Quotes about mother
page 23

“He is Karna, whom the world has abandoned. Karna Alone. Condemned goods. A prince raised in poverty. Born to die unfairly, unarmed and alone at the hands of his brother. Majestic in his complete despair. Praying on the banks of the Ganga. Stoned out of his skull.
Then Kunti appeared. She too was a man, but a man grown soft and womanly, a man with breasts, from doing female parts for years. Her movements were fluid. Full of women. Kunti, too, was stoned. High on the same shared joints. She had come to tell Karna a story.
Karna inclined his beautiful head and listened.
Red-eyed, Kunti danced for him. She told him of a young woman who had been granted a boon. A secret mantra that she could use to choose a lover from among the gods. Of how, with the imprudence of youth, the woman decided to test it to see if it really worked. How she stood alone in an empty field, turned her face to the heavens and recited the mantra. The words had scarcely left her foolish lips, Kunti said, when Surya, the God of Day, appeared before her. The young woman, bewitched by the beauty of the shimmering young god, gave herself to him. Nine months later she bore him a son. The baby was born sheathed in light, with gold earrings in his ears and a gold breastplate on his chest, engraved with the emblem of the sun.
The young mother loved her first-born son deeply, Kunti said, but she was unmarried and couldn't keep him. She put him in a reed basket and cast him away in a river. The child was found downriver by Adhirata, a charioteer. And named Karna.
Karna looked up to Kunti. Who was she? Who was my mother? Tell me where she is. Take me to her.
Kunti bowed her head. She's here, she said. Standing before you.
Karna's elation and anger at the revelation. His dance of confusion and despair. Where were you, he asked her, when I needed you the most? Did you ever hold me in your arms? Did you feed me? Did you ever look for me? Did you wonder where I might be?
In reply Kunti took the regal face in her hands, green the face, red the eyes, and kissed him on his brow. Karna shuddered in delight. A warrior reduced to infancy. The ecstasy of that kiss. He dispatched it to the ends of his body. To his toes. His fingertips. His lovely mother's kiss. Did you know how much I missed you? Rahel could see it coursing through his veins, as clearly as an egg travelling down an ostrich's neck.
A travelling kiss whose journey was cut short by dismay when Karna realised that his mother had revealed herself to him only to secure the safety of her five other, more beloved sons - the Pandavas - poised on the brink of their epic battle with their one hundred cousins. It is them that Kunti sought to protect by announcing to Karna that she was his mother. She had a promise to extract.
She invoked the Love Laws.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

pages 232-233.
The God of Small Things (1997)

Love, Women, God, Secret

“Every culture has a Story of the People to give meaning to the world. Part conscious and part unconscious, it consists of a matrix of agreements, narratives, and symbols that tell us why we are here, where we are headed, what is important, and even what is real. I think we are entering a new phase in the dissolution of our Story of the People, and therefore, with some lag time, of the edifice of civilization built on top of it….
But the new mythos has not yet emerged. We will abide for a time in the space between stories. Those of you who have been through it on a personal level know that it is a very precious - some might say sacred - time. Then we are in touch with the real. Each disaster lays bare the real underneath our stories. The terror of a child, the grief of a mother, the honesty of not knowing why. In such moments we discover our humanity. We come to each other’s aid, human to human. We take care of each other. That’s what keeps happening every time there is a calamity, before the beliefs, the ideologies, the politics take over again.
How can we prepare? We cannot prepare. But we are being prepared.”

Charles Eisenstein (1967) American writer

Charles Eisenstein, 2013:The Space Between Stories http://charleseisenstein.net/2013-the-space-between-stories/, Charleseisenstein.net, 2013

People, World, Thinking, Time

“You're not going to ask me that and if you did I'd pretend that you didn't because everybody and their mother plus their dog and cat and their goldfish asks me that.”

Meat Loaf (1947) American musician, singer, songwriter, record producer and actor

Response to the question "Where did you get the name "Meat Loaf"?" in an interview with Gary Brunnet (22 August 1993) http://www.angelfire.com/rock2/rockinterviews/meatloaf.html

Dogs, Cats

“Franziska (mother of Charlotte): 'In Heaven everything is much more beautiful than here in earth – and when your Mummy has turned into a little angel she'll.... bring a letter, telling her what's like in Heaven..”

Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) German painter

Franziska was of somewhat sentimental disposition. written text with brush, in her painting JHM no. 4175 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Charlotte_Salomon#/media/File:Charlotte_Salomon_-_JHM_4175.jpg: in 'Life? or Theater..', p. 66 her mother committed suicide when Charlotte was still a young girl - as many in her family did, before or later Charlotte Salomon - Life? or Theater?

Beauty, Angels

“By a merciful dispensation of Providence university training is almost as costly as it is unprofitable. The majority will thus be always unable to afford it, and will base their opinions on mother wit and current opinion rather than on demonstration.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Ramblings In Cheapside (1890)

Universe, Training

“The story of Rachel’s unique illness was no secret in Crawford, of course. The fact of it had spread through the college the first year of Rachel’s return and the entire town knew soon after. Crawford reacted in the fashion of small towns immemorial—some tongues wagged constantly, some people could not keep the pity and pleasure at someone else’s misfortune out of their voices and gazes—but mostly the community had folded its protective wings around the Weintraub family like an awkward mother bird shielding its young.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 4 (p. 286)

People, Pleasure, Secret, Family

“As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children.”

Anita Bryant (1940) American singer

Source: Parting Glances: Oranges & lemons sliced http://www.pridesource.com/article.shtml?article=17348 (February 2, 2006).

Children

“There are photographs under the pistol, showing his mother genitals. These genitals make no perceptible impression on him, though it was through them that he first entered the world.”

Elfriede Jelinek book Wonderful, Wonderful Times

248
Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)

World

“Egypt is the mother of the world and will be as great as the world.”

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (1954) Current President of Egypt

- El-Sisi http://archive.is/20140102210335/www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/egypt-leaks-help-not-hurt-el-sissis-image/2013/12/20/afe0bc86-6947-11e3-997b-9213b17dac97_story.html 2013

World

“Hearing has its own memory. It registers the dog whose sudden barking startled me as a child. The folk songs my nanny used to sing. The dadaism of a cabaret song from Berlin: ‘I tear out one of my eyelashes and stab you dead with it,’ innocently sung by my mother. Hitler conjuring up the Almighty. The crowing voice of little Goebbels. Alarm sirens, the roar of aircraft, the blast of bombs. Ljuba Welitsch being Salome. The sonorities of Edwin Fischer’s piano playing. María Casares as Lady Macbeth in Avignon. Ralph Kirkpatrick’s two Scarlatti recitals. Gré Brouwenstijn as Leonore in Fidelio. The epiphany of Ligeti’s Aventures et Nouvelles Aventures. The magic application of noise in Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All sorts of laughter.”

Alfred Brendel (1931) Austrian pianist, poet, and author

quoted in Alan Rusbridger, "Music, Sense and Nonsense by Alfred Brendel review – a great pianist’s thoughts on his art", The Guardian, 24 September 2015

Dogs, Dreams, Tear, Laughter

“To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals (1975), Ch. 4: Becoming a Vegetarian

Lie, Dogs, Freedom, Baby

“I was such a large sperm, my mother went into labor during conception.”

Brad Garrett (1960) actor, comedian, voice actor

When the Balls Drop https://books.google.com/books?idlLydBAAAQBAJ&pgPT0 (2015), Chapter 1, "I Was a Ten-Pound Preemie."

“My mother saw herself as a victim. Once upon a time she had shaped her future and made decisions -- she had left Somalia for Aden, divorced her first husband and chosen my father--but at some point, it seemed, she lost hope. Many Somali women in her position would have worked, would have taken control of their lives, but my mother, having absorbed the Arab attitude that pious women should not work outside the home, felt that this would not be proper. It never occurred to her to go out and create a new life for herself, although she can't have been older than thirty-five or forty when my father left. Instead, she remained completely dependent. She nursed grievances; she was resentful; she was often violent; and she was always depressed.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Source: Infidel (2007), Ch. 5

Life, Women, Hope, Home

“He used to wear a little blond moustache but Mother made him cut it off. She said -'
'Don't tell me. The minister needed it to stuff a cushion.”

Raymond Chandler book The Little Sister

Source: The Little Sister (1949), chapter 2

“Back and forth the fantastic tableaux would spin, past his cruel plebe hazing, the self-discovery at the West Texas Military Academy, the patriarchal Judge MacArthur, all beard and cigar smoke, presiding over dynastic feats at Washington's 1201 N Street; the chimes of the drawing-room clock there telling off the quarters; the ceremonial changing of the guard at Leavenworth; his father's tales of Sherman's dauntless Boys in Blue; his mother's imperious commands to fight and fight and never lower his blade short of victory; the clean crack of Krag rifles and the warm prickling of desert sand as he played with his brother outside the fort stockade; the rumbling of the sunset gun and Pinky's face tilting downward, her lambent smile gilding the child's upturned features while he clutched at her cascading skirts; the yellow notes of the bugles as he stirred in his cradle; the chant of sergeants hawking cadence on the parade ground outside; and, snapping proudly in the overarching sky above him, the flag, and the flag, and the flag.”

William Manchester (1922–2004) (April 1, 1922 – June 1, 2004) American author, journalist and historian

Source: American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964 (1978), p. 709

Smile, Boy, Change, Past

“The narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive woman can succeed in being a "loving” mother as long as the child is small. Only the really loving woman, the woman who is happier in giving than in taking, who is firmly rooted in her own existence, can be a loving mother when the child is in the process of separation.”

Erich Fromm book The Art of Loving

Source: The Art of Loving (1956), Ch. 2

Love

“Freud, Sigmund: A man so dissatisfied with his own mother and father that he devoted his life to convincing everyone who would listen — or better still, talk — that their parents were just as bad.”

John Ralston Saul The Doubter's Companion

"Freud"
The Doubter's Companion (1994)

Life, Parent

“Morgot and Myra would tell her there wasn’t any reason to make promises or seek changes because the Great Mother didn’t bargain. The deity didn’t change her mind for women’s convenience. Her way was immutable. As the temple servers said, “No sentimentality, no romance, no false hopes, no self-petting lies, merely that which is!””

Sheri S. Tepper book The Gate to Women's Country

Which left very little room, Stavia thought, for womanly initiative.
Source: The Gate to Women's Country (1988), Chapter 2 (p. 9)

Women, Hope, Way, Change

“Reconstruction is merely a special case of economic progress. If we are to understand its problems thoroughly, we must examine what is meant by economic progress and try to discover how it comes about… Economic progress is not altogether easy to define and is even more difficult to measure. Nevertheless, the phrase clearly corresponds to a meaningful idea. We have only to contrast a savage society with our own. In a savage society, the same customs, the same techniques, the same ways of doing everything, from ploughing to praying, are maintained generation after generation, son following exactly in the footsteps of his father and daughter in the footsteps of her mother, without deviating an inch from the well-trodden way. In modern civilized society, on the other hand, there is constant change and flux; we are constantly improving on the methods of our ancestors, and indeed one of the surest ways to discredit anything is to call it "old-fashioned!"”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1940s, The Economics of Peace, 1945, p. 73

Way, Idea, Fashion, Understanding

“From '41 to '51
I was my folk's contrary son;
I bit my father's hand right through
And broke my mother's heart in two.”

John Masefield The Everlasting Mercy

Opening lines
The Everlasting Mercy (1919)

Heart

“"If you believe," he shouted to them, "clap your hands; don't let Tink die."
Many clapped.
Some didn't.
A few beasts hissed.
The clapping stopped suddenly; as if countless mothers had rushed to their nurseries to see what on earth was happening; but already Tink was saved. First her voice grew strong, then she popped out of bed, then she was flashing through the room more merry and impudent than ever. She never thought of thanking those who believed, but she would have like to get at the ones who had hissed.”

J. M. Barrie book Peter Pan

Source: Peter and Wendy (1911), Ch. 13

Strong

“The dullness of fact is the mother of fiction.”

Isaac Asimov book Fact and Fancy

Fact and Fancy (1962), p. 11
General sources

“Ridiculous as the idea may have been for her bluestocking mother to send brother and sister over alone like this, the fact was that Judy was protected as much by her curiosity as by her innocence. And then there was this other thing about her, too. You know all that razzle-dazzle about people being born in Original Sin and all that rot? Well, maybe it’s rot and maybe it isn’t. I mean I wouldn’t slit my throat from ear to ear, just because I’d found out for sure that most people are. But she wasn’t. That was the thing. She simply wasn’t.”

Elaine Dundy (1921–2008) American journalist, actress

I’m positive of that.
Part One, Two
The Dud Avocado (1958)

People, Idea, Sister

“I support freedom of choice. My choice is to not support abortion, except in cases of a clear-cut choice between the lives of the mother and child. A child conceived through incest or rape is innocent and deserves the right to be born.”

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

"How I am a Roman Catholic" http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/how-i-am-a-roman-catholic Roger Ebert's Journal (1 March 2013)

Support, Freedom

“Mother brings a child late to contact by half-an-hour; father then requires an extra half-hour the next week. This is getting silly. If, in fact, the father does not see the child at all, of course he should see the child on another occasion, but there are fathers who actually add up the minutes and produce it and say "Now I should have so much more contact because I lost five minutes last week and ten minutes the week before."”

Elizabeth Butler-Sloss (1933) English judge

Testimony before the Constitutional Affairs Committee http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmconst/uc1247-i/uc124702.htm, November 9, 2004

“Children's health depends on the mothers, so if we can scale up the achievement of the MDGs, it would benefit people in Africa. We should also look at how we can empower women to leverage their resources and their creativity and become change agents. We have seen example after example where women who are appropriately motivated and given the right environment can make changes, not only to themselves but also to their families and their communities.”

Margaret Chan (1947) Director-General of the World Health Organization

WHO Interview on taking office as Director-General http://www.who.int/dg/chan/interviews/taking_office/en/, Frontlines, 4 January 2007.

Women, Children, People, Health

“Of the nature of Death and the Dead we may enumerate twelve kinds. First there are those who become new gods, for whom new universes are born. Second those who praise. Third those who fight as soldiers in the unending war with evil. Fourth those who amuse themselves among flowers and sweet springs with sports. Fifth those who dwell in gardens of bliss, or are tortured. Sixth those who continue as in life. Seventh those who turn the wheel of the universe. Eighth those who find in their graves their mothers' wombs and in one life circle forever. Ninth ghosts. Tenth those born again as men in their grandsons' time. Eleventh those who return as beasts or trees. And last those who sleep.”

Gene Wolfe book Gene Wolfe's Book of Days

"Forlesen", Orbit 14 (1974), ed. Damon Knight, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Gene Wolfe's Book of Days (1981), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Castle of Days (1992), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Fiction

Life, Death, Men, God

“All dreads other than reverent dread that are proffered to us, though they come under the colour of holiness yet are not so true, and hereby may they be known asunder. — That dread that maketh us hastily to flee from all that is not good and fall into our Lord’s breast, as the Child into the Mother’s bosom, with all our intent and with all our mind, knowing our feebleness and our great need, knowing His everlasting goodness and His blissful love, only seeking to Him for salvation, cleaving to with sure trust: that dread that bringeth us into this working, it is natural, gracious, good and true. And all that is contrary to this, either it is wrong, or it is mingled with wrong. Then is this the remedy, to know them both and refuse the wrong.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Sixteenth Revelation, Chapter 74

Love, Nature

“Our most cruel enemies are our nearest in blood!… Kings have neither brothers, nor sons, nor mothers.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Nos plus cruels ennemis sont nos proches... Les rois n'ont ni frères, ni fils, ni mère.
Source: About Catherine de' Medici (1842), Part II: The Ruggieri's Secret, Ch. V: The Alchemists.

“When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic

First chorus, line 65.
Atalanta in Calydon (1865)

Spring, Winter

“It is as natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than their lives.”

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer

Crabbed Age and Youth.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

Love, Men, Nature

“I want to turn the whole thing upside down.
I’ll find the things they say just can’t be found.
I’ll share this love I find with everyone.
We’ll sing and dance to mother nature’s songs.
I don’t want this feeling to go away.”

Jack Johnson (musician) (1975) American musician

Upside Down.
Song lyrics, Sing-A-Longs and Lullabies for the Film Curious George (2006)

Love, Feeling, Nature, Singing

“After this Alexander left Dareius's mother, his daughters, and his son in Susa, providing them with persons to teach them the Greek language, and marching on with his army on the fourth day reached the Tigris River.”

Diodorus Siculus (-90–-30 BC) Greek historiographer

Histories 17.67.1

Personality, Daughters

“Music has a natural place in our lives. Right from the shloka you recite in your morning puja and the milkman who comes whistling on his cycle, to the fakir singing as he begs for alms and your mother humming around the kitchen…Music fills our spaces naturally. It will always be dear to us.”

Gulzar

Gulzar, in an interview http://www.upperstall.com/people/gulzar

Music, Nature, Singing

“My beautiful Grandmother -- Caroline Garlinghouse -- came from Pittsburgh -- my mother's mother. I never met her but I have followed many of her ideas -- through my mother -- And it has given me a warm spot in my heart for your city…My grandmother's brother, Fred Garlinghouse, lived in Pittsburgh, was an engineer and apparently worked for Jones & Laughlin.”

Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) film, stage, and television actress

On Stage: Kate Hepburn, Richard Rauh and old Nixon Pittsburgh Post-Gazette July 9, 2003. http://old.post-gazette.com/ae/20030709rawson0709p5.asp

Beauty, Idea, Heart

“The Constitution forbids the passing of a bill of attainder: that is, a law entailing upon the child the disabilities and hardships imposed upon the parent. Every slave law in America might be repealed on this very ground. The slave is made a slave because his mother is a slave. But to all this it is said that the practice of the American people is against my view. I admit it. They have given the Constitution a slaveholding interpretation. I admit it. Thy have committed innumerable wrongs against the Negro in the name of the Constitution. Yes, I admit it all; and I go with him who goes farthest in denouncing these wrongs. But it does not follow that the Constitution is in favor of these wrongs because the slaveholders have given it that interpretation. To be consistent in his logic, the City Hall speaker must follow the example of some of his brothers in America — he must not only fling away the Constitution, but the Bible. The Bible must follow the Constitution, for that, too, has been interpreted for slavery by American divines. Nay, more, he must not stop with the Constitution of America, but make war with the British Constitution, for, if I mistake not, the gentleman is opposed to the union of Church and State. In America he called himself a Republican. Yet he does not go for breaking down the British Constitution, although you have a Queen on the throne, and bishops in the House of Lords.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery? (1860)

War, People, Law, Parent

“Mothers with marriageable daughters ought to look out for men of this stamp, men with brains to act as protecting divinity, with worldly wisdom to diagnose like a surgeon, and with experience to take a mother’s place in warding off evil. These are the three cardinal virtues in matrimony.”

Honoré de Balzac book Une fille d'Ève

Les mères de famille devraient rechercher de pareils hommes pour leurs filles: l'Esprit est protecteur comme la Divinité, le Désenchantement est perspicace comme un chirurgien, l'Expérience est prévoyante comme une mère. Ces trois sentiments sont les vertus théologales du mariage.
Source: A Daughter of Eve (1839), Ch. 3: The Story of a Happy Woman.

Wisdom, Men, Marriage, Evil

“Unless in fact he had a very dim memory of her and the photograph had blown on the tiny little ember of his connection with his granny, like a faint orange glow in a heap of soft grey ash, and for a moment he really could remember when he had sat on his granny’s lap and smiled at her and patted her wrinkly old face — his mother said he smiled at her and she was really pleased.”

Edward St. Aubyn (1960) British writer

At Last, Chapter 10

Smile, Memory

“I would take school instruction out of the hands of the old order of decrepit, stammering, journeymen-teachers as well as from the new weak ones, who are generally no better for popular instruction, and entrust it to the undivided powers of Nature herself, to the light that God kindles and ever keeps alive in the hearts of fathers and mothers, to the interest of parents who desire that their children should grow up in favour with God and man.”

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) Swiss pedagogue and educational reformer

How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (1801), ed. Ebenezer Cooke, trans. Lucy E. Holland and Frances C. Turner (Syracuse, NY, 1894), letter VII, p. 97 http://www.archive.org/stream/howgertrudeteach00pestuoft/howgertrudeteach00pestuoft_djvu.txt

God, Children, School, Nature

“His rivals used to say quite a bit
That as a monarch he was most unfit.
But still in all they had to admit
That he loved his mother.”

Tom Lehrer (1928) American singer-songwriter and mathematician

"Oedipus Rex"
An Evening (Wasted) With Tom Lehrer (1959)

Love

“Equal employment opportunities, yes, but we shouldn't get our women into jobs where they cannot, at the same time, be mothers…our most valuable asset is in the ability of our people, yet we are frittering away this asset through the unintended consequences of changes in our education policy and equal opportunities for women. This has affected their traditional role … as mothers, the creators and protectors of the next generation.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

[Wong, Theresa, Brenda Yeoh, Fertility and the Family: An Overview of Pro-natalist Population Policies in Singapore, ASIAN METACENTRE RESEARCH PAPER SERIES, 2003, 12, http://www.populationasia.org/Publications/RP/AMCRP12.pdf]
1980s

Women, People, Education, Change

“To arrive at understanding from being one's true self is called nature, and to arrive at being one's true self from understanding is called culture. He who is his true self has thereby understanding, and he who has understanding finds thereby his true self.
Only those who are their absolute true selves in the world can fulfil their own nature; only those who fulfil their own nature can fulfil the nature of others; only those who fulfil the nature of others can fulfil the nature of things; those who fulfil the nature of things are worthy to help Mother Nature in growing and sustaining life; and those who are worthy to help Mother Nature in growing and sustaining life are the equals of heaven and earth.”

Zisi (-481–-402 BC) Chinese philosopher

Source: The Doctrine of the Mean, p. 123

Life, World, Understanding, Nature

“"There is no God, and Mary is his mother." Often, almost certainly incorrectly, attributed to Santayana himself. More plausibly attributed to Robert Lowell, as a sardonic description of Santayana's philosophy.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Paul Mariani, "Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell" (1994), p. 159
Misattributed

God

“He picked up from me a certain way of thinking, certain logic, certain cut of mind. He has got from his mother a facility with words, and a certain intuition. So please do give him some slack, if you find that he thinks slowly, and speaks even more slowly.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew on Lee Hsien Loong, Straits Times, Jun 22, 2004
2000s

Way, Thinking

“I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me — to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

Way, Mountain, Parting

“With all the efforts made by modern society to nurture and educate the young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the world!”

Jane Addams (1860–1935) pioneer settlement social worker

Source: Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Ch. 9

Children, Stupidity, World, Education

“My obsession with wolves hadn't helped past relationships. I had split up with Jan, the mother of my four children, after 11 years together, but there was never any animosity; it was more a case of separation by default. Maybe I never gave that relationship a chance. I was so passionate about wolves that I wonder whether any human relationship could have come close. If I'd had to choose between spending a night in the wolf enclosure or at home, I would probably have chosen the wolves.”

Shaun Ellis (1977) American football player, defensive end

I howled for the woman I loved... and she howled back - British wolfman tells how his obsession drove away the love of his life http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1245507/I-howled-woman-I-loved--howled--British-wolfman-tells-obsession-drove-away-love-life.html, Daily Mail, (23 January, 2010)

Children, Home, Wolf, Passion

“How do I pick a role? Well, primarily I think I would like to be part of a film that's progressive as well as entertaining, you know? Because in India we have a huge amount of audience that is not educated, and they really look up to films… So I think it's important to do a film… that's entertaining but has a message. And after that I'd like to do films that are different for me -- if I'm doing a love story then I want to do a war film, if I'm doing a war film then I want to do a story about an un-wed mother. I think variety is the spice of life.”

Preity Zinta (1975) film actress

Famous quotes

Love, Life, War, Education

“The women giving birth, who I respect as mothers, were militants who were active in the machine of terror… Many used their unborn children as human shields.”

Jorge Rafael Videla (1925–2013) Argentinian President

As quoted in anon (May 17, 2013) "Former Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla dies in prison age 87". The Independent.

Women, Children, Birth

“India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.”

Will Durant (1885–1981) American historian, philosopher and writer

The Case for India (1931)

Way, Democracy, Communication, Mathematics

“I'd like to thank the academy and I'd like to thank my mother and I'd like to thank my mother again, because I forgot to thank her last year.”

James Spader (1960) American actor

2005 Emmy Awards acceptance speech for Best dramatic actor. Quoted at BBC News (September 19, 2005)

“Profound as race prejudice is against the Negro American, it is not practically as far-reaching as the prejudice against women. For stripping away the sentimentality which makes Mother’s Day and Best American Mother Contests, the truth is that women suffer all the effects of a minority.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Of Men and Women (1941), Ch. 8

Women, Truth, Suffering

“It took me a while to realize that these stories, while often used with children, are not at all children's stories. I think the devil has tricked us into thinking so much of biblical theology is a story fit for kids. How did we come to think the story of Noah's ark is appropriate for children? Can you imagine a children's book about Noah's ark complete with paintings of people gasping in gallons of water, mothers grasping their children while their bodies go flying down white-rapid rivers, the children's tiny heads being bashed against rocks or hung up in fallen trees? I don't think a children's book like that would sell many copies.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Children, People, Books, Imagination

“Next morning the sun revealed a horrid spectacle on the vast plain south of PAnipat. On the actual field of the combat thirty-one distinct heaps of the slain were counted, the number of bodies in each ranging from 500 upwards to 1000 and in four up to 1500 a rough total of 28,000. In addition to these, the ditch round the Maratha camp was full of dead bodies, partly the victims of disease and famine during the long siege and partly wounded men who had crawled out of the fighting to die there. West and south of PAnipat city, the jungle and the road in the line of MarAtha retreat were littered with the remains of those who had fallen unresisting in the relentless DurrAni pursuit or from hunger and exhaustion. Their number - probably three-fourths non-combatants and one-fourth soldiers - could not have been far short of the vast total of those slain in the battlefield. 'The hundreds who lay down wounded, perished from the severity of the cold.'….
'After the havoc of combat followed massacre in cold blood. Several hundreds of MarAthas had hidden themselves in the hostile city of PAnipat through folly or helplessness; and these were hunted out next day and put to the sword. According to one plausible account, the sons of Abdus Samad Khan and Mian Qutb received the DurrAni king's permission to avenge their father's death by an indiscriminate massacre of the MarAthas for one day, and in this way nearly nine thousand men perished; these were evidently non-combatants. The eyewitness Kashiraj Pandit thus describes the scene: 'Every Durrani soldier brought away a hundred or two of prisoners and slew them in the outskirts of their camp, crying out, When I started from our country, my mother, father, sister and wife told me to slay so may kafirs for their sake after we had gained the victory in this holy war, so that the religious merit of this act [of infidel slaying] might accrue to them. In this way, thousands of soldiers and other persons were massacred. In the Shah's camp, except the quarters of himself and his nobles, every tent had a heap of severed heads before it. One may say that it was verily doomsday for the MarAtha people.'….
The booty captured within the entrenchment was beyond calculation and the regiments of Khans [i. e. 8000 troopers of AbdAli clansmen] did not, as far as possible, allow other troops like the IrAnis and the TurAnis to share in the plunder; they took possession of everything themselves, but sold to the Indian soldiers handsome Brahman women for one tuman and good horses for two tumans each.' The Deccani prisoners, male and female reduced to slavery by the victorious army numbered 22,000, many of them being the sons and other relatives of the sardArs or middle class men. Among them 'rose-limbed slave girls' are mentioned.' Besides these 22,000 unhappy captives, some four hundred officers and 6000 men fled for refuge to ShujA-ud-daulah's camp, and were sent back to the Deccan with monetary help by that nawab, at the request of his Hindu officers. The total loss of the MarAthas after the battle is put at 50,000 horses, captured either by the AfghAn army or the villagers along the route of flight, two hundred thousand draught cattle, some thousands of camels, five hundred elephants, besides cash and jewellery. 'Every trooper of the Shah brought away ten, and sometimes twenty camels laden with money. The captured horses were beyond count but none of them was of value; they came like droves of sheep in their thousands.”

Ahmed Shah Durrani (1722–1772) founder of the Durrani Empire, considered founder of the state of Afghanistan

Jadunath Sarkar, Fall of the Mughal Empire, Volume II, Fourth Edition, New Delhi, 1991, p.210-11

Death, Women, Men, Money

“I don't have a deep desire to know my father. My brother and sister and I got forgotten about by him, and we haven't spoken to him in a ridiculous amount of years. He never contacted us after he and my mother broke up. […] I never felt rejected as a kid. We had a fulfilling life with my mum. She was so strong.”

Anastacia (1968) American singer-songwriter

Anastacia refuses to see father http://www.breakingnews.ie/showbiz/anastacia-refuses-to-see-father-165719.html, Breaking News.ie, September 9, 2004. General Quotes

Life, Sister, Strong

“The name " Hindustan " must continue to be the appellation of our country. Such other names as India, Hind, etc., being derived from the same original word Sindhu may be used but only to signify the same sense—die land of the Hindus, a country which is the abode of the Hindu Nation. Aryavarta, Bharat-Bhumi and such other names are of course the ancient and the most cherished epithets of our Mother Land and will continue to appeal to the cultured elite. In this insistence that the Mother Land of the Hindus must be called but " Hindustan ", no encroachment or humiliation is implied in connection with any of our non-Hindu countrymen. Our Parsee and Christian countrymen are already too akin to us culturally and are too patriotic and the Anglo-indians too sensible to refuse to fall in line with us Hindus on so legitimate a ground.”

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) Indian pro-independence activist,lawyer, politician, poet, writer and playwright

V.D. Savarkar quoted from B.R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)

Sense, Country

“Why does the drum, of all instruments, have the greatest potential for life enhancement? I don't really know but here are some thoughts. First of all, there are no notes, therefore fewer judgments to be made by yourself and by others. There will be less right and wrong—especially if there is no counting. Is it the vibrating membrane? So alive! Is it because of its roundness? What I do know, is that everyone's association with the drum is with Life, with Heart—even more with the Mother.”

John Diamond (doctor) (1934) Australian doctor

Source: The Way of the Pulse: Drumming with Spirit (1999), p. 79

Life, Heart

“He knew what she'd be reading first as she started from the beginning, reading what he'd had to say when he was younger, and then growing older, stories at first about tiny mice who lived in families in back of the wall, and stories about school, and apartments in Greenpoint and Carnasie and Flatbush, elves in Ireland that he'd pictured as Pop had told him about them, and the woman with lace on her sleeves.
She kept turning pages, and then halfway through, she whispered, "Water Street."
Thomas knew she was reading now about a boy who listened at a register, thinking about a family, and a lighthouse, and then she turned the next page and took a breath.
It was the story he really wanted her to see: a story about a girl who though less of herself than everyone else did, who worried about everyone, even when she didn't want to, even when it made her irritable. A girl who was afraid, and who hardly knew it yet, but was on her way to being a healer like her mother, because there'd never be anything else for her, and how lucky they were just to know her.”

Patricia Reilly Giff (1935) American children's writer

Source: Water Street (2006), Chapters 21-29, p. 135-136

School, Family, Way, Girl

“The blackbirds are in this book, they're both pro the kids and against the kids. Just like fate. Sometimes it goes your way. Sometimes… and also a blackbird is from my passion for Schubert songs and his blackbirds and his birds of doom or birds of good. … some people were baffled that in the last big picture of that book, there's a crucifix on the wall of the children's house. Everybody assumes the hero and heroine are Jewish and the mother is Jewish. They're not. They're not. — That was my point. Those kids were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And all children were in the Holocaust. Everybody was in the Holocaust. So, I made sure my hero and heroine were not Jewish children. That was too easy. That was too easy.”

Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) American illustrator and writer of children's books

NOW interview (2004)

Fate, Children, People, Books

“No sound doth great the still of night;
My mother land in silence lies;
Yet oft is heard an anguished moan
As Georgia in her slumber sighs. I stand alone … the mountains, shades
The slumber of my land caress.
O God! O God! when will we wake
And rise again to happiness?”

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

Elegy, p. 60
Anthology of Georgian Poetry (1948)

God, Happiness, Mountain, Silence

“It is a view of God that compensates every thing else, and enables the soul to rest in His bosom. How, when the child in the night screams with terror, hearing sounds that it knows not of, is that child comforted and put to rest? Is it by a philosophical explanation that the sounds were made by the rats in the partition? Is it by imparting entomological knowledge? No; it is by the mother taking the child in her lap, and singing sweetly to it, and rocking it. And the child thinks nothing of the explanation, but only of the mother.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 599

God, Soul, Knowledge, Thinking

“Here’s a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life—’’possessive’’, even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life, only you know why his body has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth.”

Aravind Adiga book The White Tiger

The Second Night.
The White Tiger (2008)

Life, Feeling, Time, Fight

“Just as the mother influence is formative with a man's anima, the father has a determining influence on the animus of a daughter. The father imbues his daughter's mind with the specific coloring conferred by those indisputable views mentioned above, which in reality are so often missing in the daughter. For this reason the animus is also sometimes represented as a demon of death. A gypsy tale, for example, tells of a woman living alone who takes in an unknown handsome wanderer and lives with him in spite of the fact that a fearful dream has warned her that he is the king of the dead. Again and again she presses him to say who he is. At first he refuses to tell her, because he knows that she will then die, but she persists in her demand. Then suddenly he tells her he is death. The young woman is so frightened that she dies. Looked at from the point of view of mythology, the unknown wanderer here is clearly a pagan father and god figure, who manifests as the leader of the dead (like Hades, who carried off Persephone). He embodies a form of the animus that lures a woman away from all human relationships and especially holds her back from love with a real man. A dreamy web of thoughts, remote from life and full of wishes and judgments about how things "ought to be," prevents all contact with life. The animus appears in many myths, not only as death, but also as a bandit and murderer, for example, as the knight Bluebeard, who murdered all his wives.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Source: Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Animus, a Woman's Inner Man, p. 319 - 320

Love, Life, Death, God

“The cult of the Virgin, Mariolatry, which by the gradual elevation of the divine element in the Virgin has led almost to her deification, answers merely to the feeling that God should be a perfect man, that God should include in his nature the feminine element. The progressive exaltation of the Virgin Mary, the work of Catholic piety, having its beginning in the expression Mother of God, …has culminated in attributing to her the status of co-redeemer and in the dogmatic declaration of her conception without the stain of original sin. Hence she now occupies a position between Humanity and Divinity and nearer Divinity than Humanity. And it has been surmised that in course of time she may perhaps even come to be regarded as yet another personal manifestation of the Godhead.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God

God, Feeling, Nature, Time

“O God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we call upon thy holy name, and as suppliants we implore thy clemency, that by the intercession of Mary, ever Virgin Immaculate and our Mother, and of the glorious Archangel St. Michael, thou wouldst deign to help us against Satan and all other unclean spirits, who wander about the world for the injury of the human race and the ruin of souls. Amen.”

Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903) 256th Pope of the Catholic Church

Prayer to Saint Michael (1888)

God, World, Soul, Help

“The best way to help children is to help their mothers live long to raise them.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2010s, 2014, U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit Spousal Program (August 2014)

Children, Way, Help

“"At 11:00 PM, the police came to my mother's house to eject her… they locked her up for being a loser." - My Mother Smokes Crack Rocks”

Wesley Willis (1963–2003) American singer-songwriter

Lyrics, Solo

Housing

“A wise son maketh a glad father: but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother.”

Solomon (-990–-931 BC) king of Israel and the son of David

[Proverbs, 10:1, 9]

“These experiences are not 'religious' in the ordinary sense. They are natural, and can be studied naturally. They are not 'ineffable' in the sense the sense of incommunicable by language. Maslow also came to believe that they are far commoner than one might expect, that many people tend to suppress them, to ignore them, and certain people seem actually afraid of them, as if they were somehow feminine, illogical, dangerous. 'One sees such attitudes more often in engineers, in mathematicians, in analytic philosophers, in book keepers and accountants, and generally in obsessional people'. The peak experience tends to be a kind of bubbling-over of delight, a moment of pure happiness. 'For instance, a young mother scurrying around her kitchen and getting breakfast for her husband and young children. The sun was streaming in, the children clean and nicely dressed, were chattering as they ate. The husband was casually playing with the children: but as she looked at them she was suddenly so overwhelmed with their beauty and her great love for them, and her feeling of good fortune, that she went into a peak experience…”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: New Pathways In Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution (1972), p. 17

Love, Happiness, Children, People

“I always said if I lived to get grown and had a chance, I was going to try to get something for my mother and I was going to do something for the black man of the South if it would cost my life; I was determined to see that things were changed.”

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977) American civil rights activist (October 6, 1917 – March 14, 1977)

As quoted in Freedomways, p. 232 (Second quarter, 1965).

Life, Change, Chance

“The storm that hit the United States was the result of every mother or father's prayer, or an orphaned son, or a woman whose honour was taken away in Iraq or Afghanistan.”

Abu Musab Zarqawi (1966–2006) Jordanian jihadist

On Hurricane Katrina. Referring to Hurricane Katrina https://www.irishtimes.com/news/abu-musab-al-zarqawi-in-quotes-1.786124 The Irish Times (11th September 2005)

“Just why are we so poor? Why can I never sleep at night? Because bombs keep dropping! Why does my mother have to torture herself like that? Why didn't anyone give my dad a break? Why is there a war? Why? Why? Why?”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

On his childhood. p. 40
Kinski Uncut : The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (1996)

War, Sleep, Night

“.. Mother, the dawn has broken in me and I can feel the day approaching. I'm going to become somebody. If only I had been able to show Father that my life has not been fishing in troubled waters, pointless; if only I had been able to repay him for the part of himself that he planted in me! I feel that the time is soon coming when I no longer have to be ashamed and remain silent, but when I feel with pride that I am a painter..”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

In a letter to her mother, from Worpswede, 6 July 1902; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 202
1900 - 1905

Life, Feeling, Fish, Water

“The boy on the Oakland porch goes to sleep upon the universe of ice and wakes up and remembers the death of his father and mother, and sees the sun.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

Obituaries (1979)

Death, Boy, Sleep, Universe

“I had to read it out to my sister, who was witness to my early dark days, when my mother was afraid what would happen to me. But, I knew I couldn't read without choking up, so I asked Gautami to read it out for me.”

Kamal Haasan (1954) Indian actor

About the letters from Balachander, in “His Master's voice 1 September 2010”

Sister, Reading

“One by one the tribe swung down from their arboreal retreats and formed a circle about Tarzan and his vanquished foe. When they had all come Tarzan turned toward them.
"I am Tarzan," he cried. "I am a great killer. Let all respect Tarzan of the Apes and Kala, his mother. There be none among you as mighty as Tarzan. Let his enemies beware."”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 7 : The Light of Knowledge

“In response to his grandchildren holding dual passports in a way said to be contrary to law - "What is the big deal? Their mother is an Indian diplomat, so they used an Indian passport. The passports were duly kept in the custody of Indian mission in New York once they had received US passports… When we were taking the kids to the US, we were told as they were natural US citizens they should get US passports."”

Uttam Khobragade (1951) bureaucrat

Devyani's daughters' dual passports raise a stink http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/khobragade-daughters-dual-passports-raise-a-stink-mea-unaware/article1-1194794.aspx, Hindustan Times, 14 March 2014.

Law, Way, Nature

“The most unacknowledged spending expectation among women is the amount of time spent by single mothers caring for children, not only physically, but psychologically. It is my feeling that only a small percentage of a mother’s time is normally compensated for by child support, given what a woman could make adding these hours to workforce hours… It is why women who have never been married and never had children earn so much more in the workplace than women who have had children.”

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

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 222.

Women, Children, Feeling, Support

“I had been gone a fortnight when the telegram was put into my hands. I had got a letter from my sister, a few hours before, saying that all was well at home. The telegram said in five words that she had died suddenly the previous night. There was no mention of my mother, and I was three days' journey from home.
The news I got on reaching London was this: my mother did not understand that her daughter was dead, and they were waiting for me to tell her.”

J. M. Barrie book Margaret Ogilvy

Source: Margaret Ogilvy (1897), Ch. 10

Home, Understanding, Sister, Waiting

“In one variant, "On the day He created the heavens and the earth, Allah Almighty created a hundred mercies, each mercy equal to what is between the heaven and the earth, and He put one mercy on the earth by which a mother has compassion for her child and wild animals and birds for each other. On the Day of Rising, He will perfect them with this mercy."”

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

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 3, hadith number 420
Sunni Hadith

Bird, Animals, Perfection

“The day that my stepfather left was hard, though. Renee sat in a chair in the living room, wearing a pair of navy shorts and a purple polo shirt. She was sobbing into her hands. Her face was pressed into the side of the chair. I thought - and I will never forget this - I don't ever want to be like that. I love my mother, but in that moment, I saw her as weak. I knew that she could survive without a man, but she wanted a partner so badly that she let him ruin her life.”

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

pg. 47
Pretty Mess book (2018)

Love, Life, Forgetting

“Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects governments to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy. In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother. Feminism has inherited these contradictions.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 3

Freedom, Suffering

“Mr. Lévesque was saying that part of my name was Elliott and since Elliot was an English name, it was perfectly understandable that I was for the No side, because, really, you see, I was not as much of a Quebecer as those who are going to vote Yes. That, my dear friends, is what contempt is…. It means saying that the Quebecers on the No side are not as good Quebecers as the others and perhaps they have a drop or two of foreign blood, while the people on the Yes side have pure blood in their veins.… Of course my name is Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Yes, Elliott was my mother's name. It was the name borne by the Elliotts who came to Canada more than 200 years ago. It is the name of the Elliotts who, more than 100 years ago, settled in Saint-Gabriel de Brandon, where you can still see their graves in the cemetery. That is what the Elliotts are. My name is a Quebec name — but my name is a Canadian name also.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

Speech in Paul Sauvé Arena, Montreal, Quebec, six days before the Quebec referendum on independence. (14 May 1980)

People, Understanding, Parting

“Death did not come to my mother
Like an old friend.
She was a mother, and she must
Conceive him. Up and down the bed she fought crying
Help me, but death
Was a slow child
Heavy.”

Josephine Miles (1911–1985) American poet, academic

"Conception" (1974) st. 1–2; Collected Poems, University of Illinois Press, 1983

Death, Help, Cry

“When my mother delivered me, she didn't have milk, and I was breastfed by an Arab woman. Maybe that had an effect on my leftist views.”

Amir Peretz (1952) Israeli politician

Attributed

“I love my gallant captain with all my heart and soul and might, and never will desert him, while God lets us be together. Oh, Mother, I never knew how much like heaven this world could be, when two people love and live for one another!”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Amy, in Ch. 42 : All Alone
Little Women (1868)

Love, God, People, World

“I can remember the horror which came over my parents when they became convinced that it was so with me [that I wanted to be a writer]—and properly so. What you have and they had to look forward to is life made intolerable by a mean, cantankerous, opinionated, moody, quarrelsome, unreasonable, nervous, flighty, irresponsible son. You will get no loyalty, little consideration and desperately little attention from him. In fact you will want to kill him. I'm sure my father and mother often must have considered poisoning me.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 45 (1969)

Life, Parent, Loyalty

“I swear to you, then," said MacIan, after a pause. "I swear to you that nothing shall come between us. I swear to you that nothing shall be in my heart or in my head till our swords clash together. I swear it by the God you have denied, by the Blessed Lady you have blasphemed; I swear it by the seven swords in her heart. I swear it by the Holy Island where my fathers are, by the honour of my mother, by the secret of my people, and by the chalice of the Blood of God.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Ball and the Cross

The atheist drew up his head. "And I," he said, "give my word."
The Ball and the Cross (1909), part II: "The Religion of the Stipendiary Magistrate", last paragraphs

God, People, Secret, Heart

“Many young women of my generation believe they live in a post-feminist world, without unfair sex discrimination -- a world in which career paths are designed with fathers and mothers in mind. Unfortunately, that world doesn't exist quite yet.”

Sandra Fluke (1981) American women's rights activist and lawyer

CNN, (April 17, 2012).
Articles

Women, World, Sex

“I think I’m more committed now. Some things are just serendipitous. My mother had the disease and I got involved with the organization, and then I met this splinter group out of the University of Minnesota Hospital, Dr. Karen Ashe and the team at the Grossman Center (for Memory Research and Care). I became sort of their spokesperson and then I got published. I published a first essay and a second essay and I’m up to my sixth essay. I speak all over the country and sometimes all over the world. It’s grown and blossomed into something that feels right. I’ve had a really good life and a wonderful career. I’ve been comfortable and I’ve been healthy. And I adored my mother. So this is my way to give back.”

Kate Mulgrew (1955) American actress

Catching Up with Kate Mulgrew http://www.startrek.com/article/catching-up-with-kate-mulgrew-part-2 (January 19, 2011)

Life, World, Disease, Way

“I had no idea that mothering my own child would be so healing to my own sadness from my childhood.”

Susie Bright (1958) American writer and feminist

Sadness, Idea, Childhood

“Every one knows that the fine phrase "God geometrizes" is attributed to Plato, but few know where this famous passage is found, or the exact words in which it was first expressed. Those who, like the author, have spent hours and even days in the search of the exact statements, or the exact references, of similar famous passages, will not question the timeliness and usefulness of a book whose distinct purpose it is to bring together into a single volume exact quotations, with their exact references, bearing on one of the most time-honored, and even today the most active and most fruitful of all the sciences, the queen-mother of all the sciences, that is, mathematics.”

Robert Edouard Moritz (1868–1940) German mathematician

Robert Edouard Moritz. On Mathematics and Mathematicians https://archive.org/details/onmathematicsmat00mori, 1914, 1942, 1958; p. v; Preface, lead sentence

God, Books, Search, Mathematics

“When the sun shouts and people abound
One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze
And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;
Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities
Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.
Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them,
Then nothing will remain of the iron age
And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem
Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass
In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain…”

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) American poet

"Summer Holiday"

People, Age, World, Mountain

“If every pure character in the Old Testament announces the Messiah, if every unworthy person is his torturer and every woman his Mother, does not the Book of Books lose all life with this obsessive theme?”

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) French philosopher

On the doctrine of prefiguration.
Persons or Figures (1950)

Life, Books, Personality

“Listen! You will hear mothers' lullabies, madmen's shrieks, love-croonings, cries of agonized terror, hymns of Christ, the roaring of lynch mobs, the kisses of lovers, the curses of pirates.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

Love, Lovers, Kiss, Christ

“One time, when I was really little, I climbed a tree and ate these green, sour apples. My stomach swelled and became hard like a drum, it hurt a lot. Mother said that if I'd just waited for the apples to ripen, I wouldn't have become sick. So now, whenever I really want something, I try to remember what she said about the apples.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner (2003)

Tree, Time, Waiting, Hurt

“Of all my travels in this country, nothing has affected me more deeply than the time I have spent with the mothers and fathers who have lost their children to violence spilling across our border.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, July, (21 July 2016)

Children, Travel, Time, Country

“he took a few, the tribe of Abraham. He established a perfect despotism—with no schools, with no philosophy, with no art, with no music—nothing but the sacrifices of dumb beasts—nothing but the abject worship of a slave. Not a word upon geology, upon astronomy; nothing, even, upon the science of medicine. Thus God spent hours and hours with Moses upon the top of Sinai, giving directions for ascertaining the presence of leprosy and for preventing its spread, but it never occurred to Jehovah to tell Moses how it could be cured. He told them a few things about what they might eat—prohibiting among other things four-footed birds, and one thing upon the subject of cooking. From the thunders and lightnings of Sinai he proclaimed this vast and wonderful fact: “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.””

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Some Reasons Why (1881)

God, School, Art, Music

“At the opening of the Odyssey, Telemachus, inspired by the male-born Athena, searches for his father by turning against his mother. Jesus too publicly spurns his mother to be about his father’s business. Male adulthood begins with the breaking of female chains.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 89

Search, Business, Adulthood

“Jews are one of the few ethnic groups where learning is equivalent to praising God, which brings results. One Jewish Nobel Prize winner, when asked where his passion for science came from, explained that when his friends were returning home, they were asked what the teacher was asking about today. Me, said the Nobel Prize winner, mother asked: What did you ask the teacher today? He was taught to ask, not to answer.”

Włodzimierz Ptak (1928–2019) immunologist

Borejza, Tomasz (January 2018): Trochę bakterii nie zaszkodzi https://www.tygodnikprzeglad.pl/troche-bakterii-zaszkodzi/. Przegląd (4/2018): pp. 54–55.

God, Home, Learning, Teachers

Quotes about mother page 23

Quotes about mother
page 23