Quotes about mother
page 22

“Look on yon child, it droops the head,
Its knees are bow'd with pain;
It mutters from its wretched bed,
"Oh, let me sleep again!"
Alas! 'tis time, the mother's eyes
Turn mournfully away;
Alas! 'tis time, the child must rise,
And yet it is not day.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Factory
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Pain, Sleep, Time

“The obscuring of the difference or duality of the sexes has enormous consequences on a variety of levels. This theory of the human person, intended to promote prospects for equality of women through liberation from biological determinism, has in reality inspired ideologies which, for example, call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2003

Women, Family, Sex, Question

“In many ways I still resent the wretched yellow journalism that was clearly evident in (the media's) treatment of the game — 60 Minutes in particular. I've never watched that show after Ed Bradley's interview with me because they rearranged my answers. When I sent some copies of letters from mothers of those two children who had committed suicide who said the game had nothing to do with it, they refused to do a retraction or even mention it on air. What bothered me is that I was getting death threats, telephone calls, and letters. I was a little nervous. I had a bodyguard for a while.”

Gary Gygax (1938–2008) American writer and game designer

GameSpy interview, Pt. I (15 August 2004)

Death, Children, Way, Game

“Ah here, O mother is they task,
Thy sacred duty to thy land:
Endow thy sons with spirits strong,
With strength of heart and honor bright;
Inspire them with fraternal love,
To strive for freedom and for right.”

Ilia Chavchavadze (1837–1907) Georgian poet and politician; a saint of Georgian Orthodox Church

Source: Anthology of Georgian Poetry (1948), Lines to a Georgian Mother, p. 59

Love, Freedom, Strong, Heart

“I know—yet my arms are empty,
That fondly folded seven,
And the mother heart within me
Is almost starved for heaven.”

Margaret Elizabeth Sangster (1838–1912) American poet, author, journalist, editor

Are the Children at Home.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Heart

“Everybody is born as a mother’s child. When a person does not respect life, but only uses death tolls (number of 228 massacre 20,000 victims) to measure how big a historical tragedy was, how then are we to conduct a dialogue with a person like this?”

Su Tseng-chang (1947) Taiwanese politician

Su Tseng-chang (2014) cited in " DPP’s Su condemns 228 Massacre remarks http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2014/03/02/2003584669" on Taipei Times, 2 March 2014.

Life, Death, Personality

“My grand mother, who was very religious, and to whom I was much attached — my master, who belonged to the church, and other religious persons who visited the house, and whom I often saw at prayers, noticing the singularity of my manners, I suppose, and my uncommon intelligence for a child, remarked I had too much sense to be raised – and if I was, I would never be of any service to any one – as a slave.”

Nat Turner (1800–1831) American slave rebellion leader

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831)

Intelligence, Sense, Housing, Personality

“This is my wedding day! The day I marry Emmanuel! And the word "wedding," which she had always linked the happiness, now seemed austere, distressing, full of snares and revelations. She saw her mother, heavy and moving with difficulty. A vision of herself as a victim of the same deformity was vivid in her mind.”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

Source: The Tin Flute (1945), P. 342

Happiness, Wedding

“By some mysterious reason, there is no difficulty for a man in illtreating a woman, and this is something amazing. Everybody loves his mother, sisters and relatives etc, but still, with all this there is this callous attitude and ill-treatment of women. So women's movements are necessary. One thing which is forgotten in India is the transformation of the attitude of men. It is in this field that active work has to be done. We all preach to women that they should assert themselves. But on the other hand we don't tell sufficient early, strongly, to the male that they should behave well, their attitude should change. I have no doubt that even the women's reservation [bill] will be finally adopted.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Shri K. R. Narayanan President of India in Conversation with N. Ram on Doordarshan and All India Radio

Love, Women, Men, Sister

“Yes, that new world, through the golden gates of which they had passed together, which is the old, old world after all, and nothing else. The same old and new world it was to our fathers and mothers as it is to us, and shall be to our children — a world clear and bright, and ever becoming clearer and brighter to the humble, and true, and pure of heart, to every man and woman who shall live in it as the children of the Maker and Lord of it, their Father. To them, and to them alone, is that world, old and new, given, and all that is in it, fully and freely to enjoy. All others but these are occupying where they have no title; "they are sowing much, but bringing in little; they eat, but have not enough; they drink, but are not filled with drink; they clothe themselves, but there is none warm; and he of them who earneth wages earneth wages to put them into a bag with holes." But these have the world and all things for a rightful and rich inheritance; for they hold them as dear children of Him in whose hands it and they are lying, and no power in earth or hell shall pluck them out of their Father's hand.”

Thomas Hughes book Tom Brown at Oxford

Source: Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Ch. 50, the concluding lines of the novel
The verses quoted are from the Bible: Haggai 1:6

Children, World, Lying, Hell

“I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister — anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book IV, Ch. 4
My Antonia (1918)

World, Idea, Thinking, Sister

“Jewish custom, which traces descent solely from the mother, is more sensible and more discreet. Our own lawgivers can't accept the fact that there are many things in family life that are best kept shrouded in mystery.”

John Mortimer (1923–2009) English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author

Source: Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life (2003), Ch. 21 : Family Values

Life, Family

“I don’t hate God. Some people say it’s impossible to hate a fictional character, but I hated the wicked step-mother in Disney’s Cinderella. Of course that’s because I knew people like her. Even though God is the most objectionable character in all fiction, he’s not real enough to hate. So it’s not that I hate God; it’s that I hate lies, and that’s what your god is made of.
If your god was real, you’d be able to convince me. In fact, he wouldn’t need you. I’d already know. However you are demonstrably wrong on everything you’ve said so far. Whether I can convince you of that depends only on whether you’re reasonably honest.”

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

Patheos, Correspondence with a Creationist http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2017/06/06/correspondence-with-a-creationist/ (June 6, 2017)

God, Hate, People, Dependency

“To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.”

Saul D. Alinsky (1909–1972) American community organizer and writer

Source: Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971), p. 24–25

Life, Fear, Learning, Time

“This is such a big deal, and my life is so simple. There are very few things — there's love, and work, and family. And I'd like to thank all my families, all the tribes that I come from and, most importantly, my mother Brandy who taught me that all my finger paintings were Picasso's and that I didn't have to be afraid. And, mostly, that cruelty might be very human, and it might be very cultural, but it's not acceptable.”

Jodie Foster (1962) American actor, film director and producer

Oscar Acceptance Speech, 1989 Academy Awards, Best Actress in a Leading Role, The Accused.

Love, Life, Family, Painting

“For God, who lives above the skies,
Would look with vengeance in his eyes
If I should ever dare despise
My mother.”

Ann Taylor (poet) (1782–1866) British female poet and literary critic

"My Mother" (1804)

God

“Motherhood and all the sentimentality that goes with Mother's Day was not congenial to the Greek mind. They were a remarkably unsentimental people; they had no particular reverence for children, nor did they regard them as a special and privileged portion of society. It would not have occurred to them to erect a vast temple to Mickey Mouse. They left that for us.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

The Noble Greeks.

Children, People

“O Mother, I throw myself on Thy mercy; I take shelter at Thy Hallowed Feet. I do not want bodily comforts; I do not crave name and fame; I do not seek the eight occult powers. Be gracious and grant that I may have pure love for Thee, a love unsmitten by desire, untainted by any selfish ends — a love craved by the devotee for the sake of love alone. And grant me the favour, O Mother, that I may not be deluded by Thy world-bewitching māyā, that I may never be attached to the world, to "woman and gold", conjured up by Thy inscrutable māyā! O Mother, there is no one but Thee whom I mav call my own. Mother, I do not know how to worship; I am without austerity; I have neither devotion nor knowledge. Be gracious, Mother, and out of Thy infinite mercy grant me love for Thy Lotus Feet.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Source: The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942), p. 731

Love, World, Knowledge, Selfishness

“Mother, they would praise my balls if I hung them high enough.”

Brendan Behan (1923–1964) Irish poet, short story writer, novelist, and playwright

Speaking of newspaper critics, as quoted in Mother of all the Behans: The story of Kathleen Behan as told to Brian Behan (1984) by Kathleen Behan and Brian Behan, p. 119

“To be perfectly honest, it has had its handicaps. The thing is that people judge you by your parents' and people expect me to be just like daddy and mother. Therefore, I can't run across the street or anything.”

Yolanda King (1955–2007) American actress

1970s

People, Parent

“Diamond, however, had not been out so late before in all his life, and things looked so strange about him! — just as if he had got into Fairyland, of which he knew quite as much as anybody; for his mother had no money to buy books to set him wrong on the subject.”

George MacDonald book At the Back of the North Wind

At the Back of the North Wind (1871)

Life, Money, Books

“The first was the classical line, which could be traced back to my early childhood and the Beethoven sonatas I heard my mother play. This line takes sometimes a neo-classical form (sonatas, concertos), sometimes imitates the 18th century classics (gavottes, the Classical symphony, partly the Sinfonietta). The second line, the modern trend, begins with that meeting with Taneyev when he reproached me for the “crudeness” of my harmonies. At first this took the form of a search for my own harmonic language, developing later into a search for a language in which to express powerful emotions (The Phantom, Despair, Diabolical Suggestion, Sarcasms, Scythian Suite, a few of the songs, op. 23, The Gambler, Seven, They Were Seven, the Quintet and the Second Symphony). Although this line covers harmonic language mainly, it also includes new departures in melody, orchestration and drama. The third line is toccata or the “motor” line traceable perhaps to Schumann’s Toccata which made such a powerful impression on me when I first heard it (Etudes, op. 2, Toccata, op. 11, Scherzo, op. 12, the Scherzo of the Second Concerto, the Toccata in the Fifth Concerto, and also the repetitive intensity of the melodic figures in the Scythian Suite, Pas d’acier[The Age of Steel], or passages in the Third Concerto). This line is perhaps the least important. The fourth line is lyrical; it appears first as a thoughtful and meditative mood, not always associated with the melody, or, at any rate, with the long melody (The Fairy-tale, op. 3, Dreams, Autumnal Sketch[Osenneye], Songs, op. 9, The Legend, op. 12), sometimes partly contained in the long melody (choruses on Balmont texts, beginning of the First Violin Concerto, songs to Akhmatova’s poems, Old Granny’s Tales[Tales of an Old Grandmother]). This line was not noticed until much later. For a long time I was given no credit for any lyrical gift whatsoever, and for want of encouragement it developed slowly. But as time went on I gave more and more attention to this aspect of my work. I should like to limit myself to these four “lines,” and to regard the fifth, “grotesque” line which some wish to ascribe to me, as simply a deviation from the other lines. In any case I strenuously object to the very word “grotesque” which has become hackneyed to the point of nausea. As a matter of fact the use of the French word “grotesque” in this sense is a distortion of the meaning. I would prefer my music to be described as “Scherzo-ish” in quality, or else by three words describing the various degrees of the Scherzo—whimsicality, laughter, mockery.”

Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) Ukrainian & Russian Soviet pianist and composer

Page 36-37; from his fragmentary Autobiography.
Sergei Prokofiev: Autobiography, Articles, Reminiscences (1960)

Age, Dreams, Music, Search

“I started at the age of six. My elder brother and sister were dabbling a bit, and then I went to my mother and pestered her to teach me as well.”

Viswanathan Anand (1969) Indian chess player

Game of thrones with world chess champion Viswanathan Anand

Age, Sister

“If someone insults our mother, we would rather die than tolerate it… for us, it is Bharat mata, our biological mother and gau mata.”

Sakshi Maharaj (1956) Indian politician

On the 2015 Dadri mob lynching, as quoted in " If someone insults our mother, we would rather die than tolerate it, warns BJP’s Sakshi Maharaj http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/cow-mother-country-are-alike-dont-insult-sakshi/", The Indian Express (7 October 2015)

“I have not even touched paper, nor have I even taken a pen in hand. In the Bhṛṅgadūta, only the Lord of mother Sītā has spoken.”

Rāmabhadrācārya (1950) Hindu religious leader

citation needed
Masi kāgada chūyo nahīṃ kalama gahī nahiṃ hātha ।
bhṛṃgadūta mahaँ saba kahyo eka jānakīnātha ॥

“Ah! how much a mother learns from her child! The constant protection of a helpless being forces us to so strict an alliance with virtue, that a woman never shows to full advantage except as a mother. Then alone can her character expand in the fulfillment of all life’s duties and the enjoyment of all its pleasures.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Ah! combien de choses un enfant apprend à sa mère. Il y a tant de promesses faites entre nous et la vertu dans cette protection incessante due à un être faible, que la femme n’est dans sa véritable sphère que quand elle est mère; elle déploie alors seulement ses forces, elle pratique les devoirs de sa vie, elle en a tous les bonheurs et tous les plaisirs.
Part I, ch. XXXI.
Letters of Two Brides (1841-1842)

Life, Pleasure, Learning

“In a clap-board shack with a roof of tin,
Where the rain came down and leaked within,
A young mother frozen on a concrete floor,
With a bottle and a box and a cradle of straw.”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

Song lyrics, The Firstborn Is Dead (1985), Tupelo

Box

“[A grandchild barely able to remember Harry's own mother] But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Memory

“I was writing for businesses. I think my mother was a little skeptical in the beginning, but fortunately, as a free-lance writer I was successful almost immediately. And so she was very proud, because she measured success in terms of money, which is what I started to do as well. My goal then, became to increase the amount of money that I made each month. Not simply each year, but each month — I mean, talk about pressure — to have more billable hours each month. So that by the end of my third year of being a free-lance writer, I was billing 90 hours a week. I had no time to sleep. I had no life. People said I was crazy, that I was a workaholic. And I couldn't understand how it was that I had these wonderful clients, and I was making all this money, and I wasn't happy and I didn't feel successful. That's when I started to write fiction.”

Amy Tan (1952) American novelist

American Acheivement interview (1996)

Life, Money, Happiness, People

“Leaving behind son and wife, and father and mother, and wealth and grain, and relatives, and sensual pleasures to the limit, one should wander solitary as a rhinoceros horn.
'This is an attachment; here there is little happiness, and little satisfaction; here there is very much misery; this is a hook.' Knowing this, a thoughtful man should wander solitary as a rhinoceros horn.
Having torn one's fetters asunder, like a fish breaking a net in the water, not returning, like a fire not going back to what is already burned, one should wander solitary as a rhinoceros horn.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

§ 60-62
Source: Pali Canon, Sutta Pitaka, Khuddaka Nikaya (Minor Collection), (Suttas falling down)

Happiness, Pleasure, Fish, Water

“Of all the institutions in their lives, only the Catholic Church has seemed aware of the fact that my mother and father are thinkers—persons aware of the experience of their lives. Other institutions—the nation’s political parties, the industries of mass entertainment and communications, the companies that employed them—have all treated my parents with condescension.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

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

Communication, Parent, Personality

“Mr Mayor and gentlemen - I have great pleasure in associating myself in how ever humble and transitory manner with this great and splendid undertaking. I am glad to be associated with an enterprise which I hope will carry still further the prosperity and power of Liverpool, and which will carry down the name of Liverpool to posterity as the place where a great mechanical undertaking first found its home. Sir William Forwood has alluded to the share which this city took in the original establishment of railways. My memory does not quite carry me back to the melancholy event by which that opening was signalised, but I can remember that which presents to my mind a strange contrast with the present state of things. Almost the earliest thing I can recollect is being brought down here to my mother's house which is close in the neighbourhood, and we took two days on the road, and had to sleep half way. Comparing that with my journey yesterday I feel what an enormous distance has been traversed in the interval, and perhaps a still larger distance and a still more magnificent rate of progress will be achieved before a similar distance of time has elapsed from the present day. I will not detain you in a room where it is perhaps difficult to hear. Of all my oratorical efforts, the one which I find most difficult to achieve is that of competing with a steam engine. Occasionally you are invited to do it at railway stations, and I know distinguished statesmen who do it with effect, but I think I have never ventured to compete in that line. I will therefore, though with some fear and trembling, fulfil the injunctions of Sir William Forwood, and proceed to handle the electric machinery which is to set this line in motion. I only hope the result will be no different from what he anticipates.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

At the opening of the Liverpool Overhead Railway, 4 February 1893. Quoted in the Liverpool Echo of the same day, p. 3
1890s

Pleasure, Fear, Hope, Way

“In another time's forgotten space, your eyes looked through your mother's face, Wildflower seed on the sand and stone, may the four winds blow you safely home. Roll away … the dew”

Robert Hunter (1941–2019) American musician

"Franklin's Tower"
Song lyrics, Blues for Allah (1975)

Home, Time

“O ye by wandering tempest sown
’Neath every alien star,
Forget not whence the breath was blown
That wafted you afar!
For ye are still her ancient seed
On younger soil let fall—
Children of Britain’s island-breed,
To whom the Mother in her need
Perchance may one day call.”

William Watson (poet) (1858–1935) English poet, born 1858

England and Her Colonies http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/england-and-her-colonies/.

Children, Star, Forgetting

“Remove the word black and say 'lives matter'… Stop sending mothers back home empty. You can never replace a mother's child. If we want black lives matter, let's make it matter to us. That's the new call.”

Ray Lewis (American football) (1975) former American football linebacker

As quoted in "Former NFL Player Ray Lewis: 'Let's Make Lives Matter'" https://web.archive.org/web/20150917002938/http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/former-nfl-de-ray-lewis-lets-make-lives-matter-n424971 (2015), by Khorri Atkinson, NBC News. 2010s, 2015

Home

“There were mothers and brothers and sisters, and aunts and cousins to express various opinions on the subject, but as to what they severally advised history is silent.
We know only that on a bright May morning in 1888, John, Lord Greystoke, and Lady Alice sailed from Dover on their way to Africa.
A month later they arrived at Freetown where they chartered a small sailing vessel, the Fuwalda, which was to bear them to their final destination.
And here John, Lord Greystoke, and Lady Alice, his wife, vanished from the eyes and from the knowledge of men.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 1 : Out to Sea

Men, Way, History, Knowledge

“I wonder how many members can realise what [the remilitarisation of the Rhineland] means not merely to the excited politicians in Paris, but to the French peasant in his hovel, to the mother who feels that once again the…peril has come near and that once again her children will be mowed down by the scythe of war.”

Austen Chamberlain (1863–1937) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1936/may/06/foreign-office in the House of Commons (6 May 1936) 1930s

War, Children, Feeling

“In my very first review I was already jaded, observing of "Galia," an obscure French film, that it "opens and closes with arty shots of the ocean, mother of us all, but in between it's pretty clear that what is washing ashore is the French New Wave." My pose in those days was one of superiority to the movies, although just when I had the exact angle of condescension calculated, a movie would open that disarmed my defenses and left me ecstatic and joyful.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (2006)

“A tiny light had been lit in a cottage on Álftanes; probably someone was going out fishing. Often there was frost and frozen snow, and the ice creaked in the night. Somewhere out in the infinite distance lay the spring, at least in God's mind, like the babies that are not yet conceived in the mother's womb.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

God, Spring, Fish, Light

“Hinduism is a religion of the Earth. It honors the Earth as the Divine Mother and encourages us to honor her and help her develop her creative potentials. The deities of Hinduism permeate the world of nature. For example, Shiva is the God of the mountains, while Parvati is the mountain Goddess. Shiva dwells in high and steep rocky crags and cliff faces. Parvati rules over mountain streams, waterfalls, and mountain meadows with their many flowers.”

David Frawley (1950) American Hindu teacher

How I Became A Hindu - My Discovery Of Vedic Dharma

God, World, Religion, Mountain

“The basic freedom of the world is woman's freedom. A free race cannot be born of slave mothers. A woman enchained cannot choose but give a measure of that bondage to her sons and daughters. No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”

Margaret Sanger book Woman and the New Race

Source: Woman and the New Race, (1922), Chapter 8, "Birth Control; A Parents' Problem or Woman's?"

World, Freedom, Daughters

“Who in Ireland could have too much respect for organized religion? We've seen it tear our country in two. My mother was a Protestant. My father was a Catholic. And I learned that religion is often the enemy of God, actually.”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

CNN Larry King Weekend (2002)

God, Religion, Tear, Learning

“Aquinas and Augustus of Hippo, both proposed this extraordinary idea that babies who were unbaptised would not know heaven. They also proposed the idea of purgatory which doesn’t exist in The Bible. There’s absolutely no evidence for it. However, what an extraordinary brilliant coup to imagine such a thing as purgatory. That a soul needs to be prayed for, in order to go to heaven. In order to turn left when he enters the aeroplane of heaven and get a first class seat. That, he needs to be prayed for. And many hundreds, indeed over a thousand years, you’ll be amazed what generous terms those prayers came at. Sometimes as little as two thirds of a year’s salary. Could ensure that a dead loved one would go to heaven. And money could ensure that your baby. Your dead child, your dead uncle, your dead mother, could go to heaven. And if you were rich enough, you could have a chantry built and monks would permanently sing prayers so that that existence in heaven for the child would go up and up and up until they were at the table of the Lord themselves.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

2010s, Intelligence Squared, 2014

Love, Money, Soul, Imagination

“You must teach the children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.”

Chief Seattle (1786–1866) Duwamish chief

Misattributed

Men, Children

“My mother always said democracy is the best revenge.”

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari (1988) politician in Pakistan

As quoted in "Bilawal Bhutto named chairman of PPP" by Barkha Dutt, at ndtv.com (30 December 2007)

Democracy, Revenge

“Of course after the conference a desperate attempt was made by Mr. Bonham-Carter to show that of course they weren't committed to federation at all. Well I prefer to go by what Mr. Grimond says; I think he's more important. And when he was asked about this question there was no doubt about his answer; it was on television. And the question was [laughter] I see what you mean, I see what you mean. Yes was the question: "But the mood of your conference today was that Europe should be a federal state. Now if we had to choose between a federal Europe and the Commonwealth, this would have to be a choice wouldn't it? You couldn't have the two." And Mr. Grimond replied in these brilliantly clear sentences: "You could have a Commonwealth linked, though not of course a direct political link, you could have a Commonwealth link of other sorts. But of course a federal Europe I think is a very important point. Now the real thing is that if you are going to have a democratic Europe, if you are going to control the running of Europe democratically, you've got to move towards some form of federalism and if anyone says different to that they're really misleading the public." That's one in the eye for Mr. Bonham-Carter. [laughter] Now we must be clear about this, it does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent nation-state. I make no apology for repeating it, the end of a thousand years of history. You may say: "All right let it end." But, my goodness, it's a decision that needs a little care and thought. [clapping] And it does mean the end of the Commonwealth; how can one really seriously suppose that if the mother country, the centre of the Commonwealth, is a province of Europe, which is what federation means, it could continue to exist as the mother country of a series of independent nations; it is sheer nonsense.”

Hugh Gaitskell (1906–1963) British politician

Labour Party Annual Conference Report 1962, page 159. Speaking against the Liberal Party's policy of British membership of the European Communities, Labour Party Conference, 2 October 1962. See the video clip here http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/the_daily_politics/6967366.stm

History, Idea, Mood, Question

“Your mother eats fungus from the feet of lepers.”

Christopher Moore book Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal (2002)

“A young cowboy named Billy Joe grew restless on the farm;
A boy filled with wanderlust who really meant no harm.
He changed his clothes and shined his boots;
And combed his dark hair down.
And his mother cried as he walked out.Don't take your guns to town son;
Leave your guns at home Bill.
Don't take your guns to town.”

Johnny Cash (1932–2003) American singer-songwriter

Don't Take Your Guns to Town
Song lyrics, The Fabulous Johnny Cash (1958)

Home, Boy, Change, Clothes

“Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-fixed
Snowflake; that’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

" The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe http://www.bartleby.com/122/37.html", lines 1-8 Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Life, World, Home

“I sketched a young mother with her child at her breast, sitting in a smoky hut. If only I could someday paint what I felt then. A sweet woman, an image of charity. She was nursing her big, year-old bambino... And the woman gave her life and her youth and her power tot the child in utter simplicity, unaware that she was a heroine.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

excerpt of her Journal, Worpswede 1897; as quoted in: Witzling (1991, p. 193) and Delia Gaze (2001) Concise Dictionary of Women Artists, p. 489
1897

Life, Youth, Painting

“Remember, [in the Bible] it's adultery only if the woman is already married. It doesn't matter if the man is married. If he is, she may just become another one of his wives, and a man can have sex with other women who aren't his wives, and that's not cheating either, as long as they live with him, because a man is also allowed to have concubines, and a concubine is a sort of sexual servant who serves no other purpose and has no claim to your estate. Your wife may not have a claim to your estate either, because when you die your wife may become your brother's sexual property. That's how the Bible defines marriage! The Bible does not prohibit multiple wives or incest either. In fact, both are promoted. However, when your father dies, your mother does not become your wife, and you can't inherit any of his other wives either, and the reason that the Bible gives for that is because that would be like looking up your father's skirt… So, a man can have multiple wives and a collection of personal harlots, but he can also have sex with his slaves, and that's not cheating either. You've heard of friends with benefits? You can call this your property rights. That's the only way that makes sense, because according to the Bible all women are property, and property doesn't have rights. Now, some people equate having sex with slaves to rape, because the slave doesn't have any choice. But, according to the Bible, women don't have any choice anyway, and rape can be a prelude to matrimony; if you're a Bronze Age Israelite and you see some young cutie walking unescorted, if you like her, you want her, you can have her, even if she doesn't want you. Now, if you rape a married woman, that's a death sentence for both of you (because the Bible is stupid like that). But if she's not promised to someone else, and you rape her and you get caught, you have to pay her father fifty shekels of silver and she's yours. He may not want her back after that, even his own child, because an unmarried woman who wasn't a virgin was considered damaged goods back then, so they had this rule that "if you pop it, you buy it." So your victim becomes your bride and you're stuck together forever, and can never get divorced (so be careful who you rape). There's actually a cheaper [and] easier way to get a bride; if a man takes a wife and decides he doesn't like her, if he can prove she wasn't a virgin (or if he can convince other people that was probably not a virgin), she she will be murdered on her father's doorstep because, according to the god of infinite mercy, that's the moral thing to do. But if she can prove that she was a virgin, then she must remain married forever to the man who hates her, because that's divine wisdom too. That unpleasant arrangement for both of you will also cost you a hundred shekels, whereas you can marry your rape victim for half the price. So, if you're a complete loser, and you can't get any woman who appeals to you by the normal way, just rape whoever you like and she's yours forever.”

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

Youtube, Other, Biblical Family Values https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bldw8X5apnY (July 11, 2015)

Death, Wisdom, Women, God

“You caused this. Mother is dead from having too many children.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

To her father at her mother's funeral.
Quoted in [2010-05-09, The Pill turns 50, Nidhi Bhushan, DNA, http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/report_the-pill-turns-50_1380774]

Children, Dead

“There was a sharp break in my life after 1953. I came to realize that I couldn't have the same relationships with my friends. Friendship involves the exchange of confidence between two people, but a king can take no one into his confidence. I have even had to put some distance between myself and my old friend Hossein Fardoust whom I trust implicitly. I even observe certain distances with members of my family. I had to tell my mother- who is a very dictatorial woman- that it would be better if she didn't ask me for favours for I might have to refuse her.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

As quoted in Gérard de Villiers (1975), The Imperial Shah: An Informal Biography, page 273-274
Attributed

Life, Friendship, People, Family

“The last thing I watched on telly with my mother, she died in very late 2008 in the middle of the financial crash, was Gordon Brown saying that it was the destiny of the Labour movement to save the global banking system. And that statement –‘the destiny of the Labour movement to save the global banking system’… I looked to my mum and the last movement she made, really, was to shake her head. You know, it may be the fate of the Labour movement but it can’t be its destiny, that’s just crazy. She just looked bewildered by that.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Interview with Inside Politics, 4 February 2015 https://www.holyrood.com/articles/inside-politics/architect-blue-labour-interview-lord-glasman

Fate

“My mother saw me being attacked. She cried when I left engineering for this cause. She understood my fight, encouraged me. I remember all those who were with me in this struggle, including two colleagues who were killed. Whenever I free children from slavery and take them back to their mothers, the tears of happiness in their eyes are like blessings of God. When I see the faces of liberated children, I find their smile of freedom divine and it gives me divine strength. I never feel I'm liberating them, rather it feels like they're giving me freedom.”

Kailash Satyarthi (1954) Indian children's rights activist

Times of India interview (2014)

God, Happiness, Children, Smile

“[The Mother and myself] do not found ourselves on faith alone, but on a great ground of knowledge which we have been developing and testing all our lives. I think I can say that I have been testing day and night for years upon years more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane. That is why I am not alarmed by the aspect of the world around me or disconcerted by the often successful fury of the adverse Forces who increase in their rage as the Light comes nearer and nearer to the field of earth and Matter.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

August 30, 1932
India's Rebirth

World, Faith, Knowledge, Thinking

“I get upset 'cause I just want to be treated the way you are
Like a star not a worry in this world thus far
But wait a minute we both need ya mother's attention
I must be crazy jealous of my own baby infant”

Nas (1973) American rapper, record producer and entrepreneur

Book of Rhymes
On Albums, God's Son (2002)

World, Way, Star, Waiting

“While the war was still in progress, I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, "Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?" I had never thought of this before. The august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities now appeared to me in a new aspect, and I could think of no better way of expressing my sense of these than that of sending forth an appeal to womanhood throughout the world, which I then and there composed.”

Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) American abolitionist, social activist, and poet

On the Franco-Prussian War as the inspiration for her "Mother's Day Proclamation" of 1870 calling for mothers to arise as a social force against war in general.
Reminiscences (1899)

Life, War, World, Way

“I consider myself especially indebted to all the gods together, and more than all to the Great Mother in this particular instance (as in all others) that she did not suffer me to wander about, as it were in the dark, but firstly commanded me to cut away, not as regards my body, but as regards the irrational appetites and motions of the soul, all that was superfluous and empty, by the aid of the Cause, the object of intellect, and which presides over souls, whilst she herself enabled me to conceive certain notions perhaps not discordant with a true, and at the same time, reverential understanding of divine matters.”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

Upon The Mother Of The Gods (c. 362-363)

God, Soul, Understanding, Suffering

“Yes, the words, the land of my birth, they console me and compensate, but they would not bring me my mother back.”

Albert Cohen (1895–1981) Swiss writer

Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954)

Birth

“The most serious flaw of Foucault's system is in the area of sex. I view his hurried, compulsive writing as a massive rationalist defense-formation to avoid thinking about (a) woman, (b) nature, (c) emotion, and (d) the sexual body. His attempt to make the body passive property of male society is an evasion of the universal fact so intolerable to him: that we are all born of human mothers. By turning women into ciphers, he miniaturizes and contains them.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 230

Women, Sex, Nature, Thinking

“Your mother waits, heart-weary, at the door.
Your child in hunger cries for its chewed rice.
I feed your mother, serving as her son,
and like a father teach your child to read.”

Đặng Trần Côn (1710–1745) writer

Source: Chinh phụ ngâm, Lines 157–160

Hunger, Waiting, Reading, Heart

“My mother had naturally spiced the pudding with sixpences and threepenny bits, called zacs and trays respectively. Grandpa had collected one of these in the oesophagus. He gave a protracted, strangled gurgle which for a long time we all took to be the beginning of some anecdote.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Source: Memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs (1980), p. 13

Nature, Time

“A debt-ridden farmer contemplating suicide in Maharashtra and a mother who abandons her children in Karachi because she can't feed them: this is what we have achieved in our mutual desire to teach each other a lesson.”

Mohammed Hanif (1964) Pakistani journalist

Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Sunday_TOI/Ten_myths_about_Pakistan/articleshow/3932145.cms (4 January 2009)

Children, Suicide

“The integrity, beauty and fragrance of future society should be expressed through mothers. The mother is the first teacher. As such, she is the one who can influence a child the most. Whatever the mother does, the child will imbibe. A mother’s breast milk does more than nourish just the baby’s body. It also develops the baby’s mind, intellect and heart. Similarly, the life values a mother transmits to her child give it strength and courage in the future.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

The Infinite Potential of Women (2008)

Life, Beauty, Courage, Teachers

“Cut is the Sure Start maternity allowance. Has [the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith] no idea at all that supporting a family and getting the children out of poverty when the babies are born can save money from the public purse for years to come? Instead, he wants to cut support from the babes in their mothers' arms. At least Margaret Thatcher had the grace to wait until the children were weaned before snatching their support.”

Yvette Cooper (1969) British politician

During a budget response debate http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm100628/debtext/100628-0012.htm, 28 July, 2010.

Money, Children, Family, Idea

“A belief in the purposeful complexity of Fate is always more comforting than random, straightforward facts. This may be why Mother preferred to believe in Atlantis and UFOs rather than in virtually everything else.”

Bradley Denton (1958) American science fiction author

Source: Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede (1991), p. 26

Fate

“There is no difference between killing a baby in its mother's stomach and killing a baby after birth.”

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (1954) 12th President of Turkey from 2014

As quoted in "Turkey PM Erdogan sparks row over abortion" http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-18297760, BBC (June 1, 2012)

Birth, Baby

“Anna and Elsa's parents didn't die. Yes, there was a shipwreck, but they were at sea a little bit longer than we think they were because the mother was pregnant, and she gave birth on the boat, to a little boy. They get shipwrecked, and somehow they really washed way far away from the Scandinavian waters, and they end up in the jungle. They end up building a tree house and a leopard kills them, so their baby boy is raised by gorillas.”

Chris Buck

10 August 2015 via MTV http://www.mtv.com/news/2236490/frozen-director-debunks-major-disney-conspiracy-theory/, affirmed 15 December 2017 by Seventeen https://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/movies-tv/news/a33173/chris-buck-talks-tarzan-frozen-theory/

Way, Boy, Birth, Thinking

“On my mother's side I'm Polish-Jewish, and on my father's side I'm Scottish puffin.”

Tamsin Greig (1966) English actress

When asked about her heritage and striking nose From the Internet Movie Database http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0340067/bio

“MY dearest friend — White or some of my friends or the public papers by this time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will only give you the outlines. My poor dear dearest sister in a fit of insanity has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a mad house, from whence I fear she must be moved to an hospital. God has preserved to me my senses, — I eat and drink and sleep, and have my judgment I believe very sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt. Mr. Norris of the Bluecoat school has been very very kind to us, and we have no other friend, but thank God I am very calm and composed, and able to do the best that remains to do. Write, —as religious a letter as possible— but no mention of what is gone and done with. —With me “the former things are passed away,” and I have something more to do that [than] to feel. God almighty have us all in his keeping.”

Charles Lamb (1775–1834) English essayist

Lamb in September 27, 1796. In his letter to Coleridge; after the family tragedy. As quoted in Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. Letters (1905).

Death, God, Fear, School

“As a human rights defender, like millions of Iranians, I hate the death penalty; I despise discrimination and injustice against women; I protest against the imprisonment and torture of political and civil rights activists in solitary confinement; and I will not be silent in the face of human rights violations. In order to institutionalize human rights and achieve peace between the people and the state, I shall endure my deprivation of freedom and rights, even though separation from my children is nothing less than death for me. I am a woman and a mother, and with all my feminine and maternal sensibilities, I seek a world free from violence and injustice, even if I have suffered injustice and violence tens of times.”

Narges Mohammadi (1972) Iranian human rights activist

Letter Accepting 2018 Andrei Sakharov Prizefrom (2018)

Death, Women, Hate, Children

“But not in my family. My mother and father (with immigrant pragmatism) assumed the American tongue would reinvent their children. Just so did several immigrant Hispanic mothers in Southern California recently remark their children’s reluctance to join America. These mothers feared their children were not swimming in the American current—not in the swifts and not in the depths; not even in the pop. They blamed “bilingual education,” a leaky boat theorem ostensibly designed to sink into the American current. (In fact, the theorem became a bureacracy preoccupied with prolonging itself.) These few mothers organized an opposition to bilingual education and eventually they sank the Armada in California. Theirs was an American impulse: to engage the American flow directly and to let their children be taken by it.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Children, Education, Fear, Family

“The body of the mother is the physical planet. The physical planet therefore symbolizes the mother. The body of the father is the sun. The sun symbolizes the father. Neither the sun nor the earth are the father and the mother, but they are forms representing them.”

Martin Cecil, 7th Marquess of Exeter (1909–1988) Marquess of Exeter

Thus It Is, 1989, p. 6
As of a Trumpet, On Eagle's Wings, Thus It Is

Sun

“A widow, the mother of a family, and from her heart she produces chords to which my whole being responds.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky book The Idiot

The Idiot (1868–9)

Family, Heart

“"The UN and its elitist masters don't want you on their property! And in case you do "trespass" and enter forbidden areas of these pristine UN lands, you might just be shot. U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents and park personnel are now taught to love nature's Mother Earth and to despise and loathe human beings. They are being given firearms and instructed to use them. Meanwhile, foreign immigrants from India, China, Pakistan, Bulgaria, Russia and other nations are being recruited for this national park service police duty because, unlike U. S. nationals, non-English speaking foreigners will not hesitate to carry out orders and shoot American citizen "intruders"." (June 1997).”

Texe Marrs (1944–2019) American writer

citation needed

Love, Nature, Fish

“What kind of man takes a live bomb across the seas in order to blow up other people? People who have mothers and lovers and children, just like him?
Probably either a professional or a patriot, Alex thought. Or, worse, both.”

David Brin book Earth

Part IX (p. 524)
Earth (1990)

Children, People, Lovers, Sea

“I do not think that religion is the most important element. We are held together rather by a body of tradition, handed down from father to son, which the child imbibes with his mother's milk. The atmosphere of our infancy predetermines our idiosyncrasies and predilections.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

In response to a question about whether religion is the tie holding the Jews together.
1920s, Viereck interview (1929)

Religion, Thinking

“You're Orthodox? No. Conservative? Young people never are. My parents were Orthodox. They believe, I believe, that whatever your father is, as long as your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish too because we all come from our mother's womb. A long unbroken chain of Jewish mothers going all the way back to Eve.”

Thomas Pynchon book V.

Source: V. (1963), Chapter Two, Part I, Schoenmaker

People, Way, Parent

“When we had been in Ashenstovo [1873, located near the Prussian border]] a few days my mother took us children to see a famous Polish church, Kostjol, famous for its miraculous Madonna icon. This icon had three precious coats, one of gold, one of coral and one with pearls and diamonds... Many peasant men and women were were lying prostrate on the floor as if crucified, with their arms outstretched. It was very quiet. Suddenly a great blare of trumpets shattered the silence. Terribly frightened I saw the gold curtain open and the Madonna appear wearing a gold robe.”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

from his 'Memories', in 'Catalogue Raisonné of the oil Paintings', ed. Maria Jawlensky, Angelica Jawlensky and Lucia Pieroni-Jawlensky; published resp. in 1991, 1992, 1993
Source: 1936 - 1941, Life Memories' (1938), p.274

Women, Men, Children, Lying

“I am tired of the warmakers making war with our children. I am tired of our tired troops being sent over to do the dirty work for mob bosses who are going to squeeze the life out of Iraq and not leave until every asset and every natural resource has been raped from the country. I am tired of seeing Iraqis burying their loved ones and hearing the reverberating screams of mothers all over our country who are being destroyed for the benefit of a very few.”

Cindy Sheehan (1957) American antiwar activist

Blog entry http://cindy-sheehan.org/2007/01/15/insanity-surge/, January 15, 2007 2007

Love, Life, War, Children

“Appreciation of Mother Earth, her creatures, and the glories of the universe is the job of every human being. We were created to live nonviolently in peace with one another on Mother Earth and celebrate the beauty of creation morning, noon, and night.”

John Dear (1959) Catholic priest from the United States

They Will Inherit the Earth (2018)

Peace, Beauty, Universe, Night

“In my solitude I sing to myself a sweet lullaby, as sweet as my mother used to sing to me.”

Albert Cohen (1895–1981) Swiss writer

Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954)

Solitude, Singing

“My mother had a look on her face that I'll never forget. It was one of complete despair and horror, for losing Bing, for being so foolish as to think she could use faith to change fate.”

Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club

Source: The Joy Luck Club (1989), Ch. 7, pg. 130

Fate, Faith, Thinking, Change

“My heart was beat, beat, beating. No one, except my mother, had ever looked at me or spoken to me like this. “You are the most sensitive and beautiful man I’ve ever met,” she said with tears coming to her eyes. I took a big, deep breath. This was just too much. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been called stupid and ugly for so long that this was really tough to hear. Once, I’ll never forget, two seniors at the Academy had stopped me and ordered me to attention, and I’d snapped to, as we underclassmen were supposed to do. They’d walked around me, carefully inspecting my uniform, and one of them then said, “Is this the cadet?””

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

“Yes,” said the other one. “I agree with you; you’re right,” said the first one. “This is the ugliest cadet in the school!”
Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

Stupidity, School, Beauty, Tear

“Necessity, which frequently exists only in the mind, is less often the mother of invention than of obstinacy, and the obstinacy of those three years exacted from France a penalty which continued to exert its effects over the years, especially in World War II, and which cannot be fully summed up even now.”

Bernard Brodie (1910–1978) American nuclear strategist

Pg. 18
Strategy in the Missile Age

War, World, Penalty

“Somehow the inclination to write about my private life in public is related to the ability to do so. It is not enough to say that my mother and father do not want to write their autobiographies. It needs also to be said that they are unable to write to a public reader. They lack the skill. Though both of them can write in Spanish and English, they write in a hesitant manner. Their syntax is uncertain. Their vocabulary limited. The man who sits in his chair so many hours, and the woman at the ironing board—‘keeping busy because I don’t want to get old’—will never be able to believe that any description of their personal lives could be understood by a stranger far from home.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

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

Life, Home, Business, Personality