Mother Quotes

"I found myself in a race with Mother Nature to play as much baseball as I could before she forced me to stop"

"You can't help but feel a little bit like a mother to the younger cast members"

"I was labeled a troublemaker, my mom an unfit mother, and I was not welcome anywhere"

"My mother was born in your state, Mr. Walter, and my mother was a Quaker, and my ancestors in the time of Washington baked bread for George Washington's troops when they crossed the Delaware, and my own father was a slave"

Paul Robeson, Actor

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

Marie Osmond, Musician

"You know, I don't play the race card a lot. I'm half-black, half-white, and I'm proud of - my skin is brown. The world sees me as a black man, but my mother didn't raise me as a black man. She didn't raise me as a white guy"

Shemar Moore, Actor

"I asked my mother could I have an instrument. She said, 'Well if you go out and save your money.' So I went and got - I made me a shine box. I went out and started shining shoes, and I'd bring whatever I made"

Ornette Coleman, Musician

"Without Khomeini, we would not be where we are. What a pity that, when pregnant with him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion"

Oriana Fallaci, Journalist

"When my children were born, I didn't have them baptized because I felt baptism was about erasing Original Sin - something the Church said children got from their mother - and I absolutely refused to believe women carry Original Sin"

Olympia Dukakis, Actress

"I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. I played their game, pretending. You have to deal with, you know, party people, KGB. Horrifying"

Mikhail Baryshnikov, Dancer

"I don't remember my mother ever playing with me. And she was a perfectly good mother. But she had to do the laundry and clean the house and do the grocery shopping"

Patricia Heaton, Actress

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

Thurgood Marshall, Judge

"Because wherever I am today, I still owe it to God and I owe it to two men - the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X and of course, two very special women, my mother and my wife"

Louis Farrakhan, Activist

"If necessity is the mother of invention, it's the father of cooperation. And we're cooperating like never before"

John Ashcroft, Public Servant

"If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?"

Milton Berle, Comedian

"When I was a kid, I'd kneel down at the side of my bed every night before I went to sleep, and my mother and I would say a Greek prayer to the Virgin Mary"

Olympia Dukakis, Actress

"It's the sense of what family is at the dinner table. It was the joy of knowing mother was in the kitchen making our favorite dish. I wish more people would do this and recall the joy of life"

Paul Prudhomme, Celebrity

"You're not famous until my mother has heard of you"

Jay Leno, Comedian

"My mother was the president of the PTA at every school I attended"

Vernon Jordan, Businessman

"I got a part as a chorus girl in a show called Every Sailor and I had fun doing it. Mother didn't really approve of it, through"

James Cagney, Actor

"My mother did movies from the New Wave, but I was quite shocked I didn't know much about that period. Bernado showed us film of the demonstrations of the time"

Eva Green, Actress

"The man in our society is the breadwinner; the woman has enough to do as the homemaker, wife and mother"

Dorothy Fields, Musician

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

Steve Harvey, Actor

"My parents had this relationship that was really terrifying. I mean, the level of hatred that they had, and the level of physical abuse - my mother would beat up my father, basically - and I think I was drawn to images on television that were bright and reflective"

Augusten Burroughs, Writer

"I've been going through photos of my mother, looking back on her life and trying to put it into context. Very few people age gracefully enough to be photographed through their aging"

Jamie Lee Curtis, Actress

"Sitting around the house playing the wife and mother is driving me crazy"

Patsy Cline, Musician

"There are no adequate substitutes for father, mother, and children bound together in a loving commitment to nurture and protect. No government, no matter how well-intentioned, can take the place of the family in the scheme of things"

Gerald R. Ford, President

"When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave"

Harriet Ann Jacobs, Writer

"My mother insisted that I have a normal upbringing"

James MacArthur, Actor

"But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns"

Harriet Ann Jacobs, Writer

"What a different world it was when I first sailed for Europe in 1930, with my mother, sister, and brother to spend six months abroad"

Gene Tierney, Actress

"My mother would not talk to me for weeks, would not stay under my roof for as long as I was married to Oleg"

Gene Tierney, Actress

"The economic dimension is very clear. I was at a dinner party, a mother got up, who's a very distinguished scientist, and said she had to get home and help her daughter with her homework. The two waiters, their faces changed. They were working their second jobs, they couldn't get home to help their kids with homework"

Donna Shalala, Public Servant

"I was aware of it, but I grew up in a very a-religious family. My mother never went to church, she never had any religious training or background. It was never a part of our social interaction"

Donald Johanson, Scientist

"I was given away. If your mother gives you away, you think everybody who comes into your life is going to give you away"

Eartha Kitt, Actress

"Terri and her mother arrived. She was obviously a dedicated stage mother because she was loaded down with camera equipment, looking like a Japanese tourist"

Audrey Meadows, Actress

"You know the passage where Scarlett voices her happiness that her mother is dead, so that she can't see what a bad girl Scarlett has become? Well, that's me"

Vivien Leigh, Actress

"If Terri was upset about how silly she would look, her mother was completely undone. Seems she wanted Terri in her full natural bloom, not with any blooming flower"

Audrey Meadows, Actress

"I'll be a wife and mother first, then First Lady"

Jackie Kennedy, First Lady

"An Editor becomes kind of your mother. You expect love and encouragement from an Editor"

Jackie Kennedy, First Lady

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