Quotes about parents
page 11

“I think that people imagine protocol and etiquette as some kind of great dragon that hovers behind the pageantries of the palace to pounce on you and eat you up if you aren't behaving as you should. But in fact etiquette is saying how to do when you meet people, saying good night to your parents before going to bed, opening a door to a woman, getting up if an older person wants to sit down on the bus and it's all full, that is etiquette, or protocol, if you wish. At the everyday level, all the time, all of us. It's a way of knowing what you've got to do so that you have your mind free to do other things and think of other things.”

Margrethe II of Denmark (1940) Queen of Denmark

Television documentary 'Queen Margrethe of Denmark', BBC & Jørgen Bonfils, 31:30, 28 April 1974.
Protocol

People, Way, Imagination, Thinking

“It’s good to be 18. For a long time I felt like I was fighting my age, like I was constantly trying to prove to people that I was a savvy peer, and I felt them viewing me as a kid. I was a cocky kid, and I felt like I was an adult at, like, 9, you know? I think that’s because my parents always treated me as an adult.”

Ezra Miller (1992) American actor

Interview, Interview Magazine, 2010 http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/ezra-miller/#_

People, Age, Thinking, Time

“I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

The Crosswicks Journal, The Irrational Season (1977)

Love, God

“Have you ever wondered, perhaps, why opinions which the majority of people quite naturally hold are, if anyone dares express them publicly, denounced as 'controversial, 'extremist', 'explosive', 'disgraceful', and overwhelmed with a violence and venom quite unknown to debate on mere political issues? It is because the whole power of the aggressor depends upon preventing people from seeing what is happening and from saying what they see.

The most perfect, and the most dangerous, example of this process is the subject miscalled, and deliberately miscalled, 'race'. The people of this country are told that they must feel neither alarm nor objection to a West Indian, African and Asian population which will rise to several millions being introduced into this country. If they do, they are 'prejudiced', 'racialist'... A current situation, and a future prospect, which only a few years ago would have appeared to everyone not merely intolerable but frankly incredible, has to be represented as if welcomed by all rational and right-thinking people. The public are literally made to say that black is white. Newspapers like the Sunday Times denounce it as 'spouting the fantasies of racial purity' to say that a child born of English parents in Peking is not Chinese but English, or that a child born of Indian parents in Birmingham is not English but Indian. It is even heresy to assert the plain fact that the English are a white nation. Whether those who take part know it or not, this process of brainwashing by repetition of manifest absurdities is a sinister and deadly weapon. In the end, it renders the majority, who are marked down to be the victims of violence or revolution or tyranny, incapable of self-defence by depriving them of their wits and convincing them that what they thought was right is wrong. The process has already gone perilously far, when political parties at a general election dare not discuss a subject which results from and depends on political action and which for millions of electors transcends all others in importance; or when party leaders can be mesmerised into accepting from the enemy the slogans of 'racialist' and 'unChristian' and applying them to lifelong political colleagues...

In the universities, we are told that education and the discipline ought to be determined by the students, and that the representatives of the students ought effectively to manage the institutions. This is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but it is nonsense which it is already obligatory for academics and journalists, politicians and parties, to accept and mouth upon pain of verbal denunciation and physical duress.

We are told that the economic achievement of the Western countries has been at the expense of the rest of the world and has impoverished them, so that what are called the 'developed' countries owe a duty to hand over tax-produced 'aid' to the governments of the undeveloped countries. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but it is nonsense with which the people of the Western countries, clergy and laity, but clergy especially—have been so deluged and saturated that in the end they feel ashamed of what the brains and energy of Western mankind have done, and sink on their knees to apologise for being civilised and ask to be insulted and humiliated.

Then there is the 'civil rights' nonsense. In Ulster we are told that the deliberate destruction by fire and riot of areas of ordinary property is due to the dissatisfaction over allocation of council houses and opportunities for employment. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but that has not prevented the Parliament and government of the United Kingdom from undermining the morale of civil government in Northern Ireland by imputing to it the blame for anarchy and violence.

Most cynically of all, we are told, and told by bishops forsooth, that communist countries are the upholders of human rights and guardians of individual liberty, but that large numbers of people in this country would be outraged by the spectacle of cricket matches being played here against South Africans. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but that did not prevent a British Prime Minister and a British Home Secretary from adopting it as acknowledged fact.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

The "enemy within" speech during the 1970 general election campaign; speech to the Turves Green Girls School, Northfield, Birmingham (13 June 1970), from Still to Decide (Eliot Right Way Books, 1972), pp. 36-37.
1970s

Pain, People, World, Education

“I'm not sure, but I think I might be an adult…. Someone the other day told me I should act more like one, but I don't even know what it is. What's an adult? I blame it on my parents; they caught it before I was even born. When I break things now I have to pay for them. I rarely get cake at parties anymore. When people give me sheets of paper I'm not supposed to draw on 'em. I'm just supposed to put the letters of my name on a line. Where's the fun in that? People get funny when I say the obvious, like "you've got a big nose." All of a sudden I'm supposed to know about the weather. And have plans! I even checked on the internet and no one's working on a cure. I'm not sure I like it.”

Ze Frank (1972) American online performance artist

http://www.zefrank.com/wiki/index.php/the_show:_06-06-06
"The Show" (www.zefrank.com/theshow/)

People, Thinking, Drawing, Weather

“Above all, you must constantly train your mind to be loving, compassionate, and filled with Bodhicitta. You must give up eating meat, for it is very wrong to eat the flesh of our parent sentient beings.”

Shabkar Tsokdruk Rangdrol (1781–1851) Tibetan Buddhist yogi and poet

The Life of Shabkar: The Autobiography of a Tibetan Yogin, translated by Matthieu Ricard (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 541 https://books.google.it/books?id=IA1VhyLNIccC&pg=PA541.

Love, Training

“If parents would only realize how they bore their children!”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Episode I
1910s, Misalliance (1910)

Children

“Demanding an “ape-man” is actually just as silly as asking to see a mammal-man, or a half-human, half-vertebrate. How about a half dachshund, half dog? It’s the same thing. One may as well insist on seeing a town half way between Los Angeles and California. Because the problem with bridging the gap between humans and apes is that there is no gap because humans are apes –definitely and definitively. The word, “ape” doesn’t refer to a species, but to a parent category of collective species, and we’re included. This is no arbitrary classification like the creationists use. It was first determined via meticulous physical analysis by Christian scientists a century before Darwin, and has been confirmed in recent years with new revelations in genetics. Furthermore, it is impossible to define all the characters exclusively indicative of every known member of the family of apes without describing our own genera as one among them. Consequently, we can and have proven that humans are apes in exactly the same way that lions are cats, and iguanas are lizards, and whales are mammals. So where is the proof that humans descend from apes? How about the fact that we’re still apes right now!”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"9th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfoje7jVJpU, Youtube (May 8, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Family, Dogs, Angels, Way

“Most of the parents I interviewed for this book said they would never want other children than the ones they had, which at first seemed surprising given the challenges their children embody. But why do any of us prefer our own children, all of them defective in some regard, to others real or imagined? If some glorious angel descended into my living room and offered to exchange my children for other, better children—brighter, kinder, funnier, more loving, more disciplined, more accomplished—I would clutch the ones I have and, like most parents, pray away the atrocious specter.”

Andrew Solomon (1963) American journalist

Source: Far from the Tree, Ch. 12 Father, p. 698.

Love, Children, Books, Angels

“It is reason, logic and rationality that machines, said to be soulless, have. In the deontological sense, in fact, morality is evolutionary atavism. It let us survive, that's why it was maintained. As parents were not empathetic, not guided by the good of others, children might have not survived, neglected and abandoned by the group, so morality was promoted in the genes.”

Jerzy Vetulani (1936–2017) Polish scientist

Woźniak, Olga; Vetulani, Jerzy (24 December 2011): Stań się dobrym. To się opłaca, interview. Gazeta Wyborcza (in Polish).

Children, Sense

“We weren't where we were in those times because we had been thrown or moved there. We didn't think so. We felt we had impelled ourselves, like the faring pioneers and immigrants driving their wagons or pushing their barrows who somewhere somehow along the way stopped and settled. […] True, in some places we stayed on where our fathers and mothers and grandfathers had first settled, but even so we were caught up in that motion if our parents and grandparents had happened to settle in places that those on the move were now headed for or drawn to—seemingly blown to, you might think seeing them, as by those cosmic tornadoes that lift a boy on a bicycle or a chicken coop full of chickens or a ford car with Gramps and Gram inside and set it down unharmed somewhere else.”

John Crowley book Four Freedoms

Part One, Chapter 5
Four Freedoms (2009)

Cars, Way, Boy, Thinking

“Why am I always on a plane or a fast train?
Oh what a world my parents gave me
Always
Travelin' but not in love.Still I think I'm doin' fine
Wouldn't it be a lovely headline?
Life is
Beautiful on a New York Times.”

Rufus Wainwright (1973) American-Canadian singer-songwriter and composer

Oh What a World
Song lyrics, Want One (2003)

Love, Life, World, Beauty

“It simply makes sense that I should miss my parents more than they miss me, especially when you consider that they only loved me for thirteen years while I loved them my entire life.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Damned

Damned (2011)

Love, Life, Sense

“Has there ever been a musician of cultural significance who's been aware they're significant? Maybe it's a generation whose parents came from a working class environment and because they were rootless in a way, like me and him, they latched onto that as an identity. Maybe we romanticise what our parents wanted to escape from. We're, like, fantasising out a living.”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

NME (New Musical Express), March 13, 2004
Music and politics

Way

“We were the kids that made America famous.
The kind of kids that long since drove our parents to dispair.
We were lazy long hairs dropping out, lost confused, and copping out.
Convinced our futures were in doubt and trying not to care.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

What Made America Famous?
Song lyrics, Verities & Balderdash (1974)

Future

“As the shell, the pith and the kernel of the fruit are all produced form one parent seed of the tree, so from the one Lord is produced the whole of creation, animate and inanimate, spiritual and material.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Source: Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (1960), p. 867

Tree, Animals

““I really did suffer a lot,” she said, “and for a lot longer than I even care to remember. I was sure I’d never find anything to take the place of ballet, and it took all my energy just to get through each day. My parents and my friends all said that time alone would heal the wound, and I guess I knew it was true, but I wished I could hibernate or something, and let time go by without having to suffer through it. But of course the clock just kept slowly ticking away. Tick, tick, tick”

Ryū Murakami book Audition

like it was chipping away at at me, at my life.“
Source: Audition (1997), Chapter Five, Yoshikawa Asami

Life, Suffering, Time

“For my own part, I find it best to assume that a good sound scolding or castigation has some latent and strengthening influence on my Grandson's Configuration; though I own that I have no grounds for thinking so. At all events I am not alone in my way of extricating myself from this dilemma; for I find that many of the highest Circles, sitting as Judges in law courts, use praise and blame towards Regular and Irregular Figures; and in their homes I know by experience that, when scolding their children, they speak about "right" or "wrong" as vehemently and passionately as if they believed that these names represented real existences, and that a human Figure is really capable of choosing between them.Constantly carrying out their policy of making Configuration the leading idea in every mind, the Circles reverse the nature of that Commandment which in Spaceland regulates the relations between parents and children. With you, children are taught to honour their parents; with us — next to the Circles, who are the chief object of universal homage — a man is taught to honour his Grandson, if he has one; or, if not, his Son. By "honour", however, is by no means meant "indulgence", but a reverent regard for their highest interests: and the Circles teach that the duty of fathers is to subordinate their own interests to those of posterity, thereby advancing the welfare of the whole State as well as that of their own immediate descendants.”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 12. Of the Doctrine of our Priests

Children, Law, Way, Home

“Were the destiny of woman thus exactly marked out, did she invariably retain the shelter of a parent’s or guardian’s roof till she married, did marriage give her a sure home and a protector, were she never liable to be made a widow, or, if so, sure of finding immediate protection from a brother or new husband, so that she might never be forced to stand alone one moment, and were her mind given for this world only, with no faculties capable of eternal growth and infinite improvement, we would still demand of her a far wider and more generous culture than is proposed by those who so anxiously define her sphere.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Article, The New York Daily Tribune (30 September 1845); quoted in Brilliant Bylines (1986) by Barbara Belford.

Marriage, World, Home

“Welfare without work erodes the spirit and the sense of self-worth of the recipient. And it conditions the children of nonworking parents to an indolent and unproductive life. Hardworking parents raise hardworking kids; we should recognize that the opposite is also true. The influence of the work habits of our parents and other adults around us as we grow up has lasting impact.”

Mitt Romney book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness

Source: No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, 2010, Chapter 10, pg. 251 http://books.google.com/books?id=PDpBpo5CVB4C&pg=PA251

Life, Children, Sense

“Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

"Education" http://books.google.com/books?id=iRAWAAAAYAAJ&q=%22Respect+the+child+Be+not+too+much+his+parent+Trespass+not+on+his+solitude%22&pg=PA116#v=onepage, Lectures and biographical sketches (1883), p.116

Solitude, For Parents

“From a woman’s perspective, sharing parent time feels like what a man might experience if his ex-wife came to his office and shared his career. He might claim the sharing is not in the best interests of the employer. But what he really would be caring about is the affront should his ex-wife do as good as he at his own job. While the fear is understandable, the difference is that his career is his, their children are theirs.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 191.

Children, Fear, Feeling, Understanding

“Whoever voluntarily undertakes the necessary office of rearing and educating, obtains the parental power without generation.”

Francis Hutcheson (philosopher) (1694–1746) Irish philosopher

A System Of Moral Philosophy (1755), Book II, Ch. II

Education

“I have discovered in the Hebrew Bible teachings of righteousness, humaneness, and human dignity—at the source of my parents' teachings of mentschlichkeit—undreamt of in my prior philosophizing. In the idea that human beings are equally God-like, equally created in the image of the divine, I have seen the core principle of a humanistic and democratic politics, respectful of each and every human being, and a necessary correction to the uninstructed human penchant for worshiping brute nature or venerating mighty or clever men. In the Sabbath injunction to desist regularly from work and the flux of getting and spending, I have discovered an invitation to each human being, no matter how lowly, to step outside of time, in imitatio Dei, to contemplate the beauty of the world and to feel gratitude for its—and our—existence. In the injunction to honor your father and your mother, I have seen the foundation of a dignified family life, for each of us the nursery of our humanization and the first vehicle of cultural transmission. I have satisfied myself that there is no conflict between the Bible, rightly read, and modern science, and that the account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis offers "not words of information but words of appreciation," as Abraham Joshua Heschel put it: "not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world's having come into being"—the recognition of which glory, I would add, is ample proof of the text's claim that we human beings stand highest among the creatures. And thanks to my Biblical studies, I have been moved to new attitudes of gratitude, awe, and attention. For just as the world as created is a world summoned into existence under command, so to be a human being in that world—to be a mentsch—is to live in search of our summons. It is to recognize that we are here not by choice or on account of merit, but as an undeserved gift from powers not at our disposal. It is to feel the need to justify that gift, to make something out of our indebtedness for the opportunity of existence. It is to stand in the world not only in awe of its and our existence but under an obligation to answer a call to a worthy life, a life that does honor to the special powers and possibilities—the divine-likeness—with which our otherwise animal existence has been, no thanks to us, endowed.”

Leon R. Kass (1939) American academic

Looking for an Honest Man (2009)

Life, Men, God, World

“Fascism was a monster born of capitalist parents. Fascism came as the end-product of centuries of capitalist bestiality, exploitation, domination, and racism—mainly exercised outside Europe. It is highly significant that many settlers and colonial officials displayed a leaning towards fascism. Apartheid in South Africa is nothing but fascism.”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 316.

Exercises

“I support a woman's right to choose up until viability of the fetus. As Governor of New Mexico, I would have signed a bill banning late-term abortion. I've always favored parental notification, I've always favored counseling, and I've always favored the notion that public funds should not be used for abortion.”

Gary Johnson (1953) American politician, businessman, and 29th Governor of New Mexico

Statement at FOX News Debate
YouTube
2011-05-05
http://youtu.be/QRPrZxHUqsA
2012-02-24
2011

Support

“Interviewer: How long do your parents usually let you stay up?
Rachel: I probably get home at 1:00 (am) and I go to bed at 1:30. [shrugs] I don't know.
Tina: She's usually in bed at-
Rachel: 1?
Tina: 1.
Interviewer: 1 am? [laughing]
Tina: [laughing] 1 am. She's performing. She's-
Rachel: Maybe on a school night, I go to bed at 10! Maybe.
Tina: Yeah. Maybe. When you went to public school. Now she does homeschool, so she doesn't go to bed until 1.”

Rachel Trachtenburg (1993) American musician

Rachel's bedtime when she performs onstage.
Off & On Broadway documentary (2006)

School, Home, Night

“If we are to give our utmost effort and skill and enthusiasm, we must believe in ourselves, which means believing in our past and in our future, in our parents and in our children, in that particular blend of moral purpose and practical inventiveness which is the American character.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1940s, And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942), p. 234—235; cited in Portraits Of Industry (2004) by Lorie A. Annarella, p. 5

Children, Effort, Past, Future

“The Soviet Union does not allow any church of any kind to interfere with education, and religion is not taught in public schools. It seems to me that this is the greatest gift of the Russian Revolution to the modern world. Most educated modern men no longer believe in religious dogma. If questioned they will usually resort to double-talk before admitting the fact. But who today actually believes that this world is ruled and directed by a benevolent person of great power who, on humble appeal, will change the course of events at our request? Who believes in miracles? Many folk follow religious ceremonies and services and allow their children to learn fairy tales and so-called religious truth, which in time the children come to recognize as conventional lies told by their parents and teachers for the children's good. One can hardly exaggerate the moral disaster of the custom. We have to thank the Soviet Union for the courage to stop it.”

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) American sociologist, historian, activist and writer

The Autobiography of W.E. Burghardt Du Bois (1968), Ch. IV : The Soviet Union; he later states in Ch. XVI : My Character: "I think the greatest gift of the Soviet Union to modern civilization was the dethronement of the clergy and the refusal to let religion be taught in the public schools."

Men, Children, Truth, World

“The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent's first duty.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

#33
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Children

“I've learned so much from being a mom about the kind of person I want to be, the kind of woman I want to be. Motherhood has taught me mindfulness. If you just parent on instinct, you'll screw your kid up for life. You have to be so mindful.”

Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) American actress, singer, and food writer

Interview with Gwyneth Paltrow, Good Housekeeping http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/family/celebrity-interviews/gwyneth-paltrow-interview-country-strong (2010)

Life, Moms, Learning, Personality

“When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have remarked to Eve: "My dear, we live in an age of transition."”

William Ralph Inge (1860–1954) Dean of St Pauls

Assessments and Anticipations http://books.google.com/books?id=87AxAAAAMAAJ&q=&quot;When+our+first+parents+were+driven+out+of+Paradise+Adam+is+believed+to+have+remarked+to+Eve+My+dear+we+live+in+an+age+of+transition&quot;&pg=PA261#v=onepage (1929), p. 261

Age

“My parents seem to me possessed of great dignity. An aristocratic reserve. Like the very rich who live behind tall walls, my mother and father are always mindful of the line separating public from private life. Watching a celebrity talk show on television, they listen for several minutes as a movie star with bright teeth recounts details of his recent divorce. And I see my parents grow impatient. Finally, my mother gets up from her chair. Changing the channel, she says with simple disdain, ‘Cheap people.’ My mother and my father are not cheap people. They never are tempted to believe that public life can also be intimate. And I realize that my parents will be as puzzled by my act of self-revelation as they are by the movie star’s revelations on the talk show. They never will call me cheap for publishing an autobiography. But I can well imagine their faces tightened by incomprehension as they read my words.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Why does he do this?
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Life, People, Imagination, Star

“The hurt is still there. When my parents were alive it affected them just as much as it is affecting us today.”

Ateca Ganilau (1951) Fijian chief

Reconciliation, Tolerance, and Unity Bill, 25 June, 2005

Hurt

“If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place. Epidemiology, not evidence.”

Richard Dawkins book Viruses of the Mind

Viruses of the Mind (1993)

Faith, Religion, Music, Birth

“Double standards in domestic roles are deeply rooted in cultural attitudes and workplace practices. Working mothers are held to higher standards than working fathers and are often criticized for being insufficiently committed, either as parents or professionals. Those who seem willing to sacrifice family needs to workplace demands appear lacking as mothers. Those who take extended leave or reduced schedules appear lacking as leaders. These mixed messages leave many women with the uncomfortable sense that whatever they are doing, they should be doing something else.”

Barbara Kellerman (1939) American academic

Source: Women and leadership, 2007, p. 12

Women, Family, Sense, Appearance

“On the pinhead front, 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant. The sister of Britney says she is shocked. I bet. Now most teens are pinheads in some ways. But here the blame falls primarily on the parents of the girl, who obviously have little control over her….”

Bill O'Reilly (1949) American political commentator, television host and writer

2007-12-20
Time vs. 'The Factor'
The O'Reilly Factor
Fox News
Television
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,317577,00.html

Way, Girl, Sister

“Parents teach children discipline for two different, indeed diametrically opposed, reasons: to render the child submissive to them and to make him independent of them. Only a self-disciplined person can be obedient; and only such a person can be autonomous.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990)

Children, Personality

“I love what I've learned from my parents, and what I continue here – wandering, Sunday trips out of town, mindfulness with which you can look at plants and animals. I am not interested in that professionally and I have no ambition to classify flora and fauna, but I am enthusiastic about amateur love for nature. Light, air, clouds, landscapes only seem harsh. A lot of beauty can be found in this rawness.”

Tomasz Vetulani (1965) Polish artist

Tomasz Vetulani o Holandii, niskim kraju http://www.nto.pl/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110605/REPORTAZ01/762330357, nto.pl, 5 June 2011 (in Polish)

Love, Beauty, Nature, Light

“Men are the Rosie-the-Riveters of parenting: They’re brought in only when needed, and considered disposable thereafter.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 115.

Men

“Well, our forefathers abolished this system [of monopolies]; at a time, too, mark you, when the sign manual of the sovereign had somewhat of a divine sanction and challenged superstitious reverence in the minds of the people. And shall we, the descendants of those men, be found so degenerate, so unworthy of the blood that flows in our veins, so recreant to the very name 'Englishman,' as not to shake off this incubus, laid on as it is by a body of our fellow-citizens? … We advocate the abolition of the Corn Law because we believe that to be the foster-parent of all other monopolies; and if we destroy that—the parent, the monster monopoly—it will save us the trouble of devouring the rest.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in London (8 February 1844), quoted in John Bright and J. E. Thorold Rogers (eds.), Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by Richard Cobden, M.P. Volume I (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), p. 59.
1840s

Men, People, Law, Time

“I was trained as an actress, but as much as I love that work when I can get it, it is not my acting work for which I’m generally known. It is not my chosen career path that ultimately defines me, but rather an unfamiliar, unexpected path that has presented itself. To quote another group from my youth, “what a long, strange trip it’s been,” and I won’t have it any other way.
Life continues to surprise and delight me, even when I think I know what I want from it. I knew I wanted to be a mother, for example, but, and I’m sure your parents can relate to this, I had no idea how much fun I would have nor how much I would learn about life and myself from my child and stepchildren.”

Dana Reeve (1961–2006) Actress, singer, activist

Middlebury College Address (2004)

Love, Life, Youth, Way

“An earlier version of this volume was originally contracted for and produced as a monograph by Warner Modular Communications, Inc., a subsidiary member of the Warner communications and entertainment conglomerate. The publishing house had run a relatively independent operation up to the time of the controversy over this document. The editors and publisher were enthusiastic about the monograph and committed themselves to put it out quickly and to promote it with vigor. But just prior to publication, in the fall of 1973, officials of the parent company got wind of it, looked at it, and were horrified by its “unpatriotic” contents. Mr. William Sarnoff, a high officer of the parent company, for example, was deeply pained by our statement on page 7 of the original that the “leadership in the United States, as a result of its dominant position and wide-ranging counter-revolutionary efforts, has been the single most important instigator, administrator, and moral and material sustainer of serious bloodbaths in the years that followed World War II.” So pained were Sarnoff and his business associates, in fact, that they were quite prepared to violate a contractual obligation in order to assure that no such material would see the light of day. […] they decided to close down the publishing house […]. The history of the suppressed monograph is an authentic instance of private censorship of ideas per se. The uniqueness of the episode lies only in the manner of suppression. Usually, private intervention in the book market is anticipatory, with regrets that the manuscript is unacceptable, perhaps “unmarketable.””

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Sometimes the latter contention is only an excuse for unwillingness to market, although it may sometimes reflect an accurate assessment of how the media and journals will receive books that are strongly critical of the established order.
Source: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, pp. xiv-xvii.

Pain, War, Books, World

“What Lars Trägårdh came to understand during his years in the United States was that the overarching ambition of Nordic societies during the course of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, has not been to socialize the economy at all, as is often mistakenly assumed. Rather the goal has been to free the individual from all forms of dependency within the family and in civil society: the poor from charity, wives from husbands, adult children from parents, and elderly parents from their children. The express purpose of this freedom is to allow all those human relationships to be unencumbered by ulterior motives and needs, and thus to be entirely free, completely authentic, and driven purely by love.”

Anu Partanen (1975) journalist

Source: The Nordic Theory of Everything, Chapter 2

Love, Children, Family, Motivation

“The so-called highly civilised culture of the West won't let them get married at that age. They prohibit them from marrying or inhibit them or make it as difficult for them as possible to get married at the age of 14 or 15, because they want to keep, them at home without having to be bothered with babies.
They just want their own little baby & keep it a babyas long as they can in the house, until it becomes an absolute monster that they can't control, they don't know what to do with,& breaks their heart & takes drugs & runs off & has a child anyhow, & then they have an abortion! They kill the baby because the parents don't want to help take care of it or teach their children how! How horrible! It's the absolute selfishness of the so-called highly civilised Western culture! Cruelly killing babies!”

David Berg (1919–1994) Children of God founder

Child Brides!

Children, Age, Home, Help

“"One of the worst major wrong actions is for a man to curse his parents." It was said, "O Messenger of Allah, how can a man curse his parents?" He said, "He may curse another man's father who in turn curses his father, and curse his mother and he in turn curses his mother."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 3, hadith number 338
Sunni Hadith

“She had called in the debt that parents owe a child for bringing her, unasked, into a strange world. One should never make an offer without knowing full well what will happen if it is accepted.”

David Brin book The Uplift War

Source: The Uplift War (1987), Chapter 73 (p. 480)

World

“Labeling a high-ranking wolf alpha emphasizes its rank in a dominance hierarchy. However, in natural wolf packs, the alpha male or female are merely the breeding animals, the parents of the pack, and dominance contests with other wolves are rare, if they exist at all. During my 13 summers observing the Ellesmere Island pack, I saw none. Thus, calling a wolf an alpha is usually no more appropriate than referring to a human parent or a doe deer as an alpha. Any parent is dominant to its young offspring, so "alpha" adds no information. Why not refer to an alpha female as the female parent, the breeding female, the matriarch, or simply the mother? Such a designation emphasizes not the animal's dominant status, which is trivial information, but its role as pack progenitor, which is critical information.”

L. David Mech (1937) American Biologist , Ecologist

Alpha status, dominance, and division of labor in wolf packs http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/mammals/alstat/. Canadian Journal of Zoology 77:1196-1203 (1999).

Nature, Wolf, Animals, Summer

“Being a good human being is very easy: Be a good son, a good husband, a good parent and a good citizen.”

Siddharth Katragadda (1972) Indian writer

page 33
The Other Wife (2003)

“All love - love of children, love of parents, love of God or life - comes out of making physical love. Without the making of love there is no body to love anything.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

The Way In (2000)

Love, Life, God, Children

“Household is a chariot. The parents are its two wheels. If the wheels don't move equally, the chariot cannot run straight.”

Baba Hari Dass (1923–2018) master yogi, author, builder, commentator of Indian spiritual tradition

Family and Community: (p. 35)
The Path to Enlightenment is not a Highway, 1996

“When we first started, we were able to take our undercover video to 60 Minutes or 20/20, and they would fight over it and do these thought-provoking exposés. Now that society has become less interested in these programs and more interested in sensationalism and the tabloids, we have to reinvent ourselves to keep our issues on the front burner; we have had to do a lot of theatrical things. … Much of what we do is geared toward kids, who have a great sense of justice. This is the first generation in which kids have grown up with this issue. Twenty-five years ago, parents were petrified when their kids went vegetarian — some still are.”

Dan Mathews (1964) American activist

About PETA's activities. “Sir Paul McCartney and PETA VP Dan Mathews Reflect on Two Decades of Activism” (April 2005), in PETA.org http://www.peta.org/features/paul-mccartney-interview/.

Justice, Sense, Fight

“I could multiply instances of men, women, and children who have been just snatched from the jaws of the grave by this Act of Parliament, and yet whilst it is walking the streets, hurrying about on its errand of mercy, visiting the sick, healing those who are afflicted with disease, feeding hungry children whose parents have been prostrated by sickness and cannot look after them—whilst it is doing the work of the Man of Nazareth in the stricken homes of Britain, it is being stoned by Tory speakers, reviled, insulted, and spat upon. Their reckoning is piling up. It will soon be demanded at their hands to the last penny by a people who have been misled by them into disdaining one of the greatest gifts the Imperial Parliament has ever delivered to the people of this land.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Nottinghamshire Miners' Association (10 August 1913) on the National Insurance Act 1911, quoted in The Times (11 August 1913), p. 10.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Women, Men, Children, People

“My wife stood up in the stirrups, grabbed my bottom lip and said "I want morphine!" I said "But, dear —" [vigorously breathing]. She said "You shut up! YOU did this to me!" And on the next contraction she told everybody in the delivery room that my parents were never married.”

Bill Cosby (1937) American actor, comedian, author, producer, musician, activist

Himself (1983)

“It's funny, I grew up in a happy family with loving parents, but I've killed off a lot of parents in these books. The orphan in children's literature, allows the child protagonist to move the story forward themselves. I think that, however happy a family, every intelligent child thinks: 'How did I come to be born to these parents?”

Brian Selznick (1966) American children's illustrator and writer

it is about finding your place in the world. Source: Brian Selznick: how Scorsese's Hugo drew inspiration from his magical book https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/11/brian-selznick-hugo-martin-scorsese (February 11, 2012)

Love, Happiness, Children, Books

“This is what matters to me: the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents. This is my story.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Home, Boy, Silence, Summer

“You should have access to ideas and information regardless of your age. If anyone is going to limit or guide a young person, it should be the parent or guardian — and only the parent or guardian.”

Judith Krug (1940–2009) librarian and freedom of speech proponent

"A Library That Would Rather Block Than Offend" http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/011897library-florida.html by Pamela Mendels, The New York Times (January 18, 1997)

Age, Idea, Personality

“I feel a kind of intellectual regret, not an emotional regret, at having left my parents and that world behind. But it's not a great weight on my soul. In a way I wish it were. To leave one’s background without guilt is an indication of shallowness of character, I suspect.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)

World, Way, Feeling, Soul

“Any parent wants the best for their children. I am not going to make a choice for my child on the basis of what is the politically correct thing to do.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

"Mr Blair opts out", Guardian, 2 December 1994. Statement on 1 December 1994, defending his decision to send his eldest son Euan to the London Oratory School which had opted out of local education authority control under a policy which the Labour Party opposed.
1990s

Children

“Sanders: I have a D minus voting record, from the NRA. I lost an election probably, for congress here in Vermont back in 1988, because I believe we should not be selling or distributing assault weapons in this country. I am on record and have been for a very long time in saying we have got to significantly tighten up the background checks. We have to end the absurdity of the gun show loophole. 40 percent of the guns in this country are sold without any background checks. We have to deal with the straw man provision which allows people to legally buy guns and then distribute. We’ve got to take on the NRA. And that is my view. And I am, will do everything I can to—the tragedy that we saw in Parkland is unspeakable. And all over this country, parents are scared to death of what might happen when they send their kids to school. This problem is not going to be easily solved. Nobody has a magic solution, alright, but we’ve got to do everything we can do protect the children—
Todd: What does that mean? You say everything we can. Does that mean raising the age when you can purchase an AR-15? Does that mean limiting the purchase of AR-15s?
Sanders: Yes! Yeah, look. Chuck, what I just told you is that for 30 years, I believe that we should not be selling assault weapons in this country. These weapons are not for hunting, they are for killing human beings. These are military weapons. I do not know why we have five million of them running around the United States of America, so of course we have to do that. Of course we have to make it harder for people to purchase weapons. We have people now who are on terrorist watch lists who can purchase a weapon. Does this make any sense to anybody. Bottom line here, Republicans are going to have to say that it’s more important to protect the children of this country than to antagonize the NRA. Are they prepared to do that, I surely hope they are.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Interviewed by Chuck Todd of NBC News on Meet the Press on 18 February 2018 after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting ([Meet the Press - 18 February 2018, 18 February 2018, 1 September 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-february-18-2018-n849191, NBC News, Meet the Press]).
2010s, 2018

Death, Children, People, Age

“It’s very difficult to make them understand the importance of a Guruji. In India, it’s kind of more than gods and goddesses. We revere our Gurujis more than our parents, more than our family members, more than gods and goddesses. But they’ll never understand. Never understand who a Guru is. There are so many differences. But when I am teaching at Rotterdam in Netherlands (He heads the World Music Department at the Rotterdam Music Conservatory), I tell each and every student-“keep your shoe out, you have to sit down. If you want to learn Indian music, you have to treat me- not like your teacher, not like your Guru, you treat me as a friend and we share our willing.”

Hariprasad Chaurasia (1938) Indian bansuri player

On Guru-Shishya Parampara (tradition of Teacher and Student) and Modern world.
Melodies of Brindavan: Pandit Hariprasad Chourasia

God, World, Family, Music

“My proposal is this: once this technology [genetically engineered intelligence] becomes available, why not offer it free of charge to parents on low incomes with below-average IQs? Provided there is sufficient take-up, it could help to address the problem of flat-lining inter-generational social mobility and serve as a counterweight to the tendency for the meritocratic elite to become a hereditary elite. It might make all the difference when it comes to the long-term sustainability of advanced meritocratic societies.”

Toby Young (1963) British journalist

The Quadrant (2015)

Intelligence, Problem, Help

“A father is rarely a good teacher; either he thinks he knows things and finds his knowledge to be very slight, or he knows but explains badly, or he is too severe and impatient because teaching bores him, or he is dangerously indulgent because he loves his children too much. It is from professional teachers who have made a success of the art that we must learn its rules. There can be no teaching without discipline. A pupil must first learn to work. Training of the will must precede that of the mind, and this is why home teaching is never very successful. Excuses are too easily accepted: the child has a headache; he has slept badly; there is a party somewhere. A school makes no compromise and that is its virtue. I am inclined to prefer the boarding-school system. It has some serious drawbacks; it sometimes produces immorality and it is always rather severe, but it makes men. The system forces boys to find their own places in a group; in a family they find these places ready-made and it is too easy for them. If absolutely necessary, and if the parents are judicious, day schools are satisfactory up to the age of fifteen or sixteen. For boys between the ages of seventeen and twenty, freedom in a large city is fatal.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

Love, Men, Children, Age

“my fiancé is so handsome. Imma have to send his parents a fruit basket thanking them for creating the perfect man.”

Frances Bean Cobain (1992) American artist

6 May 2013 https://twitter.com/alka_seltzer666/status/331568693131759616 Twitter https://twitter.com/alka_seltzer666 posts

Perfection

“That's the kind of hope that every single one of us — politicians, parents, preachers — all of us need to be providing for our young people. Because that is what moves this country forward every single day — our hope for the future and the hard work that hope inspires.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2010s, Farewell Speech (2017)

People, Hope, Future, Country

“Some enacted the charade of seeking forgiveness of their victims, claiming that this was their custom and tradition, but without showing a semblance of remorse for their wicked ways. Such pretence of piety will not heal the trauma of the hostages and their loved ones for their 56-day stopover into hell. Or wash away the tears of Filipo Seavula's young wife, suddenly made widow in a violent act of treason, or her young orphaned son, or diminish the daily agony of parents, suddenly made jobless, as they strive to feed their hungry children.”

Vijay R. Singh (1931–2006) Fijian politician

Speaking Out (2006)

Love, Children, Way, Forgiveness

“We seek an amicable divorce from the European Union and its replacement with a genuine free-trade agreement, which is what my parents' generation thought we’d signed up for in the first place.”

Nigel Farage (1964) British politician and former commodity broker

In UKIP news (issue 56), July 2004.
2004

“It is from the traditional family that we absorb those universal ideals and principles which are the teaching of Jesus, the bedrock of our religious faith. We are taught the difference between right and wrong, and about the law, just punishment and discipline. We are taught to obey our parents, as Jesus did, and about the sanctity of truth and life itself. We are warned against lying, cheating and stealing. We learn that we must respect the person and property of others, care for each other, live and work together in cooperation, show loyalty, patience, kindness and share what we have. The family teaches us about the importance of knowledge, education, hard work and effort. It teaches us about enjoying ourselves, having fun, keeping fit and healthy.”

Kamisese Mara (1920–2004) President of Fiji

Opening address, Pacific Vision festival, Auckland, New Zealand (26 July 1999) http://www.minpac.govt.nz/resources/reference/pvdocs/opening/mara.php.

Life, Truth, Education, Family

“In general statistics can be considered as the offspring of the theory of probability, it builds on its parent and extends the area of patronymic jurisdiction.”

Richard Arnold Epstein (1927) American physicist

Source: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic (Revised Edition) 1977, Chapter Two, Mathematical Preliminaries, p. 24

“A cemetery is an affront to the rational mind. One reason is its eerily wasted space, this tribute to the dead that inevitably degenerates into ancestor worship as, on birthdays and anniversaries, humans of every faith and no faith at all brave whatever weather may that day threaten, in order to stand before these rows of silent stone markers, praying, yes, and remembering, of course, but very often actually speaking to the deceased, an oddly pagan ritual in which we engage, this shared pretense that the rotted corpses in warped wooden boxes are able to hear and understand us if we stand before their graves.The other reason a cemetery appeals to the irrational side is its obtrusive, irresistible habit of sneaking past the civilized veneer with which we cover the primitive planks of our childhood fears. When we are children, we know that what our parents insist is merely a tree branch blowing in the wind is really the gnarled fingertip of some horrific creature of the night, waiting outside the window, tapping, tapping, tapping, to let us know that, as soon as our parents close the door and sentence us to the gloom which they insist builds character, he will lift the sash and dart inside and…And there childhood imagination usually runs out, unable to give shape to the precise fears that have kept us awake and that will, in a few months, be forgotten entirely. Until we next visit a cemetery, that is, when, suddenly, the possibility of some terrifying creature of the night seems remarkably real.”

Stephen L. Carter book The Emperor of Ocean Park

Source: The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), Ch. 50, Again Old Town, I

Children, Fear, Faith, Imagination

“After much consideration and many inquiries, I determined, in 1885, on experimenting with sweet peas, which were suggested to me both by Sir Joseph Hooker and by Mr. Darwin. …The result clearly proved Regression; the mean Filial deviation was only one-third that of the parental one, and the experiments all concurred. The formula that expresses the descent from one generation of a people to the next, showed that the generations would be identical if this kind of Regression was allowed for.”

Francis Galton (1822–1911) British polymath: geographer, statistician, pioneer in eugenics

Source: Memories of My Life (1908), Ch. XX Heredity (1909 ed.)

People

“Did you know 75 percent of kids who go from Christian homes to public schools are going to lose their faith after one year of college? You parents better think long and hard before you send your kids off to school. Are you sending them off to a secular university so they could make more money in life? Is that your goal? You're willing to risk three fourths of them? I'd recommend at least one good year of Bible College before they go to a secular school, even if it's not accredited.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The dangers of evolution

Life, Money, School, Faith

“LA is easier. People have garages. And then as you go up the coast, in Washington and Oregon people have bigger houses and bigger garages, and people have parents.”

Courtney Love (1964) American punk singer-songwriter, musician, actress, and artist

On being a working musician on the West Coast, in conversation with Lana Del Rey, Dazed http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/35578/1/lana-del-rey-courtney-love-lust-for-life (April 2017) 2014–2017

People, Housing

“As to that leisure evening of life, I must say that I do not want it. I can conceive of no contentment of which toil is not to be the immediate parent.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

Letter to G W Rusden (8 June 1876), published in The Letters of Anthony Trollope (1983), p. 691

Life

“Blue Labour has complete disrespect for the managerialism of New Labour and has much more honour for the workforce. If you talk about schooling, we'd like to see parents have a third of the power, teachers have a third of the power and the funders – whether it's the state or local authority – a third of the power, and negotiate a common good. New Labour sought managerial solutions in the private sector and that's what led to the banking collapse; they sought managerial solutions in the public sector which led to the erosion of the public ethos – so we will put people first, relationships first and that's a very different thing.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

The Guardian article, 30 June 2011 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/jun/30/labour-guru-german-public-service-vision

People, School, Teachers

“As my parents taught me by both words and deeds, a life of public service is as much a gift to the person who serves as it is to those he is serving. And for me, there could be no higher public service than serving as a member of the United States Supreme Court.”

Merrick Garland (1952) American judge

[Remarks by the President Announcing Judge Merrick Garland as his Nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick, Garland, w:Merrick Garland, The White House, March 16, 2016, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Remarks_by_the_President_Announcing_Judge_Merrick_Garland_as_his_Nominee_to_the_Supreme_Court#Remarks_by_Judge_Garland]; quote then excerpted in:
[March 18, 2016, http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2016/03/16/obama-taps-chicago-native-merrick-garland-supreme-court, Obama Taps Chicago Native Merrick Garland for Supreme Court, Paris Schutz, March 16, 2016, WTTW]; and also quote excerpted in:
[March 18, 2016, http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2016/03/16/President-Obama-to-reveal-Supreme-Court-nominee/7221458128542/, United Press International, Merrick Garland: Supreme Court nomination 'greatest honor of my life', March 16, 2016, Andrew V. Pestano]; and quote again also excerpted in:
[March 18, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2016/03/16/470684460/will-garlands-nomination-prompt-senate-to-act, Morning Edition, National Public Radio, March 16, 2016, Renee Montagne, Judge Garland Has Ability To 'Assemble Unlikely Coalitions,' Obama Says]
Remarks by Judge Garland upon nomination to Supreme Court of the United States (2016)

Life, Personality

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care.”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

" Statement on the Current Health Care Debate https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=113851103434&ref=mf", Facebook, , quoted in * 2009-08-10 Sarah Palin falsely claims Barack Obama runs a 'death panel' Politifact http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/aug/10/sarah-palin/sarah-palin-barack-obama-death-panel/ In response to the proposed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. 2014

Love, Death, Health, Baby

“The fact is that child rearing is a long, hard job, the rewards are not always immediately obvious, the work is undervalued, and parents are just as human and almost as vulnerable as their children.”

Benjamin Spock (1903–1998) American pediatrician and author of Baby and Child Care

Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care (1945)

Children

“So it is in that spirit that I declare this afternoon to the people of Cuba that those who seek refuge here in America will find it. The dedication of America to our traditions as an asylum for the oppressed is going to be upheld. I have directed the Departments of State and Justice and Health, Education, and Welfare to immediately make all the necessary arrangements to permit those in Cuba who seek freedom to make an orderly entry into the United States of America. Our first concern will be with those Cubans who have been separated from their children and their parents and their husbands and their wives and that are now in this country. Our next concern is with those who are imprisoned for political reasons. And I will send to the Congress tomorrow a request for supplementary funds of $12,600,000 to carry forth the commitment that I am making today. I am asking the Department of State to seek through the Swiss government immediately the agreement of the Cuban government in a request to the President of the International Red Cross Committee. The request is for the assistance of the Committee in processing the movement of refugees from Cuba to Miami. Miami will serve as a port of entry and a temporary stopping place for refugees as they settle in other parts of this country. And to all the voluntary agencies in the United States, I appeal for their continuation and expansion of their magnificent work. Their help is needed in the reception and the settlement of those who choose to leave Cuba. The Federal Government will work closely with these agencies in their tasks of charity and brotherhood. I want all the people of this great land of ours to know of the really enormous contribution which the compassionate citizens of Florida have made to humanity and to decency. And all States in this Union can join with Florida now in extending the hand of helpfulness and humanity to our Cuban brothers. The lesson of our times is sharp and clear in this movement of people from one land to another. Once again, it stamps the mark of failure on a regime when many of its citizens voluntarily choose to leave the land of their birth for a more hopeful home in America. The future holds little hope for any government where the present holds no hope for the people. And so we Americans will welcome these Cuban people. For the tides of history run strong, and in another day they can return to their homeland to find it cleansed of terror and free from fear. Over my shoulders here you can see Ellis Island, whose vacant corridors echo today the joyous sound of long ago voices. And today we can all believe that the lamp of this grand old lady is brighter today; and the golden door that she guards gleams more brilliantly in the light of an increased liberty for the people from all the countries of the globe. Thank you very much.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Remarks at the signing of the Immigration Bill (1965)

Children, People, Health, Education

“Everything I am came from my parents. I don't take that much credit for who I am and what I am.”

Mandy Patinkin (1952) American actor and tenor singer

Forward.com, "Broadway Star Mandy Patinkin Finds His Forte: Yiddish" http://www.forward.com/articles/3284

““Promise me,” he said, “that you’ll say nothing, and if something happens to me, you’ll always honor our parents.” I swallowed. He was scaring me. “Look,” he continued, “I’ve met a lot of rich kids and their parents at the Academy, and I’ll tell you, there are no parents that I’m prouder to have as my father and mother than ours. They rose up with nothing, Mundo, except guts and faith and love. Do you understand?” I shook my head. “No, I don’t,” I said. He licked his lips. He seemed to be licking his lips all the time now. “You will,” he said. “You just pay close attention, and you will.””

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

Love, Faith, Understanding, Time

“I've always wanted to do my own thing, and my parents allowed me to do what I needed.”

Alicia Witt (1975) American actress

On moving to Hollywood at 14, after having earned her high school equivalency diploma, as quoted in "Genius at Work" in People magazine, Vol. 43 No. 9 (6 March 1995)

“I am inclined to regard the separation of parental traits in the progeny of hybrids in Pisum as complete and thus permanent. The progeny of hybrids carries one or the other of the parental traits, or the hybrid form of the two; I have never observed gradual transitions between the parental traits or a progressive approach towards one of them. The course of development consists simply in this; that in each generation the two parental traits appear, separated and unchanged, and there is nothing to indicate that one of them has either inherited or taken over anything from the other”

Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) Silesian scientist and Augustinian friar

April 18, 1867.
Letters to Carl Nägeli

Appearance

“It is important for a father who feels pushed away to say, in effect, "When you do that, I feel unwanted as a father," or "I feel my rough-housing is not bad parenting; it's my contribution to helping our child take risks." Women cannot hear what men do not say.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

page 105.
Father and Child Reunion (2001)

Women, Men, Feeling, Help

“Food is, for me, for everybody, a very sexual thing and I think I realised that quite early on. I still cannot exaggerate how just putting a meal in front of somebody is really more of a buzz for me than anything. And I mean anything. Maybe that goes back to trying to please my dad, I don't know. It's like parenting in a way I suppose.”

Nigel Slater (1958) English food writer, journalist and broadcaster

The Guardian, London, While other boys in his class were reading Shoot! Nigel subscribed to Cordon Bleu magazine, Tim, Adams, 2003-09-14, 2010-05-20 http://observer.guardian.co.uk/foodmonthly/story/0,,1040953,00.html,

Food, Way, Thinking

“In 1848, driven by a revolution in Paris, King Louis Philippe abdicated and Louis Napoleon (a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) was elected president of France. Four years later, after a coup d’etat, Louis Napoleon styled himself Napoleon II, emperor of France.
napoleon III’s first act as emperor was to imprison his political opponents. He was a crafty monarch, and his ambition during his reign was to seek glory through military adventurism while the great mass of French peasants remained ina state of poverty and despair.
Initially, Napoleon III achieved a short-lived public popularity by trying to “modernize” France and liberalize its economy, but his legacy remains that of a dictator and conniving politician.
In 1870, fearful that Germany was expanding too fast, Napoleon III declared war against this neighbor. The French were quickly defeated, and Napoleon III became a prisoner of war. Upon release in 1871, he was exiled to England, where he lived until his death in 1873.
Maurice Joly was mindful of this growing tension between Germany and France. He had been born in 1821 of French parents. He was admitted to the Paris bar as an attorney and was a one-time member of the General Assembly. Joly devoted most of time to writing caustic essays on French politics. He joined many other severe critics of Napoleon III, who regarded him as a ruthless despot.
In 1864, Joly wrote a book called “The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.”…It intended to liken Napoleon III to the infamous Machiavelli, author of “The Prince,” a treatise on the acquisition of power. Holy intended to reveal the French dictator’s dark and evil plans.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Will Eisner, pp. 7-8
The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Death, War, Books, Fear

“Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 192

Courage, Freedom, Dependency

“Many, if not most, good ideas die young — mainly from neglect on the part of the parents, but sometimes from over-fondness. Once well started, an opinion had better be left to shift for itself.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

The Art of Propagating Opinion
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part X - The Position of a HomoUnius Libri

Idea, Parting

“Telling your parents you’ve failed at something is harder than the actual failure.”

Chetan Bhagat book Revolution 2020

Revolution 2020 (2011)

Failure

“My parents -- we lived in Brooklyn, NY, we owned a house -- my parents were difficult people, they didn't get along with anyone. Actually, they didn't even get along with each other. So, on the one side were the Golds and on the other side were the Kasslers and they did not get along with the Golds and they did not get along with the Kasslers, so they built a fence. And it was within their right to build a fence. But, as everybody knows, when you build at fence, at any rate in New York, you first have to hire a surveyor. That's a fact, I'm not joking. You have to hire a surveyor and you have to make sure that fence is right down the line on your property because if that fence is literally one quarter of an inch on the Golds' side or on the Kasslers' side, they have the right to tear it down. Under law, that's it. Now, let's take Israel's wall. What happens if my parents decide to build a fence that's not only on the Kasslers' side but goes right around their swimming pool? Well, some people will begin to wonder "are Mary and Harry Finkelstein trying to protect their property? Or are they trying to steal the Kasslers' swimming pool?"”

Norman G. Finkelstein (1953) American political scientist and author

Other sourced statements Source: Talk at Santa Cruz, CA http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=600, October 23, 2006

People, Law, Tear, Housing

“Satan tried to control the world with power but created hell. That power cannot create the ideal world. God has to create the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth by true love, even to liberate hell. Based on true love, not politics or economy, scholars can change their concepts. So far, scholars have supported political authority, but that must change. Economy has supported the reigning political power, which makes for division. Now unity will come by parental love.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

1999, http://www.tparents.org/Moon-Talks/sunmyungmoon99/UM990825.htm

Love, God, World, Hell

“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 M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Youth, Night

“Parents are indeed capable of routinely torturing their children without anyone interceding.”

Alice Miller (1923–2010) Swiss psychologist

Breaking Down the Wall of Silence (Abbruch der Schweigemauer) (1990)

Children

“"My Father, it is dark!" "Child, take my hand,
Cling close to me; I'll lead thee through the land,
Trust my all-seeing care, so shalt thou stand
'Midst glory bright above."
Can we be unsafe where God has placed us, and where He
watches over us as a parent a child that he loves?”

François Fénelon (1651–1715) Catholic bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 264.

Love, God

“On their date, my father said to Renee, "Tomorrow I'm going to come by your parents' house, pick you up, and we're going to go hunt for apartments. The three of us will live together and be a little family." It was really romantic at the drive-in, so this was all fabulous. He dropped her off at my grandparents' house. The next day, my mother waited and waited. He never came. He never called. Finally, she called her friend, Janet, who had recently married Nicolas' brother Gabriel. She asked if Janet had seen my father. "Oh honey, he's moved to California. He left this morning," Janet said.”

Erika Jayne (1969) American singer, actress and television personality

pg. 39-40
Pretty Mess book (2018)

Family, Waiting, Housing

“When I painted Christ's parents I was thinking of my own parents. The bearded man is the Child's father. He is my father.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

Chagall stated this in 1950
as quoted in From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, Matthew B. Hoffman; Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 219
after 1930

Thinking, Christ, Painting