease my parents.’ – Ann-Margret

‘I have had to tell my son, my parents, my friends that I used steroids. It’s been very hard. It’s been very difficult.’ – Mark McGwire

‘Follow your own passion – not your parents’, not your teachers’ – yours.’ – Robert Ballard

‘I’ve always been shy, but I see that as a good thing because it kept me focused on music. When I was in seventh grade, I asked my parents for a mobile recording system for Christmas, and I got it. I didn’t come out of my room for years after that. I’d get invited to the movies and I’d say, ‘I’m gonna finish a couple of demos.” – Hunter Hayes

‘The blessing that I got from my parents, even if they didn’t really teach me about money, was their simple lifestyle.’ – Bo Sanchez

‘My dad is a judge, but he started off as an attorney. He is one of my biggest role models; both of my parents are. So, from a young age, I said I wanted to be an attorney.’ – Rachel Lindsay

‘I was an only child. We were so poor, my parents and I had the same room.’ – David Copperfield

‘I chucked my CA final exams to pursue modeling. My parents objected to this, but they soon came around. And after seeing my maiden movie Tum Bin, they were happy beyond words!’ – Priyanshu Chatterjee

‘My parents were very funny – they didn’t know it. But they were. They were actually sharing an IQ.’ – Tim Conway

‘When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them.’ – Rodney Dangerfield

‘My parents were actors. And so I was born in New York City, and when I was 7, they quit acting and went back to medical school at the University Of Chicago.’ – Adam Pally

‘Merit pay has failed repeatedly, and it’s no surprise. When you base teacher pay on standardized test scores, you won’t improve education; you just promote the high-stakes testing craze that’s led parents, students and educators to shout ‘Enough!’ all across the country.’ – Randi Weingarten

‘Cloning looks like a degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children.’ – Leon Kass

‘I’m convinced that what kids need today are parents – not buddies. They need someone who will exercise mature judgment.’ – Zig Ziglar

‘Emotional intelligence begins to develop in the earliest years. All the small exchanges children have with their parents, teachers, and with each other carry emotional messages.’ – Daniel Goleman

‘My parents called me the WB frog. Because when I was onstage, I would do this whole song and dance, but if my parents had a family friend over, I would just go hide in the bedroom.’ – Brie Larson

‘Parents who wonder where the younger generation is going should remember where it came from.’ – Sam Ewing

‘My name is James Edward Franco. Ted is a nickname for Edward. That’s what my parents called me. I also got ‘Teddy Ruxpin’ a lot. It just got to a point where I got sick of it, so when a teacher called out ‘James Franco’ my junior year of high school, I didn’t correct her.’ – James Franco

‘Too often, parents whose children express an interest in farming squelch it because they envision dirt, dust, poverty, and hermit living. But great stories come out of great farming.’ – Joel Salatin

‘I grew up in Malibu, so it’s nice to be back home and be with my parents and sit and drive my car and listen to music and just chill out for a little bit.’ – Bella Hadid

‘My parents were typical Asian parents, and they do, like all parents, want their children to be successful. They really encouraged my brother and I to study math and science, and that’s what we did as kids.’ – Lisa Su

‘Our cellar home had a kitchen and a combination bedroom and half bath, which meant we had a sink next to the bed. We had no refrigerator, no shower or tub, and no privacy. My parents shared the bedroom with my sister and me.’ – Lou Holtz

‘My parents worked as brokers at Oppenheimer securities. They managed to finagle me a job.’ – Steve Eisman

‘I’ve always regretted that I never was able to talk openly with my parents, especially with my father. I’ve heard and read so many things about my family that I can no longer believe anything; every relative I question has a completely different story from the last.’ – David Bowie

‘I had parents who were incredibly loving and nurturing and always made me feel beautiful, so I never really questioned that.’ – Khloe Kardashian

‘My working-class Italian-American parents didn’t go to school, there were no books in the house.’ – Martin Scorsese

‘Yeah, I was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa. My parents lived in a little town called Eagle Grove. My mom taught high school and my dad was an instructor at the community college.’ – Katie Porter

‘My brother and I have converted to Christianity, and my other brother and sister are still Sikh. So for me, it’s not something that I ever want to be judgmental on. I know my parents are two people of a very strong faith. I respect all that they’ve done in raising their four kids and in the opportunities that they’ve given us.’ – Nikki Haley

‘Sex education is very relevant in today’s world where children have access to adult content across media. So it has become all the more important for parents to educate kids about sex and talk to them about it.’ – Tejaswi Madivada

‘Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.’ – Alan Bennett

‘Many years ago, when I was born in the ’50s – ’50s and ’60s didn’t belong to girls in India. They belonged to boys. They belonged to boys who would join business and inherit business from parents, and girls would be dolled up to get married.’ – Kiran Bedi

‘I think I’m proudest of making my parents proud.’ – Eric Dickerson

‘Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won’t have as much censorship because we won’t have as much fear.’ – Judy Blume

‘Parents forgive their children least readily for the faults they themselves instilled in them.’ – Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

‘I couldn’t ask for better parents. I keep that at the forefront of whatever I do, and every time I feel like I can’t take another step, I see their faces, and that drives me.’ – Tiger Shroff

‘Getting up quite late in the morning, going and trying to clean my bikes – I have quite a few of them in Ranchi – spending some time with my family, my parents and friends. Going out for rides with my friends and having lunch or dinner at a roadside hotel – that’s my favourite time-pass. These are the sort of things that really excite me.’ – MS Dhoni

‘I got a lot of support from my parents. That’s the one thing I always appreciated. They didn’t tell me I was being stupid; they told me I was being funny.’ – Jim Carrey

‘It’s wrong for parents to bury their children. It should be the other way around.’ – Rose Kennedy

‘My listening changed when I heard music from Stax, Atlantic, Motown because by that age I thought anything that my parents listened to must be square. So I had to find my own rock n’ roll, as it were, and I found it in black soul music.’ – Robert Palmer

‘I would like to thank my parents in Vergaio, a little village in Italy. They gave me the biggest gift: poverty.’ – Roberto Benigni

‘I knew from a young age that I wanted to be an actor. I never even thought about other careers. The acting field is certainly not the path many Indian parents encourage their children to take, but mine were very supportive. They wanted me to have an education, but understood that this is what I wanted to do.’ – Archie Panjabi

‘A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!’ – Philip Roth

‘My parents have always told me to try and stay humble as you can, and I think that’s been a big help to my career.’ – Kyle Larson

‘My parents’ divorce made an important change in my life. It affected me.’ – Rafael Nadal

‘There’s something about a divorce in that even if your parents still love you, the fact that they can’t live with each other makes you feel there’s something wrong with you.’ – Jack Black

‘I wouldn’t have been born if my parents had stayed in China. Which is kind of funny. But it also just kind of fills me with this existential dread.’ – Bowen Yang

‘You grow up a certain way, and you make decisions within your family, but then you go to college, and the decisions become harder. You are away from home, from the influence of your parents, dealing with peer pressure. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on in college.’ – Benjamin Watson

‘My parents are very hard working people who did everything they could for their children. I have two brothers and they worked dog hard to give us an education and provide us with the most comfortable life possible. My dad provided for his family daily. So, yes, that is definitely in my DNA.’ – David Oyelowo

‘We are all in the business of sales. Teachers sell students on learning, parents sell their children on making good grades and behaving, and traditional salesmen sell their products.’ – Dave Ramsey

‘We were the last generation to have the experience of going out with our friends to the woods or the train tracks and the only way our parents could connect with us was to say, ‘It’s time for dinner.” – Ross Duffer

‘Since it’s based on my parents, it’s more emotionally close to me than some of my more surreal plays. And then I like the balance of the comic and the sad. It should play as funny, but you should care about the characters and feel sad for them.’ – Christopher Durang

‘My mom is very calm and quiet, so I think I got that from her. Because my dad is passionate and loud… It was always interesting, and I really enjoyed that my parents always included us in their lives.’ – Sofia Coppola

‘But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.’ – Joseph Heller

‘I saw this new thing called television, and I saw people throwing pies in each other’s faces, and I thought, ‘This could be a wonderful tool for education! Why is it being used this way?’ So I said to my parents, ‘You know, I don’t think I’ll go into seminary right away. I think I’ll go into television.” – Fred Rogers

‘Scriabin, as you know, is a mystic composer. His music is supersensuous, superromantic, and supermysterious. Everything is super; it is all a little overboard. Anyway, my parents were pleased that I played for him.’ – Vladimir Horowitz

‘My parents’ selfless affection and dedication nourished and prepared me to receive the love of my guru or spiritual father, Swami Prabhupada. My parents prepared the soil in which my guru sowed the seeds of his compassion.’ – Radhanath Swami

‘Most children threaten at times to run away from home. This is the only thing that keeps some parents going.’ – Phyllis Diller

‘Love always comes up to my mind when I think about my parents.’ – Kim Woo-bin

‘I am originally a surd who was born in Delhi in 1982, just two years before the Sikh riots, so all my childhood pictures are in baby frocks with ponytails, as my parents wanted to hide the fact that I was a Sikh boy, given the riots. My dad worked for a travel agency, and we soon moved to Saudi Arabia.’ – Karan Singh Grover

‘Asian people are very practical and come from a conservative world. The parents want their kids to be doctors and lawyers. There are casting calls for Asian children, but once the parents find out the children might miss school, they’re opposed to it.’ – B. D. Wong

‘My parents were going through a divorce, and I used to go spend all weekend at the movies to get away from it all. There was something about the sameness of the movies. It was a place for me to go to express my emotions, you know, and let it out.’ – Tim Matheson

‘I was born and raised Catholic, so it’s in my blood. I don’t go to church… I was born and raised Catholic, which is about the extent of my religion. My parents made one request: that I have my first Holy Communion.’ – Tom Araya

‘I used to get nervous, you know if my parents would come watch. And then I would get nervous if my friends came and watched. Today it’s not a problem anymore actually, because now I enjoy it. I see that they, you know, respect me immensely, and I try to put on a good show and show that I can still play very good tennis.’ – Roger Federer

‘Despite the efforts of some parents, children still tend to act out the traditional sex roles of our culture. The child’s peer group may have more of an influence over this than the parents.’ – Brian Sutton-Smith

‘If my parents were still alive, they would be very proud. They gave me a good start in life, the values that have driven me, and the confidence to believe in myself.’ – Alex Ferguson

‘I don’t know where, or by whom, Judge Wapner was raised, but my parents taught me, when you don’t have something nice to say about someone, say nothing.’ – Judy Sheindlin

‘When you lose a spouse, you’re a widow or widower; when you lose your parents, you’re an orphan. When you lose a child, there’s no word in the English language for that position, that place that you’re left.’ – Frances McDormand

‘Parents know how to push your buttons because, hey, they sewed them on.’ – Camryn Manheim

‘People will laugh at me, but when they ask me to make a wish for the next life, I will say I want the same parents, same brother and sister, same wife, same friends.’ – Rakesh Jhunjhunwala

‘In 1953 there were two ways for an Irish Catholic boy to impress his parents: become a priest or attend Notre Dame.’ – Phil Donahue

‘A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.’ – H. L. Mencken

‘I was born to Haitian parents, and the idea of giving back is really just a part of our culture. So, I don’t think there was ever a moment that I questioned my call to philanthropy, but I can say that the more I’ve grown, the bigger that call has become.’ – Karen Civil

‘I’ll always represent Canada. I was born here, and my parents chose to immigrate here. There are so many things I don’t see in other countries, I see here. I love having the Maple Leaf behind me.’ – Patrick Chan

‘As a kid, I was pretty obsessed with dinosaurs and the day that my parents took me to Dinosaur National Park, I didn’t think life could get any better.’ – Chelsea Clinton

‘My parents taught me the value of hard work, that people don’t mind working hard as long as they get to share in the prosperity they create.’ – Raphael Warnock

‘All parents are an embarrassment to their kids. Often, grandparents are the relief. Kids don’t have to resist you.’ – Anne Lamott

‘It has been my observation that parents kill more dreams than anybody.’ – Spike Lee

‘I had the worst birthday party ever when I was a child because my parents hired a pony to give rides. And these ponies are never in good health. But this one dropped dead. It just wasn’t much fun after that. One kid would sit on him and the rest of us would drag him around.’ – Rita Rudner

‘Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.’ – Allan Bloom

‘These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that.’ – Steve Jobs

‘My parents said, Oh, he’s going to be a director someday. I wanted to be an actor.’ – Quentin Tarantino

‘It is saddening to see parents busy making money and their children losing out on a good life.’ – Ravi Kishan

‘My parents are very proud of my success but still worry, as I’m in a profession where there is no guarantee of work. They have always supported my decision to go into acting, but there have been tough times work-wise.’ – David Harewood

‘My parents treated my height as a wonderful thing to be celebrated, but also normal.’ – Gwendoline Christie

‘Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.’ – George Santayana

‘When I was twelve, I heard about the National Theater School, and I told my parents, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ And that was it.’ – Ana de Armas

‘I’m still the community college kid with immigrant parents.’ – Jimmy Gomez

”E.T.’ began with me trying to write a story about my parents’ divorce.’ – Steven Spielberg

‘Here he tells us that the new birth is first of all ‘not of blood’. You don’t get it through the blood stream, through heredity. Your parents can give you much, but they cannot give you this.’ – E. Stanley Jones

‘I decided to be an inventor when I was five. My parents had given me a few various enrichment toys like erector sets, and for some reason I had the idea that if I put things together just the right way, I could create the intended effect.’ – Ray Kurzweil

‘My parents would always say, ‘It doesnt’ matter if it’s a guy picking up the garbage or the President of the United States, treat everybody as you would want to be treated.’ – Dan Marino

‘I’ve moved to Australia, to amazing parents who gave me unconditional love, to being educated and submerged in an amazing country and society.’ – Saroo Brierley

‘Certainly, by providing individuals coming out of institutions with ways to become productive citizens, we reduce recidivism. What that means is we reduce crime. There are fewer victims when individuals have options – when they have job skills, when they have life skills, we break the cycle of children following their parents into institutions.’ – Loretta Lynch

‘I’m really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.’ – Paul Auster

‘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

‘Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of ‘like’ has spread through the idiom of the young. And it’s true that in some cases the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables.’ – Christopher Hitchens

‘The social relations which are the basis of the reproduction of the species are founded upon the continuous union of parents in marriage.’ – Maria Montessori

‘I have one brother, John, an airline pilot, who is seven years younger. He’s adopted, though we’re still blood related – he’s my cousin. My parents couldn’t have any more children after me, so when Dad’s brother died, they adopted John, then just a baby.’ – Gary Numan

‘Since my parents both worked, they hired me when I was 11 to make dinner every night. I got a quarter a day. But I was always making things like duck a l’orange and baked Alaska. I was a little bit nutty.’ – Teri Hatcher

‘My parents were big music fans, and my dad plays music, so I grew up with Madonna, Frank Zappa, the Beatles, Alice In Chains… it was all over the place. I had a Third Eye Blind record, but I also had Korn, Courtney Love, and Shania Twain.’ – Madi Diaz

‘My grandparents – my mom’s parents – they’re Jewish. But nobody ever pushed religion onto us. It wasn’t something I ever grew up with.’ – David Beckham

‘All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.’ – Anna Quindlen

‘The reason we love our parents is because they loved us first. Every single company should take this advice.’ – Gary Vaynerchuk

‘When I started wearing makeup, my parents….. were like, ‘You’re absolutely not wearing it out of the house.’ At first, I thought they were not happy with me wearing it, but later on, I realized it was out of fear of me getting bullied and ridiculed in school.’ – James Charles

‘My parents were strict, but it was the world I lived in. I had no idea there was a world outside.’ – Katy Perry

‘I grew up with Scientology – my parents at one point were clerical. It’s a pragmatic philosophy, not merely a belief system. Yeah, it’s had media exposure because certain luminaries do Scientology, but millions of people do it who are not celebrities. It’s not a threat or some cult.’ – Giovanni Ribisi

‘As a nonparent, I stand in awe of parents.’ – Philip Yancey

‘My parents were always supportive. They didn’t say, ‘Get a real job.’ They believed in the arts, and they prepared me to be skilled. I’m lucky I can drop into these worlds – into a studio or onto a set or go on stage – and feel comfortable.’ – Vanessa Williams

‘My parents were divorced by the time I was even conscious – like, I don’t remember them ever being together.’ – J. Cole

‘I had some bad influences in my time and, if my parents weren’t there to straighten me out, things might have gone haywire.’ – Brian Lara

‘My dad is black and my mom is white. It was not in vogue to be an interracial couple in the 1970s in South Texas. After my parents moved to San Antonio, it took almost a year for them to find their first home.’ – Will Hurd

‘In some ways, siblings, and especially sisters, are more influential in your childhood than your parents.’ – Deborah Tannen

‘A lot of people influenced me as I was learning, but probably Bing Crosby was the most influential because I would hear his Christmas albums, which my parents played a lot.’ – Gordon Lightfoot

‘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

‘I go to church because my parents go to church, and I believe the things they were doing at the time were right because they were the ones growing up in righteousness, and their life was supposed to be an example, seen?’ – Peter Tosh

‘I am the product of hustlers who taught me how to do it. They gave me a hustler’s ambition. Not a bad thing to get from your parents. But hustling only gets you so far. You have to trust yourself. And you have to be ready to fall on your face and be okay when it happens.’ – Jay Pharoah

‘My parents own a restaurant in downtown Oakland – Garden House – and I started working there at 8. I’d work the cash register while people looked at me skeptically. Free child labor!’ – Su-chin Pak

‘My dad is an art director for BBC TV shows, and my mum does screen printing workshops. Both of my parents played instruments, too, and my mum used to have crazy house parties when me and my brother were young – dub and garage would be banging through my house.’ – King Krule

‘I think something about high school students being snobby about how much they have or don’t have is particularly absurd because it’s not theirs. It’s their parents’. So to feel quite good about yourself because you’ve got the fancy house and car doesn’t make any sense – you didn’t earn any of that.’ – Greta Gerwig

‘In high school, I played football and became an all-American offensive lineman, but my father hadn’t been to any of my games. In those instances, you still hold your head up high. But, when you look up into the stands and you see everyone else’s parents cheering and supporting, you have to just stay focused and push through.’ – Rick Ross

‘My parents were Democrats, and I was a Democrat. And John Wayne was a Republican.’ – Angie Dickinson

‘What use could the humanities be in a digital age? University students focusing on the humanities may end up, at least in their parents’ nightmares, as dog-walkers for those majoring in computer science. But, for me, the humanities are not only relevant but also give us a toolbox to think seriously about ourselves and the world.’ – Nicholas Kristof

‘My parents are awesome, but they’re pretty left-wing.’ – Winona Ryder

‘Public service has allowed me to put values my parents taught me into action.’ – Tom Perez

‘I never thought I’d get married to someone from the film industry. I still remember telling my parents that I want to get married somewhere abroad and live there, away from everything.’ – Nazriya Nazim

‘We were brought up Protestant, and I went to church three times a day on a Sunday. My parents weren’t Bible-bashers, but we all have a strong belief in God and a strong faith. We had a huge garden; our house was a bit like a scene from ‘The Good Life.’ I think Mam and Dad had it really hard, bringing up a big family on very little.’ – Bonnie Tyler

‘Without greater support for childcare, parents of young children may be forced to choose cheaper, poor quality care for their children or fail to provide it entirely.’ – Tim Johnson

‘My parents’ marriage was very rocky. They were always arguing. When they split up when I was in my 20s, my brother and I were both delighted because we knew they weren’t good for each other.’ – Gail Porter

‘Internet safety begins at home and that is why my legislation would require the Federal Trade Commission to design and publish a unique website to serve as a clearinghouse and resource for parents, teachers and children for information on the dangers of surfing the Internet.’ – Mike Fitzpatrick

‘I spent grade nine and ten going to school in Victoria. My parents lived there for 10 years.’ – Sophie Hawley-Weld

‘I love gay Mardi Gras in Sydney, which is a big parade, a big march that thousands and thousands of people participate in. And there’s one little group… well it’s not little, it’s got hundreds of people marching, and they’re all very sweet, middle-aged and elderly people who are the parents of gay children who are out and proud.’ – Jacki Weaver

‘Preparation for a mission is important. A mission is a voluntary act of service to God and humankind. Missionaries support that privilege with their personal savings. Parents, families, friends, and donors to the General Missionary Fund may also assist.’ – Russell M. Nelson

‘The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they’re gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you’re going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.’ – Alice Munro

‘When I take my kid to school, all the parents stop and stare.’ – Adam Sandler

‘My childhood was bittersweet in many ways. We moved around a lot. By the time I was 10, I had travelled thousands of miles, often on my own. My parents were like my friends, so it felt like I didn’t really have parents at all. But in a crazy way that was very liberating. It forced me to be independent, maybe a leader, and certainly a survivor.’ – Nile Rodgers

‘Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.’ – Ogden Nash

‘My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles were all funny, and I felt that energy, that delivery, that timing, that sarcasm. All that stuff seeped into my brain.’ – Jeff Ross

‘I think my parents took me to see Sting when I was very, very young.’ – Hozier

‘I have my three brothers, and then I have my adopted sister from El Salvador, who is actually the oldest. My brother and I were already born, and then my parents adopted my sister from El Salvador during the war and had two more kids.’ – Carrie Coon

‘For me it is important that children be children. My parents felt exactly the same about me.’ – Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden

‘In Afghan society, parents play a central role in the lives of their children; the parent-child relationship is fundamental to who you are and what you become and how you perceive yourself, and it is laden with contradictions, with tension, with anger, with love, with loathing, with angst.’ – Khaled Hosseini

‘I never lost an argument and my parents assumed I would be a lawyer. They cast me in that role.’ – Jared Harris

‘I never took acting classes, but I knew I could do it based on the skill with which I lied to my parents on a regular basis!’ – Ryan Reynolds

‘I am super close with my brother. He is my ultimate role model. Growing up and having a family break apart, you know, when my parents divorced and things like that, it was a struggle, and all we had was each other at the time.’ – Ali Krieger

‘I am a refugee: my parents fled Chile under Pinochet in 1976 when I was 9 months old, and my parents were able to start from nothing and make lives for themselves in the United States.’ – Pedro Pascal

‘I’m from an Indian family of professionals, and my parents had to go through hardships themselves to send me to IIT-Mumbai.’ – Romesh Wadhwani

‘My parents were always Welsh-speaking and very proud of Wales.’ – John Rhys-Davies

‘Time has taught me that parents do the best they can with the light they are seeing with. That is what we all do.’ – Leslie Jordan

‘I remember having computers at my parents’ house growing up. We had different desktop PCs, but my first laptop was an IBM ThinkPad laptop. It was big, bulky, slow and terrible.’ – Scott Michael Foster

‘My parents taught me to never give up and to always believe that my future could be whatever I dreamt it to be.’ – Susana Martinez

‘In every kid’s life, there’s about three or four years when you’re at liberty, and after that, you have to get a job because you’re getting married or you have to support your parents or whatever it is. I was lucky: I didn’t get married, so I didn’t have to have that responsibility.’ – Lemmy

‘I was at a school in England, a prep school, from the ages of 8 and 13. And every play they did was a musical. Parents love musicals. And I don’t sing. It was driving me crazy. ‘We’re doing ‘Macbeth.’ ‘Yes!’ ‘The musical!’ And I was always in the chorus, because of course, in all the main parts, you had to be able to sing.’ – Charlie Cox

‘I choose not to see my parents because I value myself – and they didn’t value me or my mind.’ – Tara Westover

‘I went to middle school and high school, and my drama teacher, Ms. Cooper, basically nurtured me. It was always a part of my life, and my parents allowed it to be.’ – Teyonah Parris

‘Of all the subjects on this planet, I think my parents would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.’ – J. K. Rowling

‘Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.’ – Muriel Spark

‘With Charlie Brown, it was about loneliness and isolation. I always thought that the thing about Charlie Brown and those characters was the absence of the parents. Half the strip was about who wasn’t there. The parents were never in the picture.’ – Matt Groening

‘Both of my parents sacrificed a lot. My dad, Tero, would drive me to training every single day. My mum, Teija, came to Seville to help me. She did everything for me. It was such a big place to go at 17. Even if you can speak English, it doesn’t matter there. It was all Spanish. They don’t do English.’ – Teemu Pukki

‘I had a happy childhood in the suburbs of L.A. My parents instilled in us an appreciation of history, art and, most important, Motown. Jarron and I weren’t allowed to listen to rap until we were 12. After our birthday I dashed to Target and bought DJ Quik’s album ‘Quik Is the Name.’ I memorized every line.’ – Jason Collins

‘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

‘The children of less effective, less competent parents will be more likely to adopt the customs and values of the peer group.’ – Caterina Fake

‘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 was born in Kerala, where my maternal grandparents lived, and stayed there till the age of one, after which I came to Maharashtra to live with my parents and moved all around the state with my father, who worked as a superintendent in an ordnance factory.’ – Kay Kay Menon

‘That’s where the Black Keys and Jack White have succeeded and I’ve failed: They’ve actually convinced college kids that they’re listening to hip music – but it’s just blues twisted a new way – while I’m playing for the college kid’s parents.’ – Joe Bonamassa

‘Now that I’m a parent, I know that my parents were incredibly brave.’ – Ruby Bridges

‘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

‘It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.’ – Paulo Coelho

‘The four of us enjoyed a most wonderful family atmosphere filled with love and reciprocal devotion. Both parents were highly cultured and instilled in us their high appreciation of intellectual pursuit. It was, however, a typical Victorian style of life, all decisions being taken by the head of the family, the husband and father.’ – Rita Levi-Montalcini

‘I thank God that I’m a product of my parents. That they infected me with their intelligence and energy for life, with their thirst for knowledge and their love. I’m grateful that I know where I come from.’ – Shakira

‘In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.’ – Gregory Bateson

‘My parents named me Arlette, and I changed it to Agnes when I was young. I didn’t like it because I don’t like names with ‘ette’ – you know, it looks like a little girl’s name.’ – Agnes Varda

‘Let me be clear: All I really care about is my kids know that their parents love them.’ – Kenneth C. Griffin

‘Soccer was the first sport that my parents put me in, and ultimately, all the parents kind of came over to my mom and were, ‘We think Channing would be better at football…. We love him, he’s really great, but he’s kind of hurting our children.’ I was just a little wild.’ – Channing Tatum

‘Parents have to really talk to their children before they leave home.’ – Aretha Franklin

‘My parents didn’t allow me to do all the things the cool kids could do. I was quiet, reserved, and at some points, taken complete advantage of simply because of my sex and gender. For a while, in high school, I was so deep into self-hate.’ – Rupi Kaur

‘When I hear music that parents hate, or older musicians hate, I know that’s the new music. When I hear older people saying, ‘I hate Rap or Techno’ I rush to it.’ – George Clinton

‘I believe that parents need to make nutrition education a priority in their home environment. It’s crucial for good health and longevity to instill in your children sound eating habits from an early age.’ – Cat Cora

‘Patriotism to your country is something that comes from your heart. It should be taught to you by your parents.’ – Jesse Ventura

‘Both my parents are artists, so that just makes me look at everything slightly different. I listened to different music; I dressed differently. So I kind of grew up without following the pack.’ – Jason Momoa

‘I was inadvertently raised in the ‘gay community.’ I had straight parents, but I spent massive amounts of time at a very early age with gay, theater-hopeful thirty-somethings.’ – Darren Criss

‘My parents said sticks and stones will break your bones but names will never hurt you. But I always felt a sense of exhilaration after a fight; it was the names that really hurt me.’ – Michael Franti

‘Mysteries, like the Masonic rites, are ones parents and elders are sworn not to reveal to the uninitiated, which include all children. And so we sought for signs.’ – Anthony Hecht

‘Usually I’ll go to San Diego to hang out with my parents if I want to unwind.’ – Mario Lopez

‘My hairstyle is not common in India, where my parents come from.’ – Anand Giridharadas

‘I spent lockdown back in Yorkshire with my parents, which was… tricky! But it did remind me how beautiful my hometown of Bridlington is, with its beautiful beaches, wildlife, and lovely locals.’ – Rosie Jones

‘My humour is a mix of my parents’. I get the chatty, anecdotal stuff from my dad and the filth from my mam, Valerie. She has a very dark sense of humour, I think from having grown up with disabilities. It’s a coping mechanism. She had polio when she was eight and has been in a wheelchair for about 20 years.’ – Sarah Millican

‘I’ve always been surrounded by many great people and professors, but my family, especially my mom who was a teacher, was the person who encouraged me to study and pushed me to continue. When we’re young, we don’t understand why our parents bug us so much with school and doing homework, but it’s a blessing to have that support at home.’ – Bad Bunny

‘The first sign of real obsession with music was with an old wind-up gramophone that mum had thrown out into the garage. My parents gave me three old 45s – two Supremes records and one Tom Jones record – and I used to come home from school literally every day, go out to the garage, wind this thing up, and play them.’ – George Michael

‘I always wanted to be an actress, but my parents were adamant that I complete my studies first before I take up acting.’ – Keerthy Suresh

‘I grew up on a council estate in south London; my dad was a bus driver and my mum sewed clothes to bring in extra money. My parents worked hard and were able to save up and buy a home for our family.’ – Sadiq Khan

‘Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn’t know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives.’ – Homer Hickam

‘My dad wanted me to be a professional person, which I was – I was a civil engineer. I graduated from civil engineering at USC in California. I became an engineer, and I helped design the roads for the L.A. County Roads Department. And I did that for about one and a half years in a sense to please my parents – to be a ‘respectable’ person.’ – James Hong

‘My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or blessed, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.’ – Barack Obama

‘Parents become very good at not hearing the explicit words and listening instead to what the child means but doesn’t yet know how to say: ‘I’m lonely, in pain, frightened’ – distress which then unfairly comes out as an attack on the safest, kindest, most reliable thing in the child’s world: the parent.’ – Alain de Botton

‘I was born in Cairns, Queensland. Then my parents and I moved to Sydney. We moved to New Wales. We moved around Australia. I was just really close to my parents, and actually, we moved around a lot when I was very young. I think it played a big part in making me the shy teenager that I was.’ – Catriona Gray

‘We must ensure full access to all reproductive health services, including abortion. We must also provide for our aging population, ensuring our parents and grandparents have the care they need. We must defend Medicare, expand Social Security, and provide tax credits for families who care for their elders and loved ones with disabilities.’ – Deb Haaland

‘Creativity is not just for artists. It’s for businesspeople looking for a new way to close a sale; it’s for engineers trying to solve a problem; it’s for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way.’ – Twyla Tharp

‘Religiosity amongst younger Muslims is not about following their parents’ cultural traditions, but rather, their interest in religion is more politicized.’ – Munira Mirza

‘The system in Sweden is great because you get free healthcare and free education; someone who doesn’t have a lot of money can become a doctor or lawyer. There’s good paternity and maternity leave – the U.S. is probably the only civilised country in the world that doesn’t give parents anything.’ – Alexander Skarsgard

‘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

‘To me, rock music was never meant to be safe. I think there needs to be an element of intrigue, mystery, subversiveness. Your parents should hate it.’ – Trent Reznor

‘Obviously, I rep Jamaica. I’m a first generation born Jamaican-American. My parents are born and raised in Jamaica, my grandparents are born and raised in Jamaica, my other family still lives in Jamaica, and I still go back there.’ – Aljamain Sterling

‘Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers.’ – Alison Gopnik

‘Parents are destined to sin against their kids; it’s inevitable. As is narcissism and the human condition. Everyone has their ego and their ambitions. Life happens in between.’ – Alice Ripley

‘Iranian parents can’t stop their children. They’re just wild – they want to party, they want their rights, they want to paint, they want to dance. No one can stop these new generations coming. That’s why Iran has to open up: it’s like a pot full of hot water, vapour and steam.’ – Golshifteh Farahani

‘My parents probably were delighted when I chose acting, because if there is one job in the world that is less financially reliable than acting, it is art.’ – Josh O’Connor

‘I came from a happy family with loving parents, so my associations with marriage and children were all happy, positive things that brought me comfort as a child, which I wanted in my life.’ – David Furnish

‘Cameras in classrooms are no substitute for greater authority by parents and teachers.’ – Paul Weyrich

‘When I was 11 years old, my parents wanted me to do something besides get in trouble. So they enrolled me in sailing classes at the Sea Shell Association in Santa Barbara, Calif. From the moment I climbed into that 8-foot dinghy in 1952, I knew instinctively what to do and sensed I had done it before.’ – David Crosby

‘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 grew up in New York City during the Depression. My earliest recollections were of my parents talking about what they would do if they didn’t have the rent money. Luckily, we were never evicted. But my father was unemployed most of the time.’ – Stan Lee

‘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

‘I was born in New York but grew up between Switzerland, where my mom is from, and Tunisia, where my dad is from. Now I live in the East Village in New York, in the same building where my parents lived when I was born, so I’ve come full circle in my life.’ – Suleika Jaouad

‘I must have good genes from my parents because I feel no slowdown of energy, enthusiasm or even memory.’ – Nancy Pelosi

‘For me, education has never been simply a policy issue – it’s personal. Neither of my parents and hardly anyone in the neighborhood where I grew up went to college. But thanks to a lot of hard work and plenty of financial aid, I had the opportunity to attend some of the finest universities in this country.’ – Michelle Obama

‘I want to be a good example for my son. That’s the best way to parent – to be the example of what you want to see in them. That’s definitely how my parents parented and how my grandparents parented. And it works.’ – Bryce Dallas Howard

‘What kind of influence did my parents have on my life? Well, they had the most influence. These are the people who are closest to me. My parents are very positive people. They’ve been supportive. They’re always there.’ – Derek Jeter

‘I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.’ – Arthur Conan Doyle

‘My parents have left a legacy in our family of service to others.’ – Neil Bush

‘Coming from an Italian family, my parents had supermarkets and they said I had to take over as any son should take over the family business – I copped a lot of flak when I said ‘no.” – Adriano Zumbo

‘When I was young, my parents made me listen to old music and watch Jimmy Durante. I fell in love with the whole mystique of acting and entertainment.’ – James Wolk

‘I just did a spread in ‘Maxim’, I’m 35 years old. I’ve had women and parents email me asking if I should really be doing that, since I’m still considered a role model.’ – Danica McKellar

‘The biblical framework limits the authority of each institution to its specific jurisdiction. The church does not have the right to meddle in the affairs of individual families and ignore parental authority. Parents do not have authority to manage civil matters while circumventing government officials.’ – John MacArthur

‘I always wanted to make sure my parents didn’t have to work again for the rest of their lives.’ – Deion Sanders

‘Phil Niekro and his brother were pitching against each other in Atlanta. Their parents were sitting right behind home plate. I saw their folks more that day than they did the whole weekend.’ – Bob Uecker

‘When the Holocaust happened, I was 15 years old. My parents kept it a secret from me, despite belonging to the Red Cross. I only found out about it much later. Even today I still feel guilty, because I was an ignoramus between the age of 15 and 25. I am sorry I couldn’t stand up for them.’ – Jean-Luc Godard

‘I think I embody the values of morals that my parents and life experiences have given me.’ – Jason Kelce

‘Parents have absolutely every right to express their opinions at public school board meetings concerning their children’s education.’ – Lauren Boebert

‘You either become like your parents or you become the opposite of your parents. And I like to think that I’m the opposite of my parents.’ – Chelsea Handler

‘All things considered, there’s nobody better for children than parents.’ – Jordan Peterson

‘I have very vivid memories of my parents talking about Nixon, my mom watching Watergate on the black-and-white set in the living room. The mayor at the time in Philadelphia was a guy named Frank Rizzo – a Democrat, a real bully, a racist.’ – Jake Tapper

‘Who would know but ten years ago that kids would be texting each other all the time, that that would be one of their main forms of communication. And so many times, these kids know more about the technology than their parents. And so many times, we’re putting kids in very adult situations and expecting them to behave like they’re 40 years old.’ – Amy Klobuchar

‘My parents were young and liberal and knew I was going to drink anyway, so they let me do it at home.’ – Jessica Alba

‘I grew up in an era of pretty severe poverty. My parents weathered the Great Depression, and money was always a very big concern. I was weaned on a shortage mentality and placed in foster homes largely because there simply wasn’t enough money to take care of the most basic of needs.’ – Wayne Dyer

‘My parents emphasized experiential learning – in my family, being adventurous was a sign of maturity.’ – Ali Wong

‘My parents are overweight, and I think the biggest problem we have in America is a lack of education. The place to start is with parents and teaching them to cook healthier.’ – Fat Joe

‘Julius Sharpe and his wife are extremely loving parents, and because I follow them on Instagram, I always see them, you know, building forts in their living room with their daughters, and doing this and that.’ – Will Sasso

‘It took my parents years to save up for ‘luxuries’ like a fridge or a television, and we were always among the last in the street to get them.’ – John Virgo

‘My background’s working class. My parents had to work to make ends meet. We don’t come from any sense of privilege.’ – Jon Bon Jovi

‘It’s bad timing, but a lot of kids become teenagers just as their parents are hitting their mid-life crisis. So everybody’s miserable and confused and seeking that new sense of identity.’ – Laurie Halse Anderson

‘I’m a surfer at heart. Both my parents moved to Hawaii in the 1970s, where they met and became Christians. Then they taught me and my two brothers how to love the Lord – and how to surf!’ – Bethany Hamilton

‘Whatever our bedtime was as kids, we could stay up an extra half hour if we were reading. My parents didn’t care as long as I was under the spell of a Stephen King or a Douglas Adams. Now I read in bed. I read at work. I read standing in line. It’s like, ‘Hello, my name is Nathan and I am a reader.” – Nathan Fillion

‘My parents even let me switch schools, to leave my regular school to go to the producer’s school, because I told them producing is what I love to do, and it makes me happy to share my music and my passion with others. I was dreaming to go to that school. I begged them. They were like, ‘Yah, know what? If you are happy, we are happy.” – Martin Garrix

‘Generational disinterest in education means that too many young children lack the push from their parents in early years which can make the difference between success and failure in schools.’ – Chris Grayling

‘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 was good at math and science, and it was expected that I would attend the University of Washington in Seattle and become an engineer. But by the time I was seventeen, I was ready to leave home, a decision my parents agreed to support if I could obtain a scholarship. MIT did not grant me one, but the University of Chicago did.’ – Robert Lucas, Jr.

‘Is there a doctor in the house? My parents want me to marry you.’ – Wendy Liebman

‘To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. Every day, parents and teachers ask me, ‘How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?’ The honest answer is, I don’t know.’ – Angela Duckworth

‘The best students come from homes where education is revered: where there are books, and children see their parents reading them.’ – Leo Buscaglia

‘My school was pretty much all African Americans, but it was still a little tough to be in because I didn’t have a lot of money. And when I came back to my neighborhood, it was tough to fit in there, too, because I was wearing Catholic school clothes, and I had two parents, which was rare.’ – Ryan Coogler

”Handsome’ means many things to many people. If people consider me handsome, I feel flattered – and have my parents to thank for it. Realistically, it doesn’t hurt to be good-looking, especially in this business.’ – Richard Chamberlain

‘All teenagers want to rebel a little and break away. But I think you are always going to want to go back to your parents for that safety they provide.’ – Saoirse Ronan

‘There are illegitimate parents, but I don’t believe there are any illegitimate children.’ – Rick Warren

‘Don’t judge other people. For example, if you want God’s anointing to be on you for parenting, you need to be careful not to criticize other parents.’ – Joyce Meyer

‘When I was a child, my parents took my brothers and me to Port-au-Prince during the summer so we could get to know the country of our ancestors. Because Haiti is an island, the beach is everywhere. Haitians are particular, even snobby, about beaches.’ – Roxane Gay

‘I think our job as parents is to give our kids roots to grow and wings to fly.’ – Deborah Norville

‘My mum had me brought up by nannies and governesses. I didn’t have much to do with my parents until I was 21.’ – Frederik, Crown Prince of Denmark

‘Any kid who has two parents who are interested in him and has a houseful of books isn’t poor.’ – Sam Levenson

‘My parents pretty much realized that I would do whatever I wanted, and that was it, really.’ – Amy Winehouse

‘The depth of the love of parents for their children cannot be measured. It is like no other relationship. It exceeds concern for life itself. The love of a parent for a child is continuous and transcends heartbreak and disappointment.’ – James E. Faust

‘Above all, I believe every child, no matter their ZIP code or their parents’ jobs, deserves access to a quality education.’ – Betsy DeVos

‘I’ve always assumed that my parents and my in-laws would live with me when I get older and have children. I just assume it will happen and that it’s the right way to do things. It’s a deeply Indian custom – that you kind of inherit your parents and your spouse’s parents and you take care of them eventually.’ – Mindy Kaling

‘I learned from both my parents that you had to be clever.’ – Mikhail Prokhorov

‘My parents taught me honesty, truth, compassion, kindness and how to care for people. Also, they encouraged me to take risks, to boldly go. They taught me that the greatest danger in life is not taking the adventure.’ – Brian Blessed

‘My parents have always been supportive. I come from a very simple middle class family, where the upbringing is very traditional. So for them to give me the kind of freedom to exercise my choices is very fortunate for me.’ – Sobhita Dhulipala

‘My parents always wanted me to do the right thing. My mom, I think her exact words were, ‘You’re not a chicken in the coop playing in the scraps, you’re an eagle.’ I was like, ‘Oh, OK… ‘ But really, I’ve used that throughout my life.’ – J. J. Redick

‘Our message to parents is to focus on the process the child engages in, such as trying hard or focusing on the task – what specific things they’re doing rather than, ‘You’re so smart. You’re so good at this.’ Although it’s never too late to change, what you do early matters.’ – Carol S. Dweck

‘My parents loved comedies, so we saw Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, the Ritz Brothers, and the Marx Brothers. I wanted to be one of them.’ – Carl Reiner

‘My parents used to call me ‘The Little Frog,’ because whenever they asked how I knew something, I’d say ‘read it,’ which sounds a bit like a frog croak.’ – Talulah Riley

‘I’m worried about parents who aren’t parenting.’ – Barbara Bush

‘Both my parents were actors and they struggled, so I was raised with that. Being raised in this industry from a young age definitely forces you to grow up a little faster than maybe the normal kid.’ – Camila Morrone

‘I’ve been blessed to surround myself with good parents, and good people, and I think that’s the secret: Surround yourself with people that are positive influences in your life that want to help and want to care.’ – Danny Amendola

‘My parents moved to American Samoa when I was three or four years old. My dad was principal of a high school there. It was idyllic for a kid. I had a whole island for a backyard. I lived there until I was eight years old and we moved to Santa Barbara.’ – Eric Stoltz

‘A lot of young people have been raised on our music, or rather had it forced upon them by their parents.’ – Roland Orzabal

‘When my parents died, it became clear to me that there was an end in sight. Death was never a real thing to me. And then when that happened I realized I only have so many years left, if I’m lucky.’ – Rick Baker

‘I guess it’s because I do have a younger audience that, you know, parents worry about the role model thing. But when I was younger, I looked up to people, but I never wanted to be them. I always had my own identity. I’m an entertainer when I’m on stage, and they need to explain that to their kids. That’s not my job to do that.’ – Britney Spears

‘There couldn’t be better parents than mine, loving yet strict. They disciplined with love. A child without discipline is, in away, a lost child. You cannot have freedom without discipline.’ – Ricardo Montalban

‘Like parents, cooks shouldn’t have favourites, but some recipes inevitably shine more than others.’ – Yotam Ottolenghi

‘I went to college as an economics major because that was the easiest major that could still please your Asian parents, and then, much to their dismay, I became a stand-up comedian.’ – Jimmy O. Yang

‘I’m from a big family; I have four younger siblings. My parents are still happily married together. I grew up moving around a lot, and my family was certainly not affluent.’ – Alice Greczyn

‘My parents never pushed me to ski race. It was my choice and something I really wanted to do. I would have rebelled if they had pushed me, and I wouldn’t have had the same passion.’ – Ted Ligety

‘The way we dress on ‘Mad Men’ is so associated with old photographs, with people’s parents and grandparents.’ – Christina Hendricks

‘The Golden Rule of Parenting is; do unto your children as you wish your parents had done unto you!’ – Louise Hart

‘I went to school and made good grades and went to college. So I was afforded an opportunity through my parents’ hard work that most people don’t have.’ – Anthony Mackie

‘I’ve got the best parents you could ever ask for. My parents are from New Jersey, and they met in Vermont in college. My Dad grew up listening to heavy, psychedelic music. He’s my biggest fan.’ – King Tuff

‘A comic strip that your parents read when they were young is a curious thing: it’s an heirloom, and it’s also intimate. You peer through windows and look at the things that made your elders laugh, and then you wonder whether the laugh really belongs to you.’ – Elizabeth McCracken

‘If we as a nation are to break the cycle of poverty, crime and the growing underclass of young people ill equipped to be productive citizens, we need to not only implement effective programs to prevent teen pregnancy, but we must also help those who have already given birth so that they become effective, nurturing, bonding parents.’ – Jane Fonda

‘So much is asked of parents, and so little is given.’ – Virginia Satir

‘I talked my parents into sending me to Roedean at 16. I had this idea that if I could get into Cambridge, then I could join Footlights. My problem was that I went to a comprehensive in Brighton. I thought I’d have to start from a good school, and the best I could think of was Roedean.’ – Lucy Griffiths

‘I have drawn my whole life. My parents were in the tapestry restoration business, and as a young girl, I would draw in the missing parts of the tapestry that needed to be rewoven.’ – Louise Bourgeois

‘My parents wanted me to be a lawyer. But I don’t think I would have been very happy. I’d be in front of the jury singing.’ – Jennifer Lopez

‘I ate Bengali food after my parents married and Dad started living with us, in both Willesden and in Delhi for three years, and then we all moved to California. Dad said he could make a really good dal, but I never saw him cook during the whole time we lived together.’ – Anoushka Shankar

‘Our parents don’t always know what’s right. It’s a new age.’ – Stormzy

‘I like writing about teenagers because it’s a time of great change and conflict. Up to then, you accept what your parents tell you.’ – Joan Lingard

‘Sometimes, it’s hard for parents to talk to their children. It’s all about learning that there are other ways to communicate, like through crafts, or through food.’ – Tabitha Brown

‘My mother just died at 103, so that’s a start. You should live 20 years longer than your parents.’ – Rupert Murdoch

‘There’s a lot of people in show business who have show business parents.’ – Bebe Buell

‘My parents don’t press it but, you know, they’re into good grades.’ – Lucy Deakins

‘A lot of parents pack up their troubles and send them off to summer camp.’ – Raymond Duncan

‘I want every version of a woman and a man to be possible. I want women and men to be able to be full-time parents or full-time working people or any combination of the two.’ – Natalie Portman

‘I would love to have a complete family. I’d love to do it all at once. I’d love to be able to give to my children what my parents were able to give to me. And if I’m blessed to be able to do that, fantastic. If I’m not, then life goes on. You have to do the best you can. I do think we have to bring the family back; I do.’ – Michael Ealy

‘I think that giving mindless praise is ridiculous. But I understand why parents do it. They want their kids to feel good about themselves. But parents are never going to teach their children true, positive self esteem by praising everything they do.’ – Rosalind Wiseman

‘I remember times of anxiety, ups and downs, and times of unexpected windfalls. But my parents loved what they did. And because their work was also their hobby, it taught me that work could be fulfilling.’ – Rosamund Pike

‘As a child, I felt that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged, and therefore somehow negated, by my American environment and vice versa. Growing up, I was impatient with my parents for being so different, holding on to India the way they did, and always making me feel like I had to make a choice of which way I would go.’ – Jhumpa Lahiri

‘The will of Virginians was clear: Parents should have a say in education.’ – Glenn Youngkin

‘My parents and my brothers and their wives are incredible and formed me as a person long before I got to Hollywood.’ – John Krasinski

‘I was 5 when I went up my first 10,000 ft mountain, with my parents, and I have been climbing ever since.’ – Reinhold Messner

‘My parents genuinely loved Vienna, and in later years I learned from them why the city exerted a powerful hold on them and other Jews. My parents loved the dialect of Vienna, its cultural sophistication, and artistic values.’ – Eric Kandel

‘My heroes always are mostly my parents – my father especially, and my mom, who’s passed on already. My dad is a very strong man, and by him being educated, and a principal and school superintendent over 37 years, he plays such a big role in my life.’ – Dikembe Mutombo

‘I think our jobs as parents is to raise our children with empathy – to figure out who this little character is, almost from birth, and then guide them to fulfill their best potential.’ – Margaret Trudeau

‘When I was three, my parents were told that I would never be able to recover from rheumatoid arthritis. Doctors from the biggest and the best of hospitals had said that the condition would never be cured. But with naturopathy and yoga, I recovered and became a wrestler, and even got the opportunity to represent my country in wrestling.’ – Sangram Singh

‘When parents ask why there are still so few girls in advanced science and math classes in high school, I tell them, because girls still need way more encouragement than boys to take those courses.’ – Eileen Pollack

‘I come from good stock. Both of my parents are big – my dad is a big guy; my mom is a big lady.’ – Frank Thomas

‘Learning can take place in the backyard if there is a human being there who cares about the child. Before learning computers, children should learn to read first. They should sit around the dinner table and hear what their parents have to say and think.’ – Dixie Carter

‘I love the story of how my parents met because it seems very 1950s Brooklyn. They met on a brownstone stoop as my father was singing a little doo-wop.’ – Jane Krakowski

‘Cursed be he above all others Who’s enslaved by love of money. Money takes the place of brothers, Money takes the place of parents, Money brings us war and slaughter.’ – Anacreon

‘I am Cuban, my parents are Cuban, and I was not adopted.’ – Oscar Nunez

‘We lived, until I was 12 or so, in communal apartment with five different families and the same kitchen, in two little – my brother and me and my parents. It was hell, but it was a common thing. My father was not general or admiral, but he was colonel. He was teaching in military academy military topography.’ – Mikhail Baryshnikov

‘All around me, I saw people who were taught by their parents, as I was, to just toe the line, not ruffle the feathers, not rock the boat too much and just put your head down, do your work and that’s it. And I think that as a community, we’re reaching the limitations of that kind of thinking.’ – Simu Liu

‘I have always loved doing accents. I have lived with my parents in a number of countries, including Italy and Jamaica.’ – Sarita Choudhury

‘Eating disorders are usually nothing to do with food. Parents need to be with their child to see them through it. All the therapists in the world can’t help if the parents aren’t present, loving, and proactive.’ – Olivia Newton-John

‘I’m glad that my parents missed one thing that was really unbelievable. They saw me hit this great success. It was a blast and we had a lot of laughs. And it was just an amazing time. They passed away. And then after I got, you know, famous, all these haters came out of nowhere.’ – Dane Cook

‘I’m Korean-American. Not Colombian. My parents are first-generation, and I’m like… in-between, because I moved over here when I was four or five.’ – Steven Yeun

‘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

‘There was not a lot of rock n’ roll in the house. Our parents didn’t think it was very groovy, and I tend to agree with them. If you grew up with Charlie Parker, Bill Haley wasn’t very hip.’ – Elvis Costello

‘My parents were just as smart as I am, just as hard working if not harder; I think my father and grandfather were probably better men, yet I’ve been able to accomplish things professionally that they were not able to.’ – Marco Rubio

‘I’d have to say, for me, as a child, my favorite memories were always centered around Christmas time. It always seemed like no matter how much money my parents had or didn’t have, we got completely spoiled rotten. There were always presents under the tree, and we always did special things, like hide elves around the house.’ – Josie Bissett

‘There are many talented and smart kids from underprivileged backgrounds but don’t get the same opportunity as a kid that has got parents that are well off.’ – Leon Edwards

‘I grew up in a family where my parents worked full-time and still found themselves and their six children trapped like so many of the working poor.’ – Stacey Abrams

‘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

‘When I was eight, my parents saved up to send me to private school, but I found it so tough that I often escaped through the back fence to walk the four miles to my father’s office in Windsor. I only lasted a few terms, but it didn’t curb my ambition.’ – Peter Jones

‘We live in a world of shifting values. The family is falling apart. Parents failing in what they ought to do.’ – Gordon B. Hinckley

‘If your parents never had children, chances are… neither will you.’ – Dick Cavett

‘As might be supposed, my parents were quite poor, but we somehow never seemed to lack anything we needed, and I never saw a trace of discontent or a failure in cheerfulness over their lot in life, as indeed over anything.’ – Albert J. Nock

‘My parents are great people.’ – Breanna Stewart

‘When I was growing up, we never had much money. My parents were divorced young, but I was always surrounded by loving individuals. They couldn’t give us riches, but they gave us their stories, their hearts, and their time.’ – Patricia Polacco

‘I had phenomenal parents. They kept me very grounded, and I lived a normal life.’ – Zachery Ty Bryan

‘Because my parents are Rwandan, there was always a lot of colour and artwork in our house and that informed my love of bright and vibrant clothes.’ – Ncuti Gatwa

‘As a result of Title IX, and a new generation of parents who want their daughters to have the opportunities they never had, women’s sports have arrived.’ – Sheryl Swoopes

‘My father came from Germany. My mom came from Venezuela. My father’s culturally German, but his father was Japanese. I was raised in New York and spent two years in Rio. My parents met at the University of Southern Mississippi, and they had me there, and then we moved to New York. I’m not very familiar with Mississippi.’ – Fred Armisen

‘If I tell a man he needs to quit his soul-sucking job, he has to go home and fight with his wife or fight with his parents and fight with his in-laws and fight with everybody, because men aren’t supposed to be happy; they’re supposed to do well.’ – Martha Beck

‘I grew up in Long Island City. When I was growing up, my parents owned a women’s clothing store in Queens. It was for older women. I got my bras there, until I realized I didn’t want those huge, taupe bras. Everything was beige, with massive amounts of hooks.’ – Jessica Valenti

‘I grew up as an only child. My parents weren’t great conversationalists. We had a quiet house. I’m not very verbal.’ – Matthew Morrison

‘The inner me was always under attack by authority, by the way my parents wanted me to be brought up, by these English schools I went to. So I’ve always felt this kind of anti-authoritarian strain in me, pushing to express itself despite the obstacles.’ – Edward Said

‘My parents know I was outgoing as a child, and whenever people came over, I’d automatically do impressions of them as soon as they left; it was my mom’s favorite thing. Yes, I grew up in Hollywood, but not in any rich neighborhood.’ – Leonardo DiCaprio

‘I come from very creative parents.’ – Tom Holland

‘My dad always pushed me, he took me to training on days where sometimes it would take two hours to get there, so I’ll always be so grateful for my parents for the work they’ve done for me.’ – Bukayo Saka

‘I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I’d go and work my way through the children’s area.’ – Neil Gaiman

‘I grew up being terrified of my parents, particularly my father figures.’ – Flea

‘There are just hundreds of people that have inspired and influenced me in a number of different ways. First of all, you can’t forget your parents and all they’ve done to help you to get here.’ – Michael P. Anderson

‘When we got signed, I lent my parents money, because they were broke.’ – Fab Moretti

‘I was quite adamant that I will not change my name as it was given by my parents.’ – Waheeda Rehman

‘I remember where I was when I wrote that story, ‘Mermaid in a Jar.’ I was at a boyfriend’s, and he was the only boy I ever dated who was rich, and his parents had a ski chalet, and I just didn’t know how to break up with him, so I decided I would be celibate.’ – Sheila Heti

‘As a child I had dealt with a lot of loss and grief. I was constantly losing my parents, losing my home, constantly moving around, living with this stranger, that stepfather, or whatever.’ – Erin Gray

‘Growing up, money is important. And now I have a career where I’m making enough money to live. But I really want to give it to my parents, my family, charities, and people around me.’ – Tyler Joseph

‘I grew up in a Christian home with amazing parents.’ – Allyson Felix

‘People who I’ve encountered who have had more given to them, they tend to be more disappointed and unable to carry on when something doesn’t go their way, and that’s not my parents.’ – Hong Chau

‘In New York, I have a photo of my parents on their wedding day in 1947. They’re beaming at home plate in Houston’s Buffalo Stadium. I love the photo because my dad is smiling. He didn’t smile much in his later years.’ – Keith Hernandez

‘My parents had this incredibly vital relationship with an audience, like muscle with blood. This was the main competition I had for my parents’ attention: an audience.’ – Carrie Fisher

‘My parents never talked to me like I was a kid. Maybe that’s why I’ve been seen as mature.’ – Dakota Fanning

‘When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates’ parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.’ – Sonia Sotomayor

‘Empowering girls is extremely important to me because, growing up, I needed those empowering women to show me the way. When my parents divorced when I was 11, my mom was a force to be reckoned with. She showed me how to be self-sufficient and independent.’ – Cassadee Pope

‘I still remember how my father used to wake me up at 4 A.M. and make me study. He also used to take me for a walk and then always dropped me to school. I was very disciplined, as my father inculcated those values in me. Now that my father is no more, I understand that you should not take your parents for granted.’ – Mouni Roy

‘I’ve got two parents, I don’t ride around with guns, and I’ve never put my hands on a woman. But the only team that believed me was the Cardinals.’ – Tyrann Mathieu

‘More than 1.1 million taxpayers in Pennsylvania will enjoy a lower tax rate, more than 1.4 million married couples will benefit from the reduction in the marriage penalty, and more than 1.1 million parents will have the advantage of an increased child tax credit.’ – Tim Murphy

‘Jasmine – it brings back memories of India with my parents.’ – Anne Reid

‘When I had bone cancer, I was just 11 years old. I think my parents suffered a lot because they worried about my health, my life, so much. For me, it was quite bad feeling during the treatment. But I quite enjoyed staying in the hospital because so many kids played with me.’ – Yu Chui Yee

‘My parents actively tried to discourage me from going into music – especially Dad, because of the troubled times he had in his youth.’ – Andrew Ridgeley

‘To me, what Minecraft represents is more than a hit game franchise. It’s this open-world platform. If you think about it, it’s the one game parents want their kids to play.’ – Satya Nadella

‘I still miss my parents every day; I adored them. And when you have no children, friends are even more important to you.’ – Miriam Margolyes

‘I was born to argue… I don’t know why. I mean, from arguing with my teachers and, on occasions, my parents. I think I’ve mastered the art of argument at a fairly young age.’ – Sean Hannity

‘Growing up, there wasn’t an exact Hispanic role model that I had. I didn’t realize how big a difference I was making, going to the Olympics and being Hispanic, until I would be in an autograph session, and parents would come up to me and say, ‘You know, our family is so proud of you, you’re really doing Hispanics proud.” – Laurie Hernandez

‘My parents always used to complain about my eating habits. I was different. I was wrong. Everything had to be plain or boiled. I was 14 before I ate pasta with tomato sauce. My dad would take me to the best restaurants, and all I would eat was rice with olive oil.’ – Fabio Lanzoni

‘All I say about severely disabled babies is that when a life is so miserable it is not worth living, then it is permissible to give it a lethal injection. These are decisions that should be taken by parents – never the state – in consultation with their doctors.’ – Peter Singer

‘My full name’s Jonathan Kimble, but my parents didn’t want to call me either. So for a while, I went by Kim, which is a name for a girl or a Korean person.’ – J. K. Simmons

‘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

‘Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form.’ – Jeffrey Kluger

‘Twenty years ago my parents wouldn’t know who the X-Men were, and now everybody knows that stuff. It means that deconstruction of the superhero is something you can do. All those movies have led to a point where we can finally have ‘Watchmen’ with a Superman character who doesn’t want to save the world and a Batman who has trouble in bed.’ – Zack Snyder

‘I think I’m probably the only person that, when the parents lent me money to make the movie, they wished I had not paid them back. They could have said ‘No,’ and it would have ended, and I would have gotten a real job.’ – John Waters

‘My parents are the coolest of the cool on every single level, and it’s because they have a deep appreciation for every moment of their lives.’ – Rashida Jones

‘I haven’t actually spoken to my parents since the hurricane.’ – Faith Ford

‘I was strong willed and my parents instilled this notion of hard graft. That’s how you’ve got to get by – nothing is given to you.’ – Vick Hope

‘For ‘Regulate,’ I was at home, and I came up with it. I was listening to Michael McDonald’s ‘I Keep Forgettin’.’ It was a record that I always loved, from being a kid and my parents playing it when they had their company of friends over. It was a record that just stuck in my head, and it just felt good.’ – Warren G

‘When I was seven or eight, whenever I was getting too rowdy at night, my parents would give me a maths workbook to work on to quieten me down.’ – Terence Tao

‘My parents were big film buffs.’ – Alden Ehrenreich

‘It was like a cliche for the parents in my hometown to let their kids watch ‘Friends.’ I had no interest at first, because I could not understand a word.’ – RM

‘I’m torn about late parenting. I believe people should spend their twenties living and having fun and not having any regrets later. I also think people in their thirties generally make better parents but so many of my friends are having trouble – myself included – as fathers get older.’ – Eric McCormack

‘My parents were very supportive and always encouraged us. My father was a gentle, nice man. My mother was quite a colorful character and a keen reader who encouraged me to write.’ – Alexander McCall Smith

‘My mind was inclined to work and to support my parents.’ – The Great Khali

‘I was happy to be with my parents. I didn’t see very much of them, so I was very happy when my father was there and out of jail.’ – Indira Gandhi

‘I think it goes back to whether or not race and class – that is, race and poverty – is not becoming even more of a constraint. Because with the failing public schools, I worry that the way that my grandparents got out of poverty, the way that my parents became educated, is just not going to be there for a whole bunch of kids.’ – Condoleezza Rice

‘For me, every show that’s about teachers – and there’s been a number of them – they’re like misfits who hate the kids and don’t want to be there and hate their jobs. For me, having crazy parents, my teachers were the sane people who raised me, and they liked being there.’ – Adam F. Goldberg

‘I work with a lot of young people who have poems that are changing their lives, that they’re eager to talk about, but every now and then when I meet someone, maybe someone of my parents’ generation, and I tell them that I write poetry, they’ll begin to recite something that they memorized when they were in school that has never left them.’ – Tracy K. Smith

‘I’m a trained architect. Both my parents were architects.’ – Greg Wise

‘I think the number one thing that I find important is the importance of honesty with your friends and your parents, if you can be. But I think that telling people how you really feel, being who you truly are, being safe and taking care of yourself is the most important thing.’ – Emma Stone

‘Love, it has been said, flows downward. The love of parents for their children has always been far more powerful than that of children for their parents; and who among the sons of men ever loved God with a thousandth part of the love which God has manifested to us?’ – Augustus Hare

”Hard Hit,’ a YA collection of poems, explores the country of grief and survival. Mark, a 16-year-old boy and skilled pitcher, must confront the coming death of his beloved father with the help of his friends, family, baseball, and an idiosyncratic belief in God. I used my own experience of my parents’ deaths to inform this journey.’ – Ann Turner

‘When I was around 16 or 17, I got asked to model, but because I was very ‘tomboy’ at the time, I wasn’t interested. But then I had a bit of teenage rebellion, and I saw modeling as an opportunity to get away from school and parents, so I thought, ‘OK, maybe I will be a model.” – Suki Waterhouse

‘People often think of America as a classless society, but, of course, that isn’t true. Within immigrant communities, there’s an enormous distinction of class, depending on who your parents are, and that kind of thing comes out really quick in things like marriage and interpersonal relationships.’ – Min Jin Lee

‘The hardest part of my entire three-year recovery has been knowing that my parents, my brothers, were suffering through this burden of injury and recovery, something I volunteered for that they didn’t ask for.’ – Kyle Carpenter

‘I’m a first-generation American. My parents are from Nigeria. I had this weird last name that looked Japanese, and then people would see me and go, ‘Oh. You’re not Japanese.” – Rick Famuyiwa

‘I’m not defined by where I came from. I never took part in the rules and hatred that sometimes go along with religion. But if my parents are happy with what they believe, then I’m happy to stay out of their way. We agree to disagree.’ – Katy Perry

‘My childhood was rough, we were poor and my parents were alcoholics, but nobody was mean. I knew I was loved. We were on welfare, but I never felt abandoned or unloved.’ – Carol Burnett

‘I was born in April of 1966, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Soon after, my parents and grandparents all lost personal freedom simply for being intellectuals. So I spent most of my childhood rotating between adopted families of peasants and coalminers.’ – Li Lu

‘With theatre, we all agree to suspend our disbelief about so many things, but not about race. It’s totally OK to have one actor playing five roles – people are willing to believe that. But they won’t believe it if there’s a black or an Asian kid who has white parents. What does that say about us?’ – David Henry Hwang

‘When I was first lady, I worked to call attention to the plight of refugees fleeing Cambodia for Thailand, I visited Thailand and witnessed firsthand the trauma of parents and children separated by circumstance beyond their control.’ – Rosalynn Carter

‘People who are feeling bullied and people who feel like outsiders should talk to their parents and guardians about finding a place with likeminded people where they can feel accepted. That’s what I needed, and that’s what I found with musical theater.’ – Nick Jonas

‘It’s great to be able to connect parents with children both emotionally and through humor. I look forward to exploring family entertainment once again and examining the specifics of our day-to-day lives against the backdrop of an extraordinary adventure.’ – Jon Favreau

‘I love doing things quietly. I love being with friends. I love my parents and my brother Guglielmo. They are essentials to me.’ – Vittoria Ceretti

‘I changed high schools three times because my parents moved. I had one friend my freshman year named Miki Vukovich. Miki and I were the only skaters in our high school. He runs my foundation now.’ – Tony Hawk

‘I was an only child. Both my parents came from working-class families in Hackney, east London.’ – Tony Robinson

‘Every child needs to have for itself not only its loving parents and siblings and friends of its own age, but a grown-up friend.’ – P. L. Travers

‘My mom was a beautician in her early days, and then my parents decided that one of them needed to go to school in order to build the future. So my mom started going to college when I was in eighth grade, and she graduated when I was a freshman in college.’ – Julie Sweet

‘We live in an age of generational turmoil. Baby-boom parents are accused of clinging on to jobs and houses which they should be freeing up for their children. Twentysomethings who can’t afford to leave home and can’t get jobs are attacked as aimless and immature.’ – Jane Ridley

‘My parents were both Spanish-speakers and they used to speak to me and my siblings in Spanish and we’d answer them in English.’ – America Ferrera

‘If you want to stay young-looking, pick your parents very carefully.’ – Dick Clark

‘When you’re young, you think your parents are embarrassing and always saying and doing the wrong things, but as you get older you really appreciate how right they were about so much.’ – Tom Daley

‘I grew up in a family with three siblings. My parents were always very supportive and encouraging. It was important for them that we have meaningful and satisfying professions, but they didn’t care as much about success and achievement.’ – Maryam Mirzakhani

‘The reason why people still come to Tech N9ne shows is because they never know what to expect. They know it’s gonna be something wild. From generation to generation, I’ve seen it. The parents are bringing the kids, and then the kids start comin’ themselves. It’s crazy, man.’ – Tech N9ne

‘It has become an accepted tenet that kids will rarely listen to their parents but seldom fail to imitate them. Communicating the message has never been a good substitute for ‘showing up’ and embodying the message.’ – Greg Boyle

‘Parents are usually more careful to bestow knowledge on their children rather than virtue, the art of speaking well rather than doing well; but their manners should be of the greatest concern.’ – R. Buckminster Fuller

‘I don’t have any brothers and sisters, so I always relied on my parents to guide me or answer questions.’ – Daryl Davis

‘Those men and women are fortunate who are born at a time when a great struggle for human freedom is in progress. It is an added good fortune to have parents who take a personal part in the great movements of their time. I am glad and thankful that this was my case.’ – Emmeline Pankhurst

‘Look, you’ve got a generation of people coming along who are going to form their own new relationship with the idea of supporting the causes that they care about or changing the world. And these people are not going to do it the way our parents do it.’ – Edward Norton

‘Both of my parents had me reading at a really young age. Maybe it was a hereditary thing, but my mom always had my nose in a book. I’ve always been a bookworm.’ – Earl Sweatshirt

‘In 1966, I bought my parents a carriage clock for their silver wedding anniversary. It was last wound 30 years later, in December 1996, the month my father died.’ – Clive Sinclair

‘My parents were very volatile but very loving. My father would get jealous if my mother looked at somebody. I used to be insanely jealous. It comes out of insecurity. It can come and go, but you get to the point in life where you don’t have this raging jealousy and protectiveness about your world.’ – Felicity Kendal

‘My parents were terrific – mother was a church organist and my father was probably the most respected person in our church outside of the minister and sometimes maybe that much. The neighbors all called him – a gentleman.’ – Jane Pauley

‘I am blessed to have parents, who believed that we should follow our dreams. They have been very supportive.’ – Ishita Dutta

‘Many foster children have had difficulty making the transition to independent living. Several are homeless, become single parents, commit crimes, or live in poverty. They are also frequent targets of crime.’ – Charles Bass

‘I had very little going for me as a kid except for the fact that I had demanding parents and was very good at filling out bubbles on standardized tests. I went to the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University because I did well on the SAT. I went to Exeter because I did well on the SAT.’ – Andrew Yang

‘Am I ever going to be able to play football again? What’s going on with my career? I was just thinking things like that. You’ve got tears going down your eyes. You’ve got your trainers right there and my parents right there. I was just thinking, “Is this it?” I didn’t know what a knee injury was. I’d never felt pain like that.’ – Rob Gronkowski

‘My concentration was really on getting to university and becoming a doctor. My parents let me know that school marks were important. Achievement was something which came by hard work.’ – Roger Bannister

‘I don’t think my parents liked me. They put a live teddy bear in my crib.’ – Woody Allen

‘In theory, parents are supposed to empathize with one other – find common cause in the fervent desire to preserve and protect the world for the next generation, and connect on some deep, almost mystical level that those poor souls who have not experienced this kind of all-consuming love cannot possibly comprehend.’ – Adam Mansbach

‘All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.’ – Gore Vidal

‘Personally, I was oblivious to any financial hardships that my parents endured.’ – Sven-Goran Eriksson

‘I think the fact that my parents weren’t conventional – especially considering their position – had a big influence on the way that I conduct myself now in design and business. It had a huge impact on my wanting to do something a bit more than just designing a pretty dress and putting it on a runway and making it glamorous.’ – Stella McCartney

‘I taught in Belize for a year, and before I left, my parents were birddogging me to get health care coverage. So what I did was, I reenrolled in college, and then got coverage through my college.’ – Denis McDonough

‘Any child may go through periods during which they become less outspoken with their parents or teachers. But girls, like boys, live in many different worlds – they have their friends and their classroom and their parents – and within these different domains, they may have different levels of expressiveness.’ – Christina Hoff Sommers

‘I started when I was four because I had asked my parents, I begged them, ‘Can I do acting? I really want to do this!’ and they let me do it, so that’s pretty much how I got started.’ – Peyton List

‘When I was young, my family didn’t go on outings to the circus or trips to Disneyland. We couldn’t afford them. Instead, we stayed in our small rural West Texas town, and my parents took us to cemeteries.’ – Jenny Lawson

‘My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way.’ – Anne Lamott

‘Raising a family is difficult enough. But it’s even more difficult for single parents struggling to make ends meet. They don’t need more obstacles. They need more opportunities.’ – Bill Richardson

‘I’ve always had the greatest respect for and listened to both my father and my mother. I’ve always tried to follow my parents’ advice because these are people who want the best for me.’ – Neymar

‘I started when I was three, and on some courses they wouldn’t let me play because they said I was too little. They wouldn’t accept that a child could play. So my parents had to argue at times with some people at golf courses so I could.’ – Matteo Manassero

‘My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books.’ – Donald Hall

‘I love everyone that supports me, and things can get wild at times, but my parents raised me to be grounded and to always remain humble. I think that’s one of the main reasons that my fans support me.’ – Lance Gross

‘I don’t know why, but the older I get the more interested I get in my parents’ marriage. And it’s interesting to be married yourself, too, because there is an inevitable comparison.’ – Jhumpa Lahiri

‘I grew up in a bookless house – my parents didn’t read poetry, so if I hadn’t had the chance to experience it at school I’d never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.’ – Carol Ann Duffy

‘Kids can’t build a marble statue at home. But I’ve had parents tell me that, after an exhibit, their kids immediately dug out their Lego kits and disappeared for three days.’ – Nathan Sawaya

‘I took the fear of marriage from my parents’ relationship, because I didn’t want to end up in a relationship like that, whereas my brothers and sisters learnt a lesson from it and made sure they didn’t carry it on into their own marriages.’ – John Mahoney

‘My parents strapped a pair of plastic skis on my boots when I was two years old and sent me down our driveway in Vail. Of course, they were holding on to me the whole time, but that was my first experience ‘skiing.” – Mikaela Shiffrin

‘I feel like, big city or small town, you can relate to following your parents’ footsteps or putting your own dreams on the back burner or vices that we get caught up in – that whole cycle. That’s not just a small-town thing. That’s a life thing.’ – Kacey Musgraves

‘Well, I was always really mature for my age. I’m an above-age reader. I’m not trying to come off like, ‘I have a high IQ number. My parents gave me the test.’ That’s the way I was, I guess. I am still a kid. I love doing kid activities. I’m such a kid, but when I’m on set, I do like to be professional.’ – Atticus Shaffer

‘I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.’ – Richard Dawkins

‘My parents had a software company making children’s software for the Apple II+, Commodore 64 and Acorn computers. They hired these teenagers to program the software, and these guys were true hackers, trying to get more colors and sound and animation out of those computers.’ – Bre Pettis

‘We write not only for children but also for their parents. They, too, are serious children.’ – Isaac Bashevis Singer

‘Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.’ – Emil Cioran

‘I was fortunate and I was lucky that I had a couple of people in my life who cared about me. I had good, loving parents.’ – Dwayne Johnson

‘I told my parents that I wanted to work on menstrual hygiene because I believe a girl can achieve everything if she is healthy.’ – Manushi Chhillar

‘Responsibility for the proper conduct of children was not confined to their parents only. When they misbehaved, they misbehaved against the community. And a senior member of the community was expected to do something about it.’ – Oliver Tambo

‘My parents didn’t have records, they didn’t have radios, and they didn’t listen to music. My grandmother was my main connection to art and music. She could play piano very well, and she had perfect pitch.’ – Gerard Way

‘You know some of the people in The Strokes, yeah, their parents had success – but we didn’t live like yuppies.’ – Julian Casablancas

‘I think in modern communication studies, we put a lot of emphasis on our relationships and our family relationships. Our relationships with our parents, and our siblings. I felt that there was this gap in content about communication with people who are super close to you in your peer group.’ – Finneas

‘My parents are music fans, even though neither of them play an instrument. I was exposed to their record collection, so I love everything from Joni Mitchell to Bruce Springsteen.’ – Gabrielle Aplin

‘My parents were born in Korea. They spent a good part of their life in Korea.’ – Randall Park

‘Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.’ – Robert Edwards

‘Most Americans have parents or grandparents who immigrated to this country, and we know the hardships they faced, from learning the language to dealing with prejudice.’ – Hank Johnson

‘My parents had us in church every Sunday, every Wednesday. It was more of a tradition at that point; I didn’t have a personal relationship with the Lord until I went to the altar call one Sunday, and the youth pastor told us to make a decision for ourselves.’ – Stephen Curry

‘My parents have – my dad has managed to succeed at his craft. So, you know, it’s not like I was struggling in my life.’ – Dan Levy

‘My parents always encouraged me and I had a good home life. We were always taught to respect things and other people. It’s so different today, because children are just not taught the right way.’ – Betty Cuthbert

‘Losing my parents, who I admired, loved and needed, it took a long time to be able to move on.’ – Billy Crystal

‘My parents are avid supporters of me, and just hearing my name and the word ‘Grammy’ in the same sentence would be a dream come true. I mean, that’s something you put on your tombstone.’ – Morgan Wallen

‘I don’t want kids listening to my music thinking it’s for their parents. I want them to feel it’s theirs.’ – Mayer Hawthorne

‘My parents have always been very supportive and it hasn’t been an issue. Mum worried I might get more problems in life because of my bisexuality but I think people are more liberal now.’ – Joe Lycett

‘For a child everything is wonderful, be it going to a fair or visting a temple with parents. This happiness and enthusiasm needs to reflect in my writing.’ – Sudha Murty

‘I can tell you, I grew up with great coaching, and it had nothing to do with sports. I had great parents. I really got some great input from there. They were entrepreneurial, middle-class business people.’ – Jerry Jones

‘My parents, along with my brother and sister, are vegetarians.’ – Alissa White-Gluz

‘If you ask the government to solve all of your problems, it’s a bit like asking your wife to cook and clean, to raise the children, to hold down a second job to help with the family finances, to keep her parents happy and well and keep your parents happy and well, and to also – to do the lawn and clean the gutters.’ – P. J. O’Rourke

‘Both my parents were keen golfers and Dad was such a creature of habit that he didn’t see much of me at Ayr United because he always played a round on Saturdays. He was an old-school parent of his time and I’ve no complaints.’ – Steve Nicol

‘Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.’ – Steven Pinker

‘When you’re around the kids, you feel like you act the most grown up just because you’re supposed to lead. I say things, like every other parent, that reminds you of your own parents. One thing I do know about being a parent, you understand why your father was in a bad mood a lot.’ – Adam Sandler

‘My father, Fukujuro, drove a cab and my mother, Itsuko, was a homemaker. My parents often took me to see Impressionist exhibits. At home, I would paint pictures in a similar style.’ – Takashi Murakami

‘Most of us become parents long before we have stopped being children.’ – Mignon McLaughlin

‘I grew up in a musical environment. My parents played music and had it playing on the radio. They brought me to a concert at the age of 5, the same age I started violin lessons.’ – Joshua Bell

‘I always wonder what my life would be like if I had parents like the other kids who went to my high school.’ – Stormy Daniels

‘My parents were born abroad. I was born in France, but I feel comfortable everywhere – I don’t see the borders.’ – JR

‘Bathrooms have always been a big issue in my life. My parents fought for me to be able to enroll in elementary school as a girl, which I did. But I still would not be allowed to use the girls’ room under any condition.’ – Jazz Jennings

‘I love both my parents dearly.’ – Kevin Eubanks

‘You can’t change who your parents are, and I would never want to do that.’ – Ananya Panday

‘I’m so lucky to have been raised the way I have, because my parents believed that everyone had the right to their own feelings, opinions, and existence; as long as they weren’t harming others, you had to defend those rights.’ – George Clooney

‘And my parents live down in West Virginia, and I have to drive through the Shenandoah Valley pretty often to go visit them. You actually drive right by Gettysburg and some other spots where there were huge battles.’ – Aaron Dessner

‘I’m Egyptian, and my parents stupidly decided to move us down to South Carolina when I was five, which was pretty brutal.’ – Sam Esmail

‘My parents were in high school and college in the ’80s, so let’s just say I’ve heard some stuff, man. We listen to a lot of music and watch lots of great films, but the real context they provide from that era is about politics.’ – Finn Wolfhard

‘My parents did not discourage me but could not understand how I could make a living by art. Their idea of an artist was a person who was condemned to starvation.’ – Jacob Epstein

‘When you have parents that come from a country that you weren’t raised in, you feel this weird sense of familiarity, like you’ve returned to something.’ – Roy Choi

‘I like my life. I’ve had a good life. I think the reason is my parents taught me that life is a burden. But if you take it one day at a time, it’s an easy burden.’ – Andrew Young

‘I was mortified by my parents – what they did, who they were, everything. I hated who I was. I hated everything, and I would live in a fantasy world and try to be different. But that’s not a lot different, I think, than a lot of kids.’ – Amy Hill

‘My parents were ballet dancers, and I did a lot of ballet, too, so I think I learned quite early on how to hold my body. Although I do recall desperately wishing I was shorter at school.’ – Elizabeth Debicki

‘My parents wanted to light my artistic candle. But over time, the definition of ‘the arts’ began to stretch. And as I got older, they suddenly realized, Oh, my God, we’re the parents of Iggy Pop.’ – Iggy Pop

‘The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.’ – Maya Angelou

‘If you want to understand your parents more, get them to talk about their own childhood; and if you listen with compassion, you will learn where their fears and rigid patterns come from. Those people who ‘did all that stuff to you’ were just as frightened and scared as you are.’ – Louise L. Hay

‘No matter where they live or how much money their parents make, every child deserves access to high-quality health care.’ – Sara Gideon

‘My dad is a lawyer and my mom is an artist. So growing up was exactly what it sounds like – strict household but a lot of creativity. They are so psyched that I get to make music for a living. My parents rule.’ – Ty Segall

‘The love and passion I had for the game was my key. I never had that taken out of me by my parents or a silly coach.’ – Bobby Orr

‘But we might be talking about a significant percentage of parents that have questions about vaccines – and we need to answer them. We need to give them the scientifically based, credible answer.’ – Theresa Tam

‘The first thing I do every morning is make my bed. It’s a habit I’m sure my parents wish I had picked up as a teenager instead of as an adult!’ – Andi Dorfman

‘You didn’t have a choice about the parents you inherited, but you do have a choice about the kind of parent you will be.’ – Marian Wright Edelman

‘My parents were just constantly affirming me in everything that I did. Late at night, I’d wake up and hear my mother talking over my bed, saying, ‘You’re going to do great on this test. You can do anything you want.” – Stephen Covey

‘I know I want to have children while my parents are still young enough to take care of them.’ – Rita Rudner

‘At some point, you realize your parents are human. They make the best decisions they can with the options available to them.’ – Cory Monteith

‘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

‘Sibling rivalry was, and still is to this day, rampant in my family. We were all competing for my parents’ divided attention.’ – Janine di Giovanni

‘When I was 10, my parents really valued success in the arts, and I thought if I was a famous ‘something artistic,’ that they would love me more.’ – Sia

‘The problem with children is that you have to put up with their parents.’ – Charles de Lint

‘I never learned music. I’m quite uneducated, and usually I sat in front of the TV, with soap operas on, in England. It was very inspiring for me, I’d done all this traveling around, I came back living with my parents, everyone around me was like they’re living in a soap opera.’ – Graham Parker

‘More than ever, we as parents and a nation must do something about the growth of obesity in our children. We must do more than just talk, we must be concerned enough to act.’ – Lee Haney

‘My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts; my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel.’ – Chinua Achebe

‘This is what a family is all about – one another, sitting around the table at night. And it’s very, very important, I think, for the kid to spend time not only around the table eating with their parents, but in the kitchen.’ – Jacques Pepin

‘My grandparents – both of my mother’s parents – were actors, and they ran the Reading Repertory Theatre Company, through the town of Reading, where I come from.’ – Kate Winslet

‘Parents shouldn’t assume children are made out of sugar candy and will break and collapse instantly. Kids don’t. We do.’ – Maurice Sendak

‘My parents got divorced when I was really young.’ – Robert Downey Sr.

‘Gradually, football has seen its appeal slip at the most basic levels. Pediatricians are advising parents not to let young children play organized football too early in life.’ – Charlie Pierce

‘I’m a war baby: I was brought up with rationing, and my parents always had to struggle. I remember when I was sent to boarding school – Prior Park College in Bath – my father was asked how he was going to pay the fees, and he replied: ‘In arrears.” – Cameron Mackintosh

‘I was born in Somalia, which is in East Africa. My parents started with nothing: poor, poor, poor. They eloped, which was unheard of in my country, when my father was 17 and my mother was 14.’ – Iman

‘When a man and a woman have an overwhelming passion for each other, it seems to me, in spite of such obstacles dividing them as parents or husband, that they belong to each other in the name of Nature, and are lovers by Divine right, in spite of human convention or the laws.’ – Nicolas Chamfort

‘I was actually supposed to be a basketball player, not an actress. My parents had me playing basketball on competitive teams when I was in kindergarten. Even though my heart belongs to the arts, I’m a tomboy at heart, too.’ – Zendaya

‘I was raised by my mom. My dad was always traveling, but she allowed me and encouraged me to be close to my dad. So I grew up with three parents: my mom, my dad and my stepmom. Ninety percent of the time I was with my mom, and 10 percent was with my dad.’ – Brian J. White

‘My mortal Guru was my Irish-Christian brother who taught me how to do everything and gave me my moral values. My spiritual Guru are my parents.’ – Victor Banerjee

‘I had a mini-breakdown and had to move back in with my parents. But then I got a great therapist and it saved my life.’ – Miquita Oliver

‘Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication.’ – James Merrill

‘Before the child ever gets to school it will have received crucial, almost irrevocable sex education and this will have been taught by the parents, who are not aware of what they are doing.’ – Mary Calderone

‘The success we are seeing in Connecticut’s education system is credited to the amazing teachers, faculty, staff, volunteers, and parents who dedicate themselves to the next generation of students.’ – Ned Lamont

‘My parents were incredibly strict. My father went through a stage where he’d line us up every Friday and cane our hands if we’d been naughty. And this was mainly to pull my brother into line. My brother is five years older and my sister’s eight years older. He would use a little bamboo cane, which my brother saw most of.’ – Toyah Willcox

‘Parents look at me like I’m somebody pretty important, and say, We were raised on your characters, and now we’re enjoying them all over again with our children.’ – Joseph Barbera

‘My parents taught me never to judge others based on whom they love, what color their skin is, or their religion.’ – Taylor Swift

‘I did a lot of acting when I was a child. I was very shy – the kind of kid who ran into a corner and cried on parents’ visiting day.’ – Adrienne Shelly

‘It’s very important for the parents of young autistic children to encourage them to talk, or for those that don’t talk, to give them a way of communicating, like a picture board, where they can point to a glass of milk, or a jacket if they’re cold, or the bathroom. If they want something, then they need to learn to request that thing.’ – Temple Grandin

‘On Halloween, the parents sent their kids out looking like me.’ – Rodney Dangerfield

‘My dad was an absentee dad, so it was always important to me that I was part of my daughter’s life, and she deserved two parents, which is part of the rationale behind us staying married for 30 years.’ – Samuel L. Jackson

‘Prenatal education can only be an unconscious result of what the parents, particularly the mother, do. If, until the child is born, the mother acts in such a way that she expresses what is morally and intellectually correct, then what she accomplishes in her own continuing education will transfer to the child.’ – Rudolf Steiner

‘Southall Broadway, in west London, has been a constant part of my life from the day I arrived in England as a baby from Kenya in 1962. My parents rented a room in one of the terraces off the Broadway, and I’ve seen it change from an ordinary English high street to what is now ‘Little India.’ with a confident Asian community.’ – Gurinder Chadha

‘In our house, Mother’s Day is every day. Father’s Day, too. In our house, parents count. They do important work and that work matters. One day just doesn’t cut for us.’ – Margaret Heffernan

‘Parents and teachers, learn to listen, then listen to learn from children.’ – Russell M. Nelson

‘I was writing full time after quitting a job as a high school English teacher, and I hadn’t been able to sell anything, and my bank account was down to zero, and all of my friends were like ‘What are you doing in the basement, when are you going to get a real job?’, and my parents thought I’d completely lost it.’ – Matthew Quick

‘My parents came here from Colombia during a time of great instability there. Escaping a dire economic situation at home, they moved to New Jersey, where they had friends and family, seeking a better life, and then moved to Boston after I was born.’ – Diane Guerrero

‘While all old people have been young, no young people have been old, and this troubling fact engenders the frustration of all parents and elders, which is that while you can describe your experience, you cannot confer it.’ – Andrew Solomon

‘I miss my parents a lot. I obviously don’t see them loads anyway because they live up north. But knowing that they’re only a couple of hours away is a lot different than knowing that they’re 12 hours away.’ – Harry Styles

‘Movies were, to me, like a way out. It was an escape valve. I remember having my parents drop me off at movies all the time.’ – Mike Patton

‘I was ten years old in 1969, and while we lived in Arizona that year, I spent most of the summer staying with family friends in Portland, Oregon while my parents visited Spain. It was an adventure all around.’ – Patrick Nielsen Hayden

‘I think happiness comes from self-acceptance. We all try different things, and we find some comfortable sense of who we are. We look at our parents and learn and grow and move on. We change.’ – Jamie Lee Curtis

‘Trees Lounge is based on my own life. Both my parents like the movie. My father, of course, thinks it’s a masterpiece.’ – Steve Buscemi

‘Kids and adults have a difference of opinion when it comes to what constitutes legitimate reading. Adults often push books that they loved as children, which, ironically, were often books that their parents weren’t particularly keen on.’ – Jeff Kinney

‘One of the greatest features of science is that it doesn’t matter where you were born, and it doesn’t matter what the belief systems of your parents might have been: If you perform the same experiment that someone else did, at a different time and place, you’ll get the same result.’ – Neil deGrasse Tyson

‘The people I see be the most successful are the people who have an inner confidence and an inner strength that comes from the character they display away from the stage and from what their parents taught them.’ – Annaleigh Ashford

‘My dad was young; he went to work. But he’d been to war. He’d seen some of the world. It wasn’t like he was going to be an extensive traveler or something. It didn’t seem to be in his nature or in the nature of his parents or many of the folks in my family, really.’ – Bruce Springsteen

‘There is a growing acceptance and interest in publicly funded school choice as a catalyst for education reform in general and a way to empower parents to be education reformers.’ – John T. Walton

‘Before the war, my parents were very proud people. They’d always talk about Japan and also about the samurai and things like that. Right after Pearl Harbor, they were just real quiet. They kept to themselves; they were afraid to talk about what could happen. I assume they knew that nothing good would come out of it.’ – Fred Korematsu

‘I have a vision of education that spans from early childhood to K-12 to college to the workforce. Because every step along the way is important: a chance for our state to do right by our kids and their parents – or to let them down.’ – Laura Kelly

‘My parents are private investigators for God’s sake.’ – Miranda Lambert

‘When I told my parents that I wanted to be an actor, they were like, ‘How can you be an actor? You have to go out and interact with people! You hardly talk to our relatives!” – Tripti Dimri

‘I would definitely say I have my head on straight, but that’s due to my parents.’ – Davante Adams

‘My parents’ divorce made an important change in my life. It affected me. After that, when I can’t play Wimbledon, it was tough. For one month I was outside the world.’ – Rafael Nadal

‘I think my parents were high when they named me.’ – Jolene Blalock

‘Somewhere it is written that parents who are critical of other people’s children and publicly admit they can do better are asking for it.’ – Erma Bombeck

‘I had very strict parents, I could never go outside or go to parties.’ – Cardi B

‘I went to Marymount College in New York City with a lot of kids whose parents paid their way, and I wouldn’t even have thought of asking my parents – they couldn’t afford it, not with six kids!’ – Moira Kelly

‘My parents know how passionate I’ve always been about acting. I convinced them this was something that I was going to put my heart and soul into.’ – Alexander Ludwig

‘My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families – second families, perhaps I should say.’ – Abraham Lincoln

‘I love Christmas. I’m really sentimental about it. My parents made it awesome for us, and we were allowed to be kids for a long time.’ – Michael Buble

‘When I was little, I knew that I was not adopted, but I actually imagined and hoped that I was – and that my real parents were going to come get me.’ – Gloria Steinem

‘Midwest kids got to summer camp. There is something very special about being away from your parents for the first time, sleeping under the stars, hiking and canoeing.’ – Jami Gertz

‘Miles Davis, his parents migrated from Arkansas to Illinois, where he had the luxury of being able to practice for hours upon hours. He never would have been able to do that in the cotton country of Arkansas.’ – Isabel Wilkerson

‘From their teenage years on, children are considerably more capable of causing parents unhappiness than bringing them happiness. That is one reason parents who rely on their children for happiness make both their children and themselves miserable.’ – Dennis Prager

‘My parents were South Korean immigrants who came to America in the early 80s for the hope of a better life for their children.’ – Jonny Kim

‘Half the bloody world is going through a divorce; more than that are having children. All of us have parents who are dying or have died. It’s just the life cycle.’ – Sarah McLachlan

‘Parents, however old they and we may grow to be, serve among other things to shield us from a sense of our doom. As long as they are around, we can avoid the fact of our mortality; we can still be innocent children.’ – Jane Howard

‘My parents separated before I was 1 year old. I moved in with my aunt and uncle when I was in fourth grade. I was, like, 8 or 9 years old. I was getting in a lot of trouble when I was in Southern California. My older sisters were in gangs. My older brother was in gangs.’ – Troy Polamalu

‘I was nervous to even talk to other kids in my class. I would hide in my room when my parents had people over.’ – Brie Larson

‘I tell people I went to ‘Beverly Hills 90210′ for high school, and everyone associates it with rich people, but you don’t have to be a rich kid to go there. It was weird – my parents didn’t raise me like that.’ – Camila Morrone

‘I worked with my parents on the stage in production numbers since I was 4, but I never really gave much thought to being a performer on my own until I was 12 or 13.’ – Helen Reddy

‘When your parents regulate everything you hear and everything you intake, it forces you to get creative in other ways. It sparked the writing bug and the very overactive imagination. Because I’ve had a lot of time by myself and a lot of time isolated from regular culture, I created my own.’ – SZA

‘My grandmother really inspires me. I lived with her until halfway through middle school, since both my parents worked a lot.’ – Jeongyeon

‘It is long overdue for parents to realize they have the right and duty to protect our children against the intolerant evolutionists.’ – Phyllis Schlafly

‘I am an American citizen born in Kuwait of Egyptian parents. I grew up in Great Britain, Malaysia, and Egypt and have lived in the United States since 1965, when I was seventeen.’ – Feisal Abdul Rauf

‘When you were growing up, your mom and dad told you to look both ways before crossing the street or not to get into a car with a stranger. It’s the same with the Internet. We have a big responsibility and a huge role in bringing all the stakeholders to the table – users, parents, educators, law enforcement, government organisations.’ – Chris DeWolfe

‘It’s hard to explain to my parents what’s going on. You can’t compare Hollywood with Cuba. I didn’t even know I could dream this.’ – Ana de Armas

‘Our children need to remember to love each other, how to honor each other, their parents, God, and their neighbors.’ – Alveda King

‘I’ve always taken apart calculators and anything I can get my hands on when I was younger. When I was around 12 – like, 6th grade – my parents always had around Mac computers because my mom is a teacher. So I’d always be playing around with all the crazy applications and making banners and printing things out and always into graphic design.’ – iJustine

‘I grew up in Brooklyn, and my parents were Holocaust survivors, so they never taught me anything about nature, but they taught me a lot about gratitude.’ – Louie Schwartzberg

‘My parents are proud to be Canadian, as I am. They had a lot to do with my success and sacrificed a lot over the years.’ – Daniel Nestor

‘Growing up watching WWE, they used to have bra-and-panties matches or pillow fights, and that’s why my mom didn’t want me to watch wrestling. But when my parents divorced, I was able to watch wrestling again, and that’s when I started to really get into wrestlers like Ivory.’ – Bayley

‘It didn’t matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.’ – Jhumpa Lahiri

‘Like all parents, my husband and I just do the best we can, hold our breath and hope we’ve set aside enough money for our kid’s therapy.’ – Michelle Pfeiffer

‘My mother was this White woman from Texas, from a racist town raised to believe in the inferiority of others by her community, not necessarily by her parents, but certainly by the community around her. And she fled it.’ – Maya Wiley

‘I watched a lot of soap operas like ‘General Hospital’ and ‘Days Of Our Lives.’ When it came to movies, my parents were quite strict. They would watch ‘Flash Dance’ but wouldn’t let us see the whole film because Jennifer Beals’ character was a stripper. It was so funny when I finally saw the whole film. I thought she was a ballerina!’ – Rachel McAdams

‘The parents who read with their children and fill their houses with books produce the highest achievers.’ – Michael Rosen

‘My parents wanted to be actors. They tried for years but didn’t get anywhere. Then Mum got pregnant with me and they decided to make actors out of their children. You need your parents’ support if you’re going to do it. Otherwise who’s going to ferry you to castings?’ – Honeysuckle Weeks

‘I was born in the summer of 1970, the last of five boys stretched over eight years. My parents were a struggling young couple who had been married one afternoon under a shade tree by a preacher without a church. No guests or fancy dress, just the two of them, lost in love, and the preacher taking a break from working on a house.’ – Charles M. Blow

‘Among the other values children should be taught are respect for others, beginning with the child’s own parents and family; respect for the symbols of faith and the patriotic beliefs of others; respect for law and order; respect for the property of others; respect for authority.’ – James E. Faust

‘With immigrant parents, they’ve had to sacrifice so much to survive, and they’re trying to preserve the culture they lost, so there are just so many boundaries.’ – Rupi Kaur

‘Ring up your parents and ring up your kids and tell them that you love them.’ – Stephen Daldry

‘Parents need all the help they can get. The strongest as well as the most fragile family requires a vital network of social supports.’ – Bernice Weissbourd

‘Occasionally I’ve seen children become heavy-handed and insensitive when dealing with their aging parents, and it only caused resentment and hard feelings.’ – Billy Graham

‘Like the Caribbean Windrush generation, my parents came to this country from the Commonwealth in the 1960s. They, too, came to help rebuild this country and offer all that they had.’ – Sajid Javid

‘My parents were definitely encouraging with creativity.’ – Yung Lean

‘My first memories of music are of my mother playing Dominican music in the house because my parents love to dance. They love to throw parties and dance, so there was a lot Latin music in the house.’ – Cyrille Aimee

‘In the ’80s, we were living in the U.S.S.R., where anti-Semitism was a deeply ingrained part of the culture. Being a Jewish person in the Soviet Union was not easy. Not that I remember any of that – I was barely old enough to chew back then – but for my parents, both Uzbekistan-born Jews, life was a struggle.’ – Milana Vayntrub

‘Ours was a very progressive Protestant family, but my parents were God-loving rather than God-fearing. We went to church, and I still go with my mum and dad when I return home – it’s a family thing. I played flute in my dad’s marching band, but I had an integrated upbringing. We had a lot of Catholic friends.’ – James Nesbitt

‘Most parents have long understood that kids don’t have the judgment, the maturity, the impulse control and insight necessary to make complicated lifelong decisions.’ – Bryan Stevenson

‘When I was a little child, my parents taught me by example to pray. I began with a picture in my mind of Heavenly Father being far away. As I have matured, my experience with prayer has changed. The picture in my mind has become one of a Heavenly Father who is close by, who is bathed in a bright light, and who knows me perfectly.’ – Henry B. Eyring

‘My parents were an ordinary East End family and very supportive – they would have supported me no matter what I wanted to do.’ – Matthew Bourne

‘I have a great relationship with my parents. I have not been on lithium.’ – Zach Braff

‘I grew up Mormon. I wasn’t really Mormon, my parents were.’ – Ryan Gosling

‘My parents are just really down-to-earth, earnest, hardworking people that don’t want for anything. I think that really served me because when you put more value on experience than things, then you’re going to go out and have experiences.’ – Carrie Coon

‘Parents – especially step-parents – are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don’t fulfill the promise of their early years.’ – Anthony Powell

‘In today’s world, everyone’s so clued into their iPhones, and communication is going by the wayside as far as one-on-one is concerned. It’s very seldom that I walk into a room and parents make their children say hello and have a social grace with one another.’ – Phyllis Smith

‘Actually, I had a lot of good people with me – my mother’s sister did a lot of taking care of me, and I suppose I got more attention than my stepbrothers because at least I got to travel with my parents.’ – Julie Andrews

‘I’ve found it easier to write, to coalesce my thoughts, since having children. It brings you back to what you experienced yourself as a child, and you empathize with what your parents went through.’ – Jill Hennessy

‘I want to prove that you don’t have to come from Oxford University or Rada – and you don’t have to have parents that support you – to succeed.’ – Samantha Morton

‘Parents should live for their children, not through them.’ – Bebe Buell

‘My parents and grandparents listened to bacheta heavy, the true bachata from back in the day – Juan Luis Guerra, Anthony Santos. I liked the genre, but I remember thinking, ‘OK, enough of this.’ I would sing Usher’s ‘U Remind Me’ to the girls in school.’ – Prince Royce

‘When they asked Jack Benny to do something for the Actor’s Orphanage – he shot both his parents and moved in.’ – Bob Hope

‘Good parents, who are able to maintain the affection and respect of their children and whose offspring admire them and value their good opinion, can be reasonably certain that their values and ways of socialized behaving will be adopted by the next generation.’ – Caterina Fake

‘I started karate in middle school when my parents wanted me to babysit my younger brother. He was a little troublemaker, so they wanted me to make sure the class was going okay. I ended up being way more into it than my brother.’ – Karen Fukuhara

‘It is our duty, as parents and as teachers, to give all children the space to build their emotional strength and provide a strong foundation for their future.’ – Kate Middleton

‘I’m not a musician, I can’t read music, but I came from a family of music fans. Not mad music fans, but people who like music. Both of my parents can play the piano. They were very good dancers, which I am not.’ – Robert Christgau

‘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

‘My parents think I’m better under pressure.’ – Tori Amos

‘As a child, I always enjoyed – my parents used to have these little cocktail parties – and I always loved trying to get the adults to tell me things they weren’t supposed to say. And in many ways, that’s what my job is today; it’s getting people to tell me things that they probably are otherwise not supposed to say.’ – Andrew Ross Sorkin

‘I wish my parents hadn’t made me feel that how I looked was linked to how much they loved me. But I do also see how hard it must be to see your child pile on the pounds and trust they’ll find their own way back to a healthy weight.’ – Arabella Weir

‘We live in a very different world than the one that we inherited from our parents and from our grandparents. Times are changing, and states must adapt to win.’ – Martin O’Malley

‘I think we forget that part of parenthood means having to face and reject or face and embrace a kind of animal capacity for unkindness. And if, when, parents do embrace that, it reveals something very ugly to oneself.’ – Karyn Kusama

‘I was raised into the Romanian Orthodox culture by my parents, and most notably my mother, who is a profoundly religious and spiritual woman.’ – Dominique Moceanu

‘My parents did not have any interest in music.’ – Maurice Jarre

‘Wherever I look, I see signs of the commandment to honor one’s parents and nowhere of a commandment that calls for the respect of a child.’ – Alice Miller

‘Parents should keep ‘Eyes Wide Open’ next to the ‘Kinsey Report’ on their shelves.’ – Paul Fleischman

‘Both of our children are adopted, and my wife and I didn’t go out of ways to find kids that looked like us. We were just happy to have some kids. And people tell me all the time that they look like us, and that’s because they learn to smile and laugh and move their head a certain way from studying their parents’ faces.’ – John Wells

‘Those who do not cherish affection for their parents, spouses and children and for their homes, villages and workplaces cannot love their country and fellow people; they can never become genuine patriots.’ – Kim Jong-un

‘My parents had always preached the virtues of hard work. But hard work is one thing; economic struggle is another.’ – Sargent Shriver

‘My parents didn’t really understand too much about sport. At that time, we were in a Polish community in the inner city of Chicago, and I was the youngest of a bunch of cousins. Polish families are real big, with cousins and aunts and uncles.’ – Mike Krzyzewski

‘As a child, the family that I had and the love I had from my two parents allowed me to go ahead and be more aggressive, to search and to take risks knowing that, if I failed, I could always come home to a family of love and support.’ – Tiger Woods

‘I thoroughly enjoy my children’s birthdays, despite the fact their parties are an apocalyptic mix of hall-booking, Nerf-gun-hiring, refreshment-organising and talking to parents whose names you’ve forgotten.’ – Romesh Ranganathan

‘If dysfunction means that a family doesn’t work, then every family ambles into some arena in which that happens, where relationships get strained or even break down entirely. We fail each other or disappoint each other. That goes for parents, siblings, kids, marriage partners – the whole enchilada.’ – Mary Karr

‘Believe it or not, we will actually be better and happier workers if we are allowed to be better parents. We might even rediscover our capacity for fun.’ – Anne-Marie Slaughter

‘When I first saw a picture of the crucifixion, I lost respect for my parents. I suddenly realised that this is what the adult world is like – full of cruelty and hypocrisy.’ – Vivienne Westwood

‘Survival is something I’ve always managed. To be fair, my parents did the first 16 years without any input from me. I ploughed through many a KitKat, but it was their insistence on vegetables and coats that kept me alive.’ – Sarah Millican

‘When my parents died, they both were 47, and they died of complications of different diseases, one being diabetes. I became a diabetic at 17 and went on this road of kind of self-destruction, eating-wise, until I was 40.’ – Stephen Furst

‘The fate of a child is in the hands of his parents.’ – Shinichi Suzuki

‘In this filmy world, you will have success today but may not have it tomorrow. But if you are prepared to face the challenge it throws, that’s when you should venture in this industry. I was ready for this and had all sorts of support from my parents.’ – Armaan Malik

‘My parents used to play me this album when I couldn’t go to sleep. It was called ‘Deep Forest.’ I think it was a self-titled record. It’s actually still one of my favorite albums of all time.’ – Flume

‘My parents had to work hard, and I was always looking for a way to make it big – for their sakes as well as my own.’ – Tiny Tim

‘It’s always good to be home and see the parents, and hit up my favorite Chinatown cafes for curry chicken rice.’ – Guy Sebastian

‘I realize that there’s a whole generation of kids out there like me who are totally disregarding the moral values taught to us by our parents.’ – Tommy Morrison

‘Mum and I have always been close. Her adoptive parents died when she was 18, and she doesn’t have any other kids, so I’m her only family. She lives life to the full, and I envy her vitality. She has pink hair and is a younger spirit than me.’ – Jacob Anderson

‘With divisive curriculum such as Critical Race Theory being taught in schools, and parents who are expressing concerns about curriculum and policy being treated as domestic terrorists by government agencies, it’s critically important to protect parents’ rights to transparency regarding their child’s education.’ – Nicole Malliotakis

‘It just seemed too weird to me. I don’t know, maybe they were smoking a joint in the car downstairs from their parents’ apartment. I had to go that far to put together a scenario of how they could have possibly recognized me.’ – Marc Jacobs

‘I don’t miss anything by being a bachelor. I don’t know any happily married couples, not even my parents.’ – Lemmy

‘My parents taught me the importance of telling the truth no matter what.’ – Marley Dias

‘Not that we didn’t have close relationships with our parents – I’m very close to my mom – but parents didn’t think anything of going off for a few weeks and leaving their kids.’ – Candice Bergen

‘Our parents set the moral tone of the family. They expected more of some of us and less of others, but never less than they thought we were capable of.’ – Sam Levenson

‘My parents are hard nuts. Especially my Dad. He never wanted me to struggle and he always wanted me to fight my own battles. He would never give me the easy option or the easy route.’ – Nicolas Hamilton

‘We’re parents first, and once you have kids, everybody knows that you have priority lists. Number one is your family and everything else just kind of finds its place.’ – Tim McGraw

‘A lot of children, like I did, move away from words because of the fear – which is something you have to take out of education: the fear of worrying about what marks you’ll get, detention, worrying about letting people down, your parents, teachers.’ – Michael Morpurgo

‘Before I ever acted as an amateur – which I did a great deal at school and at university – I used to go to the theater with my parents in the north of England, where I was born and brought up… Theater of all sorts.’ – Ian Mckellen

‘I’m very proud of the way that I was raised, I’m very proud of the way that my parents raised me.’ – Nikki Haley

‘My mum and dad were a little like tiger parents. I hate that, but at the same time, I am a little bit proud.’ – Takashi Murakami

‘I think our families or parents were trying to do best by us by telling us, ‘Do what you love.’ On an existential level, they might have done their best by us, but I think, in terms of the reality principle, maybe less so.’ – Alissa Quart

‘I guess that’s one of the things about growing up in the fifties – it never occurred to me that you wouldn’t be at least as successful as your parents.’ – Hunter S. Thompson

‘Because my parents are Muslim, there’s no doubt they wished I would marry someone Muslim.’ – Konnie Huq

‘I think my mother is my biggest influence. There are so many things I hate about her but at the same time I’m thankful for her. All I know is that when I’m a parent I want to be just like my mom. I can talk to my mom more than any of my friends could talk to their parents.’ – Nikki Reed

‘My parents always taught me that my day job would never make me rich; it’d be my homework.’ – Daymond John

‘I was around nine when a babysitter snuck ‘Who’s Next’ onto the turntable. The parents were gone. The windows shook. The shelves were rattling. Rock & roll. That began an exploration into music that had soul, rebellion, aggression, affection.’ – Eddie Vedder

‘My dad is a civil engineer, and my mom is a stay-at-home mom. The fact that my parents weren’t really involved in music was kind of good, because it meant that I had something that was private and personal.’ – Lorde

‘I’m still Vanessa from the neighborhood. My parents own the shop, and I’m there all the time, that I worked in when I was a teenager. I have a child from my childhood sweetheart.’ – Vanessa Ferlito

‘I have God, Jesus Christ: I’m Christian. I try to stay as grounded as I possibly can. And I have my parents that help me and my friends that are really great accountability partners to me.’ – Christina Grimmie

‘My parents emigrated from Poland in 1924 with my brother, who was a few months old. They were from a simple family of Polish Jews. They were looking, I suppose, for a better economic life and were escaping from an anti-Semitic environment.’ – Francois Englert

‘It was like ‘Risky Business’ for 10 years. My parents were out of town, they left me a bunch of money, the car, and the house, and I didn’t know when they were coming home.’ – Jason Bateman

‘Not only was I the only black kid and the only poor kid, but my parents were transcendental meditation devotees, and I live in an ashram for a good portion of my childhood.’ – Aisha Tyler

‘Given the choice, children who don’t want for anything will not save… We have an obligation as parents to give our children what they need. What they want we can give them as a special gift, or they can save their money for it.’ – Barbara Coloroso

‘I’m not a divorce monger by any means, but if you’re not happy in a relationship, and you’ve grown apart, it’s not healthy for a couple to stay together. It’s better for kids to see two happy parents than two miserable parents.’ – Laura Wasser

‘However my parents – both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.’ – J. K. Rowling

‘My childhood was extremely unhappy. That’s not to say that my parents didn’t love me. But it was traumatic, and of course, art doesn’t come out of rosy gardens. It comes out of damage.’ – Sean Scully

‘Parents are the centre of a person’s solar system, even as an adult. My dad had a stronger gravitational pull than most, so his absence was bound to leave a deep and lasting void.’ – Justin Trudeau

‘I’m agnostic because I went through the usual process of parents insisting you go to church, and yet they didn’t. So there’s me, sitting in the chairs, thinking, ‘Jeez, why am I here? I’d rather be playing tennis, seriously.” – Ridley Scott

‘Well, I have a Norwegian father who emigrated to America in the 1950s, and he still speaks with varying degrees of an accent. Over my lifetime my ear has been well-tuned to that accent. Any first generation kid has that wonderful gift from their parents.’ – Christopher Heyerdahl

‘I did have a very advanced grandmother, my mother’s mother, who wanted to buy me a camera. My parents wouldn’t let her. Eventually she won, and I got a camera in about 1948, a Voigtlander.’ – Peter Beard

‘I’m obsessed with TV. How wrong our parents were when they said we should only watch an hour a day. Stop wasting your time reading books.’ – Jimmy Carr

‘Parents of young children should realize that few people, and maybe no one, will find their children as enchanting as they do.’ – Barbara Walters

‘Relationships with parents, grandparents, friends, and siblings were important to me when I was young and have remained so throughout my life. Our relationships with other people both shape and reflect who we are. These relationships are infinitely fascinating to explore!’ – Sharon Creech

‘According to my parents, I was supposed to have been a nice, churchgoing Swiss housewife. Instead I ended up an opinionated psychiatrist, author and lecturer in the American Southwest, who communicates with spirits from a world that I believe is far more loving and glorious than our own.’ – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

‘I never had any question that my parents loved me. I had a real sense of self confidence.’ – Jeannette Walls

‘Both my parents developed dementia in their old age. Everyone I know whose parents had dementia feel that they didn’t deal with it very well.’ – Tony Robinson

‘After a few months in my parents’ basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.’ – David Sedaris

‘Both my parents are English and came out to Australia in 1967. I was born the following year. My parents, and immigrants like them, were known as ‘¬£10 poms.’ Back then, the Australian government was trying to get educated British people and Canadians – to be honest, educated white people – to come and live in Australia.’ – Hugh Jackman

‘My parents were both storytellers. They always spoke with metaphorical richness.’ – Alice Walker

‘I’ve grown up with my parents’ music tastes, listening to Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones.’ – Saoirse Ronan

‘I watched my parents’ fame diminish – as I was getting more conscious, their celebrity was going back down the mountain.’ – Carrie Fisher

‘I remember the first time I ever showed my parents a song that I had written. The content may have been a little darker than they were used to, or really introspective in a way that may have been uncomfortable. I thought they’d retaliate with some kind of judgment or concern about whether I was feeling all right, but they were proud of it.’ – Tyler Joseph

‘My parents are Vietnamese refugees; they left Vietnam after the war. They were part of the boat people, and they ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand after being on the water for three days, and I was born at that refugee camp in Thailand.’ – Hong Chau

‘Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother’s Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents.’ – Anne Lamott

‘My parents often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and U.S. support for these policies.’ – Norman Finkelstein

‘I grew up remodeling houses with my parents, and I’ve started to do it again with some of my friends. So, I like to watch HGTV – ‘Love It or List It,’ ‘Property Brothers,’ ‘Flip or Flop.” – Sydney Sweeney

‘We all end up at least somewhat like our parents, especially in the way we deal with our children.’ – Benjamin Spock

‘Parents are like shuttles on a loom. They join the threads of the past with threads of the future and leave their own bright patterns as they go.’ – Fred Rogers

‘I wasn’t going to great schools, because my parents didn’t believe in public education. They wanted the education to be influenced by their religion, so I was going to these halfway education-slash-Christian schools that were like pop-up shop-style education.’ – Katy Perry

‘I’m lucky that I’ve never been bullied personally. There are always going to be kids who are mean and say stuff, but the people that matter to you – the people you love, like your parents, your siblings, and your friends – those are the people you should listen to.’ – Kendall Jenner

‘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

‘We want to gently remind people that we don’t have forever. In my work, I hear parents complain all the time that their children grow up so fast. But they don’t take the time to sit down and talk to each other. The last bastion of getting together is around the table.’ – Leo Buscaglia

‘It is commonly agreed that children spend more hours per year watching television than in the classroom, and far less in actual conversation with their parents.’ – Paul Weyrich

‘I should be careful to women, but I say, ‘I love you,’ a lot to my parents and people, whether they are men or women.’ – Kim Woo-bin

‘Face your front’ is a saying in my parents’ culture. ‘Face your front, don’t look left and don’t look right.’ Don’t be comparing yourself to everybody else, yeah? Follow your own journey.’ – Ncuti Gatwa

‘My three daughters are all going to go to college, and it’s not even a question. When I was applying to college, my parents were hoping that I would just go somewhere. Today, they look at their grandkids, and they know those kids will have a chance to build this country in bigger and better ways than my parents ever had a chance.’ – Xavier Becerra

‘I’ve inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because it was so palpable all the time while I was growing up, the sense of what my parents had sacrificed in moving to the United States, and yet at the same time, building a life here and all that that entailed.’ – Jhumpa Lahiri

‘Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave when they think that their children are naive.’ – Ogden Nash

‘I’ve always been very cautious with what I do. You know, that started at a young age. I always had the approach or the mentality I never wanted to embarrass my parents.’ – Derek Jeter

‘I have been knocked down so many times, as a player and as a person, and I have had the strength, I suppose that has come from my parents, to be able to pick myself each and every single time and go out there in the face of adversity and try my best and perform. I didn’t read it up in a book. It’s deep down and it’s part of my family trait.’ – Brian Lara

‘For me, picking a college was really difficult. I wish I had had my parents there kind of supervising me. But I chose well. I did OK.’ – Diane Guerrero

‘My parents used to do these little film festivals in our house where we’d watch all the Marx Brothers movies, or Chaplin movies, and a lot of westerns.’ – Alden Ehrenreich

‘Parents don’t reveal how often they have bitten their tongue, fought back the tears, or been too tired to take off their clothes after a day of childcare. The parent loves, but they do not expect the favour to be returned in any significant way.’ – Alain de Botton

‘There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student’s achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here’s what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.’ – Thomas Friedman

‘With every word we utter, with every action we take, we know our kids are watching us. We as parents are their most important role models.’ – Michelle Obama

‘I learned from my parents to revere nature. Their way of teaching my siblings and I to respect the environment was to be in it, and so we spent a great deal of time outdoors.’ – Deb Haaland

‘Koreans are ambitious, man. It means a lot to my parents that I do the work that I do and it has the visibility.’ – Sandra Oh

‘My parents are Dominican. I would always go to the Dominican Republic, and I fell in love with Bachata, which comes from the Dominican Republic.’ – Prince Royce

‘When you meet your kids, you realize that they deserve great parents. And then you have your marching orders, and you have to try and become the person that they deserve.’ – Ryan Gosling

‘Both my parents moved here from Argentina before I was born, so they were in a foreign country.’ – Camila Morrone

‘To all those mothers and fathers who are struggling with teen-agers, I say, just be patient: even though it looks like you can’t do anything right for a number of years, parents become popular again when kids reach 20.’ – Marian Wright Edelman

‘When I was around eleven or twelve, my board got hung up on the top of a bowl, and I got a concussion, and I knocked my teeth out. That was the first time that I got seriously injured, and I was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, and my parents briefly doubted.’ – Tony Hawk

‘Spanking and verbal criticism have become, to many parents, more important tools of child rearing than approval.’ – Phil Donahue

‘My parents were practicing Jews. My mother grew up in an orthodox synagogue, and after my grandfather died, she went to a conservative synagogue and a little later ended up in a reform synagogue. My father was in reform synagogues from the beginning.’ – Judith Butler

‘Our family was poor, but my parents gave us money for education.’ – Takashi Murakami

‘I’ve been thinking a lot about the journey of my parents – just seeing the sacrifices they’ve made to allow me to do what I do. How much of a difference their sacrifices have made through the generations.’ – Rupi Kaur

‘My parents both came to the United States from the Dominican Republic, and they were deeply grateful for the opportunities this country provided. They raised my siblings and me to want to make a difference and give back. They taught us to work hard and aim high, but to also make sure the ladder was down to help others climb up.’ – Tom Perez

‘My parents have been there for me, ever since I was about 7.’ – David Beckham

‘My mother’s parents died when I was quite young, so I would like to be able to go back and know those people as an adult.’ – Rachel McAdams

‘My parents were very supportive of me and my artistic endeavours. My father and mother came to every school play I ever did.’ – Jack Black

‘My parents, who were split up, were so good at keeping my environment strong and keeping everything around me not focused on the fact that we were poor. They got me culture. They took me to museums. They showed art to me. They read to me. And my mother drove two hours a day to take me to University Elementary School.’ – Leonardo DiCaprio

‘My parents’ relationship with Kolkata is so strong. Growing up, the absence of Kolkata was always present in our lives.’ – Jhumpa Lahiri

‘Counsel with your parents is a privilege at any age.’ – Russell M. Nelson

‘If you asked me, parents were supposed to affect the life of their child in such a way that the child grows up to be responsible, able to participate in life and in community.’ – Anne Lamott

‘Even my parents sort of went along with the assumption that they were a good couple, but they probably weren’t a very good couple.’ – Carrie Fisher

‘There was no entertainment industry at all in Spokane, Washington, where I was raised. When I was 12, this movie came to town randomly, and I begged my parents to let me audition.’ – Sydney Sweeney

‘I grew up cursing a lot. It felt natural. My parents told me to stop.’ – Adam Sandler

‘My parents were struggling actors who had a hard time getting work. That’s why I hesitated about getting into acting, I had seen them going through that.’ – Camila Morrone

‘Clearly this is a tough economic time, and a lot of families are hurting. So when we talk to parents, we talk about small changes for kids and things that don’t cost extra money. Like adding water and eliminating sugary drinks and sodas. That’s going to save money right there. Or adding a few more vegetables.’ – Michelle Obama

‘My parents came from the Kyushu Island in the Southern part of Japan to find work in Tokyo. So we could only afford to live downtown, in a low-income area. It was just by the river, and whenever a typhoon came around, we were under water up to, like, here. That’s the kind of place we lived in.’ – Takashi Murakami

‘My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father came and had a life in the United States one way and my mother had a different one, and I was very aware of those things. I continue to wonder about it, and I will continue to write about it.’ – Jhumpa Lahiri