Quotes about mother (2665 quotes, page 26)

“Oral tradition is really how Chicano literature came to be. I was not exposed to the written word, but I had the greatest teacher. I always tell people that my mother was my inspiration because she was the best chismosa, and she had the best stories. And if anyone taught me about drama, it was my mother because she knew how to tell a story. And my grandfather also told stories. One of the reasons why I waned to be a writer was because I was fascinated by stories of La Llorona, supernatural stories and things like that and I love hearing chisme (gossip)…”

Josefina Lopez (1969) American playwright

On her earliest influences in “JOSEFINA LÓPEZ – IN HER OWN WORDS” http://latinopia.com/latino-theater/josefina-lopez/ in Latinopia (2010 Mar 6)

People , Teachers , Literature , Love

“My mother used to say that my tones are all crooked: it’s like hearing a song sung out of tune.”

Madeleine Thien (1974) Canadian writer

On her limited Cantonese skills in “Madeleine Thien: ‘In China, you learn a lot from what people don’t tell you’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/08/madeleine-thien-interview-do-not-say-we-have-nothing in The Guardian (2016 Oct 8)

“Could she sing? (Was it nice to hear when she did?) Was she pretty? Was she a good friend? Could she have been a loving mother? A faithful wife? Have I got a sister and does she favor me? If my mother knew me would she like me?”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

Singing , Faith , Making love , Love

“Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.”

Quentin Crisp book The Naked Civil Servant

Source: The Naked Civil Servant (1968), Ch. 1

Time

“Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A. M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

The Pale King (2011)

Tree , Time , Business , Past

“I have to totally credit that to my mother. There were two children. I was the only girl. And she just always talked to me. She would tell me things that happened to her … her dreams, her past … it’s like the monologues in my plays, it really is. Because her stories were loaded with imagery and tragedy, darkness and sarcasm and humor…”

Adrienne Kennedy (1931) African-American playwright

On how her mother’s influence appears in her works in “Adrienne Kennedy by Suzan-Lori Parks” https://bombmagazine.org/articles/adrienne-kennedy/ in BOMB Magazine (1996 Jan 1)

Dreams , Past , Children , Girl

“To me, they’re the greatest generation. My parents and their friends, to me, have qualities that I don’t have, my children don’t have. They’re very imaginative, hardworking people. They created so much. My mother could teach all day, and then she could come home and cook a perfect dinner, and her house always looked perfect. They had qualities, I think, that are just so admirable.”

Adrienne Kennedy (1931) African-American playwright

On her parents in “Unraveling the Landscape: A Conversation With Adrienne Kennedy” https://www.americantheatre.org/2019/09/04/unraveling-the-landscape-a-conversation-with-adrienne-kennedy/ in American Theatre (September 2019)

Home , Imagination , Housing , Children

“Let me tell all the scum and all the leftists: you’re going to lose all of your jobs soon. The whole mainstream media is dying. We’re going to be in a huge Depression. You’re going to be living in your mothers’ basements. And I hope your little fake liberal culture you’ve got that’s totally fascist and Satanic — I hope it keeps you warm at night because that’s all you’re going to have, and it’s all you’re ever going to have. Okay? I just hope you understand that.”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

As quoted in "Alex Jones Melts Globalists over Terror: Mind-Controlled Media Sacrificing the West for Islam" https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/21/alex-jones-melts-globalists-terror-mind-controlled-media-sacrificing-west-islam/ by Rebecca Mansour, Breitbart.com (21 September 2016) ( video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJIB9UAZY-c)
2016

Night , Hope , Understanding

“Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains. In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire them, and to effect this, they have perverted the best religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purposes. With the lawyers it is a new thing. They have, in the mother country, been generally the primest supporters of the free principles of their constitution. But there, too, they have changed.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Horatio G. Spafford (17 March 1814)
1810s

Drawing , Religion , Hostility , Country

“My mother, Dorothy, was abandoned by her parents as a young girl. She ended up on her own at 14, working as a house maid. She was saved by the kindness of others. Her first grade teacher saw she had nothing to eat at lunch, and brought extra food to share. The lesson she passed on to me years later stuck with me: No one gets through life alone. We have to look out for each other and lift each other up.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), 2016 Democratic National Convention (July 28, 2016)

Housing , Food , Girl , Teachers

“Loyalty to a side, he said, had been instilled in him by his southern mother, but he now thought you had to be loyal to all sides, to the truth as you saw it, which, when you came down to it, meant being loyal to yourself.”

Mary McCarthy book A Charmed Life

Warren in Ch. 2, pp. 535–536
A Charmed Life (1955)

Truth , Loyalty

“Mother love is not a human invention. It has been inherited. It is older than the Rocky Mountains. Mother love in man came from the same source as the backbone in man from pre-human forms. Mother love among men is the same thing exactly as mother love among birds and quadrupeds. The mother monkey loves her child with almost the same tenderness as the human mother. When a monkey child dies, the mother carries the little corpse around with her for clays, refuses to eat, and sits often in silence and grief. Mother birds will risk their very lives for their young. So will mother bears, and lions, and whales, and the females of many other species.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Mother Love", p. 61
Savage Survivals (1916), Wild Survivals in Domesticated Animals

Mountain , Silence , Bird , Love

“In their phenomena of life the inhabitants of the earth display endless variety. They swim in the waters, soar in the skies, squeeze among the rocks, clamber among the trees, scamper over the plains, and glide among the grounds and grasses. Some are born for a summer, some for a century, and some flutter their little lives out in a day. They are black, white, blue, golden, all the colours of the spectrum. Some are wise and some are simple; some are large and some are microscopic; some live in castles and some in bluebells; some roam over continents and seas, and some doze their little day-dream away on a single dancing leaf. But they are all the children of a commion mother and the co-tenants of a common world. Why they are here in this world rather than some place else; why the world in which they find themselves is so full of the undesirable; and whether it would not have been better if the ball on which they ride and riot had been in the beginning sterilised, are problems too deep and baffling for the most of them. But since they are here, and since they are too proud or too superstitious to die, and are surrounded by such cold and wolfish immensities, what would seem more proper than for them to be kind to each other, and helpful, and dwell together as loving and forbearing members of One Great Family?”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Conclusion", pp. 324–325
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

Family , Tree , Sea , Making love

“I have seen a mother mouse in a moment of peril flee from her home among the falling pieces of a cord-wood pile, and disappear under the roots of a neighbouring oak. I have seen her a little later, recovered from her initial dismay, making her way back again, clambering along among the tangled timbers, stopping now and then to look and listen, her eyes wild and anxious, and her whole little body quaking with excitement. I have seen her go among the ruins of her dwelling, take a poor little squeaking young one in her mouth, and hurry away with it to the gloomy refuge in the roots of the oak. I have watched her return again and again, each time taking in her careful teeth the tiny body of a babe, until five mouthfuls of precious pink were safely lodged within the fortress of the oak. And I could as soon believe that woman, when she saves her children from some fearful harm, is a soulless machine as think that that brave little woodmother, out there alone under the trees, snatching her darlings from the jaws of death, was a heroine without sense or feeling.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"The Common-Sense View", pp. 184–185
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Psychical Kinship

Home , Tree , Time , Making love

“The earth is our mother, our habitation, and our tomb. In the presence of these facts, it would seem the highest sanity for us to be kind and merciful to each other, and to cultivate without hypocrisy the charming chivalry of the Golden Rule. The task of understanding and managing the tendencies which surround and beat upon us and in the midst of which we writhe and supplicate is certainly sufficient in itself without our turning upon and cudgeling each other.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Ideal, pp. 159–160

Understanding

“Man, in satisfying his desires, in avoiding misery and achieving happiness, strives to do two things with the inanimate universe: to manage it and to foreknow it. The inanimate is not devoted to us. We are not birdlings cuddled in an order of things where we need simply to yawn and be filled. We must bestir ourselves, or be in a position to compel others to bestir themselves for us, or perish. We are waifs, brought into existence by a universe whose solicitude for us ended with the travail that brought us forth. The inanimate universe is our mother, but without the blessed mother-love. The first thing we are conscious of, and about the only thing we ever absolutely know, is that we are whirling around in a very helpless manner on a whirligig of a ball, out of whose substance by the sweat of our brows we must quarry our existence. The universe is practically independent of us. But we, alas, are not independent of it. The food we eat, our raiment, our habitations, our treasures, our implements of knowledge, and our means of amusement are all portions of the inanimate, which we living beings must somehow subtract from the rest. In order to obtain these indispensable portions of the universe about us, we must halter it and control it and compel it to produce to the tune of our desires.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Problem of Industry, pp. 19–20

Food , Universe , Knowledge , Love

“The long struggle is ended. I must pass away. Good-by. O, men are so cold and hard and half conscious toward their suffering fellows. Nobody understands. O my mother! and O my little girl! What will become of you? And the poor four-footed! May the long years be merciful! Take me to my river. There, where the wild birds sing and the waters go on and on, alone in my groves, forever.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Suicide note

Singing , Understanding , Girl , Suffering

“Is murder stripped of its blackness by become a fine art? All assassination is practically instantaneous and painless, the assassination of men as as well as that of birds and quadrupeds. What would the author of such nonsense think if the assassination of his brother or mother blandly attempted to relieve himself of all guilt by means of the assurance that his victim had experienced no suffering? The crime of extermination does not consist in the creation of pain, but in the destruction of that precious and mysterious essence called life.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Debate with Laurence Gronlund, quoted by Karen Iacobbo and Michael Iacobbo in Vegetarian America: A History (2004), p. 121

Pain , Suffering , Art , Bird

“The Left is infested with pedophiles - they promote the welfare state and feminism in order to get protective fathers out of the home, so they have easier sexual access to the children of single mothers.”

Stefan Molyneux (1966) libertarian philosopher, writer, speaker, and online broadcaster

@StefanMolyneux https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/1178376530726047749, Twitter (September 29, 2019)

Home , Children

“She had lovers and, if the secret must be out, she drank. What else accounts for the naughtiness of her eyes? Like so many tawaifs (geishas, courtesans) there were ups and downs in her childhood, the father leaving the mother and so on, but she was blessed with the divine gift and her art transcended the various accidents of her life. In the end all else was forgotten. Only the legend and the accomplishment survive.”

Begum Akhtar (1914–1974) Indian musician

Begum Akhtar the Undisputed Malika of Ghazals

Childhood , Art , Secret , Lovers

“Now, we can say to a certain extent that persons in this situation are persons who have really never grown up. They are still children, at a point. For you see, a child is inevitably, necessarily egocentric. He is a bundle of his own sensations, clamoring to be cared for. And, to be sure, he has his own social context. He belongs to his mother, but he cares for her only because he wants to be fed and protected. He does not care for his mother for her sake but he cares for his mother for his own sake. And so a child is inevitably egocentric, inevitably self-centered. And that is why Dr. Burnham says that during the first six or seven years of development, the ego is dominant within the child. And both in behavior and in attitudes, a child is a victim of self-centeredness. This is a part of the early development of a little child. When people become mature, they are to rise above this.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Conquering Self-centeredness (1957)

Personality , Children , People , Self-confidence

“I don’t think I was a particularly good or diligent mother. It took a long time for the obvious to become obvious: I could not operate in a conventional family.”

Annie Proulx (1935) American novelist, short story and non-fiction author

On women being expected to embrace motherhood naturally in “Annie Proulx: ‘I’ve had a life. I see how slippery things can be’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/05/annie-proulx-ive-had-a-life-i-see-how-slippery-things-can-be in The Guardian (2016 Jun 5)
Personal life and writing career

Family , Thinking , Time

“Awareness and children — Awareness will be respected in the home and in the school as a sacred, God given gift. Awareness is the mother of creation. Awareness can never be divided, nor imposed. Textbooks cannot describe it, because there is no beginning nor end to it. Awareness can only be experienced. To inspire a very young child to look for God is undivine, because in this way you create isms. Awareness is a seed in all creation and in every individual. If you allow the child to have his natural growth, you will allow his awareness to grow; the child will enjoy normal life and will not be dogmatic. In awareness you do not possess children, yet they come closer to you. Even now, children as young as nine or 10 are raising funds to feed the hungry. Imagine what they will be like when they are tomorrow’s citizens. Children can do it. Politicians cannot do it.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Maitreya's Teachings - The Laws of Life (2005)

School , Home , God , Imagination

“Even such sophisticated mammals as the great predator cats occasionally eat their cubs. A mother cat will be observed licking the area around the umbilical cord of the helpless newborn. She licks, she licks, she licks until something snaps in her brain, and she begins eating, starting there, at the vulnerable belly.”

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"Fecundity", p. 171
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1976)

Cats

“Prince Wilhelm has taken up an attitude strongly against England, a quite natural reaction for the most part against the efforts of his mother to make Anglomaniacs of her children.”

Alfred von Waldersee (1832–1904) Prussian Field Marshal

Waldersee in his diary, 26 December 1884

Children , Nature , Making love , Parting

“I put being a mother ahead of being a politician.”

Diane Abbott (1953) British Labour Party politician

Profile: Diane Abbott https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10276583 BBC News (5 January 2012)
2010s, 2012

“Mother once said our grandfather Vasyl, after whom my brother was named, had sung very well and been a very interesting person in general. So it is believed that Vasyl inherited his talent. He supposedly had a unique voice.”

Vasyl Slipak (1974–2016) Ukrainian opera singer

2017
Orest Slipak, the brother of singer. Brother about brother. The Day. Кyiv.ua. - 2017. - 27 April. https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/topic-day/brother-about-brother

Personality

“The system of administration was thoroughly remodelled. The Sullan proconsuls and propraetors had been in their provinces essentially sovereign and practically subject to no control; those of Caesar were the well-disciplined servants of a stern master, who from the very unity and life-tenure of his power sustained a more natural and more tolerable relation to the subjects than those numerous, annually changing, petty tyrants. The governorships were no doubt still distributed among the annually-retiring two consuls and sixteen praetors, but, as the Imperator directly nominated eight of the latter and the distribution of the provinces among the competitors depended solely on him, they were in reality bestowed by the Imperator. The functions also of the governors were practically restricted. His memory was matchless, and it was easy for him to carry on several occupations simultaneously with equal self-possession. Although a gentleman, a man of genius, and a monarch, he had still a heart. So long as he lived, he cherished the purest veneration for his worthy mother Aurelia… to his daughter Julia he devoted an honourable affection, which was not without reflex influence even on political affairs. With the ablest and most excellent men of his time, of high and of humbler rank, he maintained noble relations of mutual fidelity… As he himself never abandoned any of his partisans… but adhered to his friends--and that not merely from calculation--through good and bad times without wavering, several of these, such as Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Matius, gave, even after his death, noble testimonies of their attachment to him. The superintendence of the administration of justice and the administrative control of the communities remained in their hands; but their command was paralyzed by the new supreme command in Rome and its adjutants associated with the governor, and the raising of the taxes was probably even now committed in the provinces substantially to imperial officials, so that the governor was thenceforward surrounded with an auxiliary staff which was absolutely dependent on the Imperator in virtue either of the laws of the military hierarchy or of the still stricter laws of domestic discipline. While hitherto the proconsul and his quaestor had appeared as if they were members of a gang of robbers despatched to levy contributions, the magistrates of Caesar were present to protect the weak against the strong; and, instead of the previous worse than useless control of the equestrian or senatorian tribunals, they had to answer for themselves at the bar of a just and unyielding monarch. The law as to exactions, the enactments of which Caesar had already in his first consulate made more stringent, was applied by him against the chief commandants in the provinces with an inexorable severity going even beyond its letter; and the tax-officers, if indeed they ventured to indulge in an injustice, atoned for it to their master, as slaves and freedmen according to the cruel domestic law of that time were wont to atone.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 4, pt. 2, translated by W.P.Dickson
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Time , Justice , Law , Dependency

“Few men have had their elasticity so thoroughly put to the proof as Caesar-- the sole creative genius produced by Rome, and the last produced by the ancient world, which accordingly moved on in the path that he marked out for it until its sun went down. Sprung from one of the oldest noble families of Latium--which traced back its lineage to the heroes of the Iliad and the kings of Rome, and in fact to the Venus-Aphrodite common to both nations--he spent the years of his boyhood and early manhood as the genteel youth of that epoch were wont to spend them. He had tasted the sweetness as well as the bitterness of the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed, had practised literature and made verses in his idle hours, had prosecuted love-intrigues of every sort, and got himself initiated into all the mysteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles pertaining to the toilette-wisdom of the day, as well as into the still more mysterious art of always borrowing and never paying. But the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even these dissipated and flighty courses; Caesar retained both his bodily vigour and his elasticity of mind and of heart unimpaired. In fencing and in riding he was a match for any of his soldiers, and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria; the incredible rapidity of his journeys, which usually for the sake of gaining time were performed by night--a thorough contrast to the procession-like slowness with which Pompeius moved from one place to another-- was the astonishment of his contemporaries and not the least among the causes of his success. The mind was like the body. His remarkable power of intuition revealed itself in the precision and practicability of all his arrangements, even where he gave orders without having seen with his own eyes. His memory was matchless, and it was easy for him to carry on several occupations simultaneously with equal self-possession. Although a gentleman, a man of genius, and a monarch, he had still a heart. So long as he lived, he cherished the purest veneration for his worthy mother Aurelia (his father having died early); to his wives and above all to his daughter Julia he devoted an honourable affection, which was not without reflex influence even on political affairs. With the ablest and most excellent men of his time, of high and of humbler rank, he maintained noble relations of mutual fidelity, with each after his kind. As he himself never abandoned any of his partisans after the pusillanimous and unfeeling manner of Pompeius, but adhered to his friends--and that not merely from calculation--through good and bad times without wavering, several of these, such as Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Matius, gave, even after his death, noble testimonies of their attachment to him.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol.4. Part 2.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Daughters , Self-confidence , Literature , Fashion

“Sometimes I wonder if MacKinnon has simply been driven mad by all the sick things people do to one another. I, too, recoil in pain and incomprehension whenever I hear about the latest psychopath who has shot his mother, machine-gunned his coworkers, raped his daughter, or slashed a prostitute. I notice that such men are more likely to have read the bible than pornography, but I do not hold either script responsible for their actions.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon (1946) American feminist and legal activist

"The Prime of Miss Kitty MacKinnon" http://susiebright.blogs.com/Old_Static_Site_Files/Prime_Of_Kitty_MacKinnon.pdf, by Susie Bright, East Bay Express, October 1993.

Pain , Reading , Daughters , People

“I read a few books like Skinny Bitch, a bunch of books on vegan lifestyles and my mother always brought me to vegetarian restaurants, so I was really into diets and studying health. And I just thought it would be the best step, so I went vegetarian. … I watched a lot of PETA videos on YouTube, and it was heartbreaking.”

Jenna Talackova (1988) Canadian model

Unveiling her PETA ad on Davie Street; as quoted in "Jenna Talackova unveils racy PETA ad and promotes vegan diet" https://www.vancouverobserver.com/city/jenna-talackova-unveils-racy-peta-ad-and-promotes-vegan-diet, The Vancouver Observer (24 January 2014).

Study , Reading , Bitch , Health

“In Spain there are countless thousands of mothers like yourself who never had a fair shake in life. Their whole existence has been one of trying to get enough food to stay alive for another day. One day these people did something about that. They got together and elected a government that really gave some meaning to their lives and promised to make it so that the millions of mothers like you would never again have to bend their knees and beg to exist in a world that had plenty for everyone.”

Bill Bailey (Spanish Civil War veteran) (1910–1995) American labor activist

The Kid from Hoboken: An Autobiography by Bill Bailey (1993)

Food , People , World , Life

“When he was Lieutenant-Governor of Pondicherry, he came into close contact with the Ashram and his association opened up opportunities for many more from Karnataka to get to know the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.”

Basappa Danappa Jatti (1912–2002) Indian politician

Sri Aurobindo's Ashram in: "Sri Aurobindo's Ashram"

“After succeeding his mother, Rajiv Gandhi asked K. K. Tewary, a Congress MP, to make the reckless charge on the floor of the Rashtrapati Bhawan.”

Zail Singh (1916–1994) Indian politician and former President of India

Presidential Years:Zail Singh's posthumous defence of his controversial tenure

Making love

“When Mian (Dr. Hussain) reached the Rashtrapathi Bhavan after taking oath as President of India, he said that only three rooms out of its 340 sprawling rooms would suffice for his family…when we moved there were my mother, my daughter, Neelofer, some domestic servants, two cows, a parrot and about five thousand books and other household items. Of the three rooms, one was exclusively for him while my mother, my daughter and I stayed in the other room and the third room was used for meeting visitors and for taking food.”

Zakir Hussain (politician) (1897–1969) 3rd President of India

His daughter when he became President and moved to live in the Rashtrapathi Bhavan, in: p. 339.
About Zakir Hussain, Quest for Truth (1999)

Family , Books , Daughters , Food

“Rajeev used to play with Gandhiji in the same way in which his mother, Indira used to play with Gandhiji in Sabaramati ashram when she was four years old. One day, Rajeev plucked some flowers and kept them at Gandhiji’s feet. Gandhiji laughed and said – Rajeev! Don’t you know that flowers are not kept at the feet of a person who is alive?”

Rajiv Gandhi (1944–1991) sixth Prime Minister of India

Meena Agrawal, in p. 14. This incident happened on 29 January 1948 and on 30 January 1948, Gandhiji was assassinated.

Way , Personality , Flowers

“He was educated by 14 palace tutors. He remembered a childhood stay with his mother in London, when he folded up as a paper boat a doctors’ report about his being too fat, and set it adrift on the Thames, so that she would not see it. He studied economics at Travancore University, and was a Sanskrit scholar.”

Uthradom Thirunal Marthanda Varma (1922–2013) Maharaja of Travancore

Anne Keleny, in Uthradom Thirunal Marthanda Varma: The Maharajah of Travancore 4 March 2014 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/uthradom-thirunal-marthanda-varma-the-maharajah-of-travancore-9169048.html

Universe , Education , Study , Childhood

“Whenever my mother went to Bangalore, Daddy would spend a lot of time with us. He would take us all to Chamundi hill in the yellow and red sports Rolls Royce car, which he himself would drive. Of course we also had a Daimler and Austin Prince.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

My daddy, His Highness, the Maharaja of Mysore

Cars , Time , Sport

“We were starving when we got to the Texas border! And we thought that once we got across all our troubles were over. But we were wrong! A new kind of war started for us of racism and prejudice. They treated us Mexicans worse than dogs! In Douglas, Arizona, I stole six dollars worth of copper ore from the Copper Queen Mining Company to feed my starving mother and sisters, and they put me in the penitentiary. I was only thirteen years old! They wouldn’t have done that to a gringo kid, but they did this to a Mexican kid to teach an example!”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Tears came to his eyes. “In prison those monsters tried to rape me, but I fought back so hard that they cut my stomach open from rib to rib,” he yelled, tearing his shirt open and showing me the huge scar that ran across his whole abdomen, going from his upper right side to his lower left side. “My intestines came out, and they left me for dead, but the guards found me and took me to the hospital. After a week I awoke, and, at the end of that month, I escaped with two Yaqui who’d gotten twenty years for eating an Army mule. Their familias had been starving! And they’d stolen the mule to feed them! “YOU’VE GOT NO RAGE COMPARED TO THAT, PENDEJO! There aren’t enough bullets for me to kill all the racist no-good sons of bitches I’ve met in the United States! But—and this is a big but— anybody can go around killing people! Any damn group of kids can get together and kill! That takes no guts! What takes guts is to have that rage, here inside,” he said, pounding his chest, “and decide to do something good with that rage. My revenge against this racist two-faced country of the United States is that I got rich and became a Republican! So now you come back to the United States, and you do something worthwhile, AND YOU DO IT RIGHT NOW, PENDEJO!
Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

War , Dogs , Sister

“I couldn’t describe Protima Bedi better. As a mother she was phenomenal. She brought joy into our lives with her constant need to be different and creative. She was determined never to lead an ordinary life.”

Protima Bedi (1948–1998) Indian model and dancer

By her daughter Pooja Bedi in "Timepass" p. vii

Joy , Life

“We picked him because he is a great sculptor. The flip side is it makes it quite interesting to work with him because not only was he born in India – he has an Indian father and a Jewish mother of Iraqi heritage – but he lived in Israel for a few years as a young man before he moved to the UK.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

Israeli sky in Anish’s steel- India-born artist sculpts landmark symbol for museum

Making love

“For children, father is a luxurious item, - just like beans for the horse…. but mother is everything for the child. The child cannot bear separation from his mother even for a minute.”

Premchand (1880–1936) Hindi writer

In his novel Ghar Jamai quoted in page= 92.
Portrayal of Women in Premchands Stories A Critique

Horse , Children

“His Highness with the shining examples of his two illustrious parents before him had shown the same earnest devotion to duty and given the same unfailing support to his ministers as had been received at the hands of His Highness* father and his mother.”

Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV (1884–1940) King of Mysore

Said by the Dewan. Modern_Mysore, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Open University, 26 November 2013, archive.org, 201 http://archive.org/stream/modernmysore035292mbp/modernmysore035292mbp_djvu.txt,
From Modern Mysore

Support , Parent

“Whenever single people complain about anything, I really want them to shut the fuck up. First of all, if you’re single, your life has no consequence on the earth. Even if you’re helping people aggressively, which you’re fucking not, nobody gives a shit what happens to you. You can die, and it actually doesn’t matter. It doesn’t. Your mother will cry or whatever, but otherwise, nobody gives a shit.”

Louis C.K. (1967) American comedian and actor

http://splitsider.com/2013/02/the-annotated-wisdom-of-louis-c-k/

Help , Life , Cry , People

“I’m a vulgar, fucked-up degenerate comedian who did drugs. And I’m connecting with Christian mothers and fathers. I love that. That means so much to me.”

Louis C.K. (1967) American comedian and actor

http://www.dead-frog.com/blog/entry/interview_louis_ck_creator_of_the_sitcom_lucky_louie/

Love , Making love

“Bertha: Did your mother have any children that lived?”

Harvey Fierstein Torch Song Trilogy

Torch Song Trilogy

Children

“He had beaten and tortured, dragged shrieking children away from their mothers, despatched his quotas of human cargo in sealed box-cars to the frontier, until finally he was able to declare that there were no more Jews in Frankfurt.”

Heinrich Baab (1908) German Gestapo officer

Edward Crankshaw

Cars , Children , Box

“My mother is a ventriloquist – but not professionally. For ten years I thought the dog was telling me to kill my father.”

Wendy Liebman (1961) American comedian

Waiting a beat, Liebman adds, "I got my brother to do it."
Wendy Liebman page http://delafont.com/comedians/wendy-liebman.htm Richard De La Font Agency, Inc. web site. (url accessed on October 22, 2008)

Dogs

“She was leaving the world as woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad, Mariam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad.”

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Mariam, p. 370
A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007)

Personality , Bad luck , Way , World

“I just want to be a channel of the peace. The peace exists; I don’t need, thank God, to create the peace. All I have to do is become open and the peace will come, the peace is already there. Mother Teresa, one could argue, is a testimony to the principles outlined in this prayer; through service she conquered the lower, selfish drives that serve survival and the ego, and become a tool of a Higher Purpose, or God.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Selfishness , God , Peace

“Please respect our need to grieve privately. My heart is broken. I am the mother of the most tender-hearted, high-spirited, beautiful little girl who is the spitting image of her father. All that I can cling to is his presence inside her that reveals itself every day. His family and I watch Matilda as she whispers to trees, hugs animals, and takes steps two at a time, and we know that he is with us still. She will be brought up with the best memories of him.”

Heath Ledger (1979–2008) Australian actor

[Michelle Williams: Heath Ledger Has Broken My Heart, http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23147754-5001021,00.html, The Daily Telegraph, Web, news.com.au, February 1, 2008, 2008-02-01, http://web.archive.org/web/20080206234312/http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23147754-5001021,00.html, 2008-02-06]</ref>
[Michelle Williams Breaks Silence on Heath's Death, http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20175486,00.html, People, Web, people.com (Time Inc.), February 1, 2008, 2008-02-02]

Family , Tree , Time , Girl

“You’d be alone in the kitchen and twilight would be dwindling, and you could hear the far off cries of the other children playing nearby. You’d be alone in the kitchen because it was your special treat time, where the jelly would come out just for you, and your mother would appear at your side just as a vision of Laura Ashley print dress, smelling of magnolias and biscuits and put the jelly in front of you, and you would pull your chair in. Then the old fashioned bar of ice cream would come down, the one that had to be cut with a breadknife before the two sides were flanked with wafers. You would lift your little spoon up excitedly and winkle out that first divet of black jelly… AND THEN THE CAGE COMES DOWN! The cage with the Japanese fighting spiders inside, your mother strikes a match off her forearm and tells you to dance in the front room for money… You, you never forget that shit, I mean it never goes away.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

Like, Totally (2006)

Money , Time , Forgetting , Children

“You told your mother I was gonna blow you up with a fucking pumpkin bomb? What did she say?”

Dane Cook (1972) American actor and comedian

"She. Was. Terrified. She wants me to move home."
Tourgasm (2006)

“When he was 15, his distressed mother dragged him to a lecture on healthful living being given by nutritionist Paul Bragg.”

Jack LaLanne (1914–2011) American exercise instructor

In "Jack LaLanne dies at 96; spiritual father of U.S. fitness movement, LosAngeles Times"

Health

“I think I’ve gone through quite an ordinary series of steps in life. I began as most children began, with God and Santa Claus and the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny all being about the same thing. Then I went through the things that I think sensitive people go through, wrestling with the thoughts of Jesus—did he shit? Did he screw? I began to dare to believe that God wasn’t some white beard. I began to look upon the miseries of the human race and to think God was not as simple as my mother said. As nearly as I can concentrate on the question today, I believe I am God; certainly you are, I think we intelligent beings on this planet are all a piece of God, are becoming God. In some sort of cyclical non-time thing we have to become God, so that we can end up creating ourselves, so that we can be in the first place. … My own feeling is that relation to God as a person is a petty, superstitious approach to the All, the infinite.”

Gene Roddenberry (1921–1991) American television screenwriter and producer

As quoted in God & (1975) by Terrance A. Sweeney

God , Time , Question , Personality

“Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy mother-fucker, go home.”

Richard J. Daley (1902–1976) American politician

[David Farber, Chicago '68, University of Chicago Press, 1994, ISBN 0226238016, pg 145(b), pg 249(a)]
Said to Senator Abe Ribicoff of Connecticut when the Senator challenged Daley's use of force during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Home , Bitch

“This damnable sex, boys - ah, you do well to writhe in your beds at the very mention of the word. All the evil of our modern times springs from unholy lust, the act of the dog and the bitch on the bouncing bed, limbs going like traction engines, the divine gift of articulate speech diminished to squeals and groans and pantings. It is terrible, terrible, an abomination before God and His Holy Mother. Lust is the fount of all other of the deadly sins, leading to pride of the flesh, covetousness of the flesh, anger in the thwarting of desire, gluttony to feed the spent body to be at it again, envy of the sexual prowess and sexual success of others, sloth to admit enervating day-dreams of lust. Only in the married state, by God’s holy grace, is it sanctified, for then it becomes the means of begetting fresh souls for the peopling of the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Tremor of Intent (1966)

God , Soul , Time , Anger

“Did you have one of those days today, like a nail in the foot? Did the pterodactyl corpse dropped by the ghost of your mother from the spectral Hindenburg forever circling the Earth come smashing through the lid of your glass coffin? Did the New York strip steak you attacked at dinner suddenly show a mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth, and did it snap off the end of your fork, the last solid-gold fork from the set Anastasia pressed into your hands as they took her away to be shot? Is the slab under your apartment building moaning that it cannot stand the weight on its back a moment longer, and is the building stretching and creaking? Did a good friend betray you today, or did that good friend merely keep silent and fail to come to your aid? Are you holding the razor at your throat this very instant? Take heart, comfort is at hand. This is the hour that stretches. Djam karet.”

Harlan Ellison book Eidolons

We are the cavalry. We're here. Put away the pills. We'll get you through this bloody night. Next time, it'll be your turn to help us.
"Eidolons" (1988)

Heart

“During the Cretaceous Period many of the inland seas dried up, leaving the Plesiosaurs stranded without any fish. Just about that time Mother Nature scrapped the whole Age of Reptiles and called for a new deal. And you can see what she got.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

Footnote: Here we see the working of another Law of Nature: No water, no fish.
The Plesiosaur
How to Become Extinct (1941)

Time , Nature , Age , Fish

“Oftentimes when our falling and our wretchedness is shewed us, we are so sore adread, and so greatly ashamed of our self, that scarcely we find where we may hold us. But then willeth not our courteous Mother that we flee away, for Him were nothing lother.”

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

Summations, Chapter 61

Self-confidence

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.... The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured.... others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches.... and shall master all attachment.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

From the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass

School , Family , God , Soul

“We can assert, with entire plausibility, that there is not one of all these sects — Kabalism, Judaism, and our present Christianity included — but sprung from the two main branches of that one mother-trunk, the once universal religion, which antedated the Vedaic ages — we speak of that prehistoric Buddhism which merged later into Brahmanism.The religion which the primitive teaching of the early few apostles most resembled — a religion preached by Jesus himself — is the elder of these two, Buddhism. The latter as taught in its primitive purity, and carried to perfection by the last of the Buddhas, Gautama, based its moral ethics on three fundamental principles. It alleged that 1, every thing existing, exists from natural causes; 2, that virtue brings its own reward, and vice and sin their own punishment; and, 3, that the state of man in this world is probationary... However puzzling the subsequent theological tenets; however seemingly incomprehensible the metaphysical abstractions which have convulsed the theology of every one of the great religions of mankind as soon as it was placed on a sure footing, the above is found to be the essence of every religious philosophy, with the exception of later Christianity. It was that of Zoroaster, of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Jesus, and even of Moses, albeit the teachings of the Jewish law-giver have been so piously tampered with.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume II, Chapter III

Religion , Law , Nature , Perfection

“My mother has always been unhappy with what I do. She would rather I do something nicer, like be a bricklayer.”

Mick Jagger (1943) British rock musician, member of The Rolling Stones

“We went on the day on the boat train. I was 7, I had never seen a ship before. It looked very big. Everybody was very excited. We went down to the cabin and that's when my mother said to my father that she had made up her mind quite firmly that she would not go to bed in that ship. She would sit up at night. She decided that she wouldn't go to bed at night and she didn't!" I saw that ship sink, "I never closed my eyes. I didn't sleep at all. I saw it, I heard it, and nobody could possibly forget it." "I can remember the colours, the sounds, everything," she said. "The worst thing I can remember are the screams." "It seemed as if once everybody had gone, drowned, finished, the whole world was standing still. There was nothing, just this deathly, terrible silence in the dark night with the stars overhead." The band played one version of 'Nearer My God to Thee' of which there are three and the one they played was the one that was played in church."”

Eva Hart (1905–1996) Titanic survivor

"I never closed my eyes at all – I saw that ship sink. And I saw that ship break in half.
Interview from 1993, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD5J43Z9AWI, quoted in New York Times, 16 February 1996

Sleep , God , Night , Forgetting

“The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet-whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

"Poetry is Not a Luxury"
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

Thinking , Dreams , Feeling , Freedom

“The woman, who does not imitate her mother and her grandmother as a mother and a good wife, can only rely on her own scale of values to find a life ideal that is important to her happiness.”

Doris Veillette (1935–2019) Quebec journalist

Chronicle "Interdit aux hommes" (Forbidden to men), by Doris Veillette-Hamel, Journal Le Nouvelliste, March 24, 1973, page 17.
Chronicle "Forbidden to men", 1973

Happiness , Life

“Children fall into a world of drugs while their mothers cry bloody tears!”

Luiz Carlos Alborghetti (1945–2009) Italian-Brazilian radio commenter, showman and political figure

Original: (pt) As crianças caem no mundo das drogas enquanto suas mães choram lágrimas de sangue!

World , Cry , Tear , Children

“When I was a kid, my mother told me about the time my sister got lost at the circus in New York in Madison Square Garden. ... She said out of the throng of people, suddenly after looking for a long time, she said a cop just appeared and he was holding my sister's hand — she was a little girl. My mother never forgot that picture in her mind. We never see those stories about each other. And I think the writer who wants us to have a better life must take on the responsibility of showing us those kinds of stories.”

James McBride (writer) (1957) American journalist

On writing stories that are considered unseen in "James McBride's Advice For New Writers: 'A Simple Story Is The Best Story'" https://www.npr.org/2020/02/29/810052791/james-mcbrides-advice-for-new-writers-a-simple-story-is-the-best-story in NPR (2020 Feb 29)

Time , Girl , People , Thinking

“Mother always said that if one must do something unpleasant, one should do it wholeheartedly and not waste effort on regret.”

N. K. Jemisin book The Kingdom of Gods

Source: The Kingdom of Gods (2011), Chapter 23 (p. 563)

Effort

“Once vigorous measures appear to be the only means left of bringing the Americans to a due submission to the mother country, the colonies will submit.”

George III of the United Kingdom (1738–1820) King of Great Britain and King of Ireland

From George III's letter of February 15, 1775 to Lord North, quoted in the Edinburgh Review (July 1867) from the originals at Windsor.
Source: Google Books, The Edinburgh Review volumes 126–126, February 13, 2020 https://books.google.com/books?id=qpiQgE49-P8C&pg=PA18&lpg=PA18&dq=Once+vigorous+measures+appear+to+be+the+only+means+left+of+bringing+the+Americans+to+a+due+submission+to+the+mother+country,+the+colonies+will+submit&source=bl&ots=mL-ddKwu1s&sig=ACfU3U1guuvPa24Ta-4K5vWkF6OP4D6HXA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjel-HFgM_nAhUB2FkKHUaSBEkQ6AEwCXoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&f=false,

Appearance , Country

“When you eat a healthy, whole foods, plant-based diet, it changes the expression of your genes. It turns on the good genes, turns off the bad genes. Your genes are a predisposition, but your genes are not your fate. And even if your mother and your father and aunts and uncles all died of diabetes, cancer, even heart disease, it doesn't mean that you need to.”

Dean Ornish (1953) American physician

Interview in the documentary-film The Game Changers by Louie Psihoyos (2018).

Food , Fate , Bad luck , Heart

“Of course, Harry and I are both quite upset about it - that our mother's trust has been betrayed and even now she is still being exploited.”

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge (1982) a member of the British royal family

(Reaction to a book published about his mother from her private secretary) AP via BBC News http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:EQW97-KJVhEJ:news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/948542.stm+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari
Associated Press interview during his gap year (29 September 2000)

“If necessity is the mother of invention, curiosity is the father. After all, you cannot produce something interesting if you are not interested in something. Outputs need inputs.”

Will Gompertz (1965) British journalist

Think Like an Artist (2015)

“What I'm trying to say is... I'm not going to say, "I hate" anything I ever made — but I will say this: My mother is much more proud of what I do now, than all of the fart-joke videos I did in the past.”

Michael Stevens (educator) (1986) Internet personality

Responding to the question "What is your least favorite video?", in "IAMA: Michael Stevens of Vsauce" Reddit (29 April 2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hClQ-OER3Y

Past , Hate

“only in the intimacy with mother I could be just a human”

Wilhelmina of the Netherlands (1880–1962) Queen of the Netherlands 1898 - 1948

“It ain't money that makes the world go round
That's only temporary confusion
It ain't governments that make the people strong
It's the opposite illusion
Look right now and you will see
they're only here by the skin of our teeth as it is
so take heart and take care of your link with Life... Life is beautiful
if you got the sense to take care of your source of perfection
Mother Nature, She's the daughter of God and the source of all protectionLook right now
and you will see she's only here by the skin of her teeth as it is
so take heart and take care of your link with Life”

Buffy Sainte-Marie (1941) Canadian musician

"Carry It On", from Power in the Blood (2015)

Money , God , Strong , Beauty

“I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.”

William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) American journalist

"To the Public", No. 1 (1 January 1831) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2928t.html, quoted in [Todras, Ellen H., Angelina Grimké: Voice of Abolition, https://books.google.com/books?id=-S8ZAQAAMAAJ, 1999, Linnet, 978-0-208-02485-5, 46]
The Liberator (1831 - 1866)

Housing , Justice , Dead , People

“But the moment he holds them [slaves] as property, however kindly he may treat them, he is a man-stealer, whom the apostle classes among ‘murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers.’”

William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) American journalist

Letter to Gerrit Smith, (Feb. 7, 1835), The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, vol. 1, Walter M. Merrill, edit., Belknap Press-Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 445

“The first time I ever saw footage of a mother pig, in a more natural environment, making a nest for her babies, it brought me to tears realizing the frustration they must feel in farrowing crates.”

Lauren Ornelas American activist

"Some Pig" https://www.all-creatures.org/articles/ar-some-pig.html, All-Creatures.org (April 2013).

Baby , Time , Nature , Tear

“I am here on behalf of young people worldwide. For the young girl in Guatemala starving because of drought; for the young boy in Sumatra whose entire rainforest community is set ablaze for the extraction of palm oil; for the mother in Beijing who attended her 3-year-old daughter’s funeral because she breathed in the toxic air of the city. I speak for the millions suffering at the destructive hands of the fossil fuel industry.”

Jerome Foster II (2002)

at LCV Annual Gala https://www.lcv.org/article_category/blog/Speech

Girl , Suffering , People , Daughters

“Whenever the white man treats the Indian as they treat each other then we shall have no more wars. We shall be all alike – brothers of one father and mother, with one sky above us and one country around us and one government for all. Then the Great Spirit Chief who rules above will smile upon this land and send rain to wash out the bloody spots made by brothers' hands upon the face of the earth. For this time the Indian race is waiting and praying. I hope no more groans of wounded men and women will ever go to the ear of the Great Spirit Chief above, and that all people may be one people.”

Chief Joseph (1840–1904) Nez Percé Chieftain

Lincoln Hall Speech (1879)

Time , Waiting , Country , War

“Too many misinterpretations have been made; too many misunderstandings have come up between the white men and the Indians. If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian he can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike. Give them the same laws. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect all rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. If you tie a horse to a stake, do you expect he will grow fat? If you pen an Indian up on a small spot of earth and compel him to stay there, he will not be contented nor will he grow and prosper. I have asked some of the Great White Chiefs where they get their authority to say to the Indian that he shall stay in one place, while he sees white men going where they please. They cannot tell me.”

Chief Joseph (1840–1904) Nez Percé Chieftain

Lincoln Hall Speech (1879)

Peace , Chance , Law , People

“Nature's sturdiest buds and her best-fed butterflies belong to this sex; her female spiders are large enough to eat up a score of her little males; some of her mother-fishes might parody the nursery-song, "I have a little husband no bigger than my thumb."”

Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825–1921) American minister

September 1874, Popular Science Monthly Vol. 5, Article: The Alleged Antagonism Between Growth and Reproduction , p. 608
The Alleged Antagonism Between Growth and Reproduction (1874)

Fish , Sex , Nature

“Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

Forgetting , Silence , Memory , Love

“Perfume is a good example of a product gone all wrong. When I was a child, it was a semi-exotic thing and it was called something stupid like "Fleur de Fleur" and you would give it to your mother or aunty at Christmas and it was advertised by some dopey looking woman in a field of sunflowers and she looked like she'd been hit by a tractor because she was going *flails with arms*. She couldn’t just get over how nice she smelled. Now, because we’re so jaded, we’ve consumed so much, our attention can only be grabbed in a violent way. So it’s always advertised by these constipated, exo-keletal bitches who are sneering at you and it’s called something horrible like "Homicide"! "Dysentery!"”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

"Urban Dysentery" for boys and girls!

On consumerism.
What It Is (2009)

Way , Christmas , Bitch , Stupidity

“The relationships between mother, father and children, family trees and genealogies, preferential treatment of relatives and alliances through marriage furnish us with some of the few really good and useful comparative concepts we have in anthropology. They exist everywhere in one form or another, and they differ in interesting ways. If the ultimate goal is to discover the unity of humanity through its manifold appearances, the profession cannot afford to let go of the still rich gold mine of kinship.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1962) Norwegian social anthropologist and professor

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 6 : Kinship

Family , Tree , Marriage , Children

“I grant that I am full of prejudices; I sucked them in with my mother's milk, and I cannot possibly argue them away.”

Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) German statesman, Chancellor of Germany

Speech to the Prussian United Diet (15 June 1847), quoted in W. H. Dawson, Bismarck and State Socialism: An Exposition of the Social and Economic Legislation of Germany since 1870 (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1891), p. 27
1840s

“I was never been weaned with garapa! My mother's tits had milk, and it was a good one!”

Luiz Carlos Alborghetti (1945–2009) Italian-Brazilian radio commenter, showman and political figure

Original: (pt) Eu não fui desmamado com garapa! A teta da minha mãe tinha leite, e era leite do bom!

“Since the idea of order and subordination succumbed to barbarian brawn and brutality in the fifth century, the civilized world has been like a child brought up by his father. It has needed the great mother heart to teach it to be pitiful, to love mercy, to succor the weak and care for the lowly.”

Anna J. Cooper (1858–1964) African-American author, educator, speaker and scholar

Source: A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892), p. 51

Heart , World , Idea , Love

“Mercy from the Father and the Mother, mercy from the Sister and the Brother, Mercy from the Bastard, five times mercy, High Ones, we beseech you.… Mercy, High Ones. Not justice, please, not justice. We would all be fools to pray for justice.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

World of the Five Gods series, The Curse of Chalion (2000)

Sister , Justice , Fools , Time

“Without recognizing it as such, humanity is undergoing a great spiritual crisis that is focused through the political and economic field. That spiritual crisis can only be resolved by the resolution of our political and economic problems, which are based on the false sense of separation. If we would evolve, develop as a race, we must realize our oneness, realize that we are brothers and sisters of one family, under the one Divine Source, and identical with that Source. What happens in a normal family? They share whatever they have. A mother will not feed one child better than another, give one child 17 per cent and another 83 per cent of the food. We have to realize that we are one family, and therefore must share the resources of the world more equitably around the world.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Source: Maitreya's Mission Vol. III (1997)

Family , Food , Problem , Falseness

“You can talk! You can talk! You can talk! You're brave now, motherfucker! Throw his ass out! He's a nigger! He's a nigger! He's a nigger! A nigger, look, there's a nigger! Ooh! Ooh! All right, ya see? It shocks you, it shocks you, to see what's buried beneath, you stupid mother fuckers!”

Michael Richards (1949) American actor

Laugh Factory incident (2006)

Stupidity

“You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest.
You ask me to dig for stones! Shall I dig under her skin for bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again.
You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white men, but how dare I cut my mother's hair?
I want my people to stay with me here. All the dead men will come to life again. Their spirits will come to their bodies again. We must wait here in the homes of our fathers and be ready to meet them in the bosom of our mother.”

Smohalla (1815–1895) Native American prophet-dreamer

As quoted in The Ghost-Dance Religion and Wounded Knee (1890) by James Mooney on page 721; it has been sometimes also ascribed to w:Wovoka, which seems misappropriated as Mooney himself mentions Wovoka in the same book from page 765 on.
"It is perhaps the most commonly cited piece of evidence documenting the Native American belief in Mother Earth. […]They rarely place the statement in the context in which Mooney presented it, that is, the history of millenarian movements spawned in part by the pressures Native American felt from the European-Americans' insatiable desire for land […] it is a direct response to 'white' pressures placed on native relationships with the land." From Mother Earth. An American Story. https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo5975950.html

Home , Waiting , Dead , Grass

“If it's not one thing, it's your mother.”

Peter Kay (1973) English writer, producer, actor and comedian

Mum Wants A Bungalow Tour [2003]

Faith , Mother's Day , For Mother

“Black Dove [“Paloma Negra”] is a mariachi song, and we Mexicans love our mariachis; we'd go celebrate Mother's Day or a birthday or something and ask for a song that brings a great deal of sentimental feeling to us individually or the table. That's how I feel with Black Dove.”

Ana Castillo (1953) novelist, poet, essayist, short story writer

In the book I explain that it's a song that my mother actually sang as I left home as a young woman. My mother was very traditional, and in her mind, the way a girl leaves home is through marriage—me going out with my little satchel was not how they imagined it. They imagined the worst, that I was going to end up in a cabaret as one of those that dances for a few fellas.

On how she chose the title of her 2016 memoir in “'Write What's Tearing at Your Heart': Feminist Ana Castillo on Writing Her Rape” https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d7anqq/write-whats-tearing-at-your-heart-feminist-ana-castillo-on-writing-her-rape in Vice (2016 May 10)

Love , Birthday , Making love , Feeling

“A new jewel in the crown of Goddess Earth,
You are a trove of sandalwood, beauty and gold.
Victory to you Mother Karnataka, the daughter of Mother India,
where Rama and Krishna had their incarnations.”

Kuvempu (1904–1994) Kannada novelist, poet, playwright, critic, and thinker

Jaya Bharata Jananiya Tanujate (1930)

Beauty , Victory , Daughters

“I never talk about age, but I was born singing. My mother, Catalina, told me that at 9 or 10 months of age I’d wake up in the middle of the night, 2 or 3 in the morning, singing "esta muchachita va a trabajar de noche."”

Celia Cruz (1925–2003) Cuban singer (1925-2003)

Pues la viejita no se equivocó.

On her first time singing, part of her Interview with Generación Ñ http://generation-ntv.com/writing/celia-cruz-1996 in 1996.

A similar statement in shown in the BBC Arena documentary "My Name Is Celia Cruz" https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qmxcl from 1988.

Singing , Night , Age

“But for my own part I believe that for the enjoyment of true happiness, which depends chiefly upon a man's character and disposition, it makes no difference whether he be born in an obscure state or of an ill-favoured mother, or not.”

Plutarch book Parallel Lives

Demosthenes, sec. 1
Parallel Lives

Dependency , Happiness , Making love , Parting

“I was in a state of rage, also. I was so angry and I couldn't really explain why. I didn't have the language for it. And so I turned to what I knew, I remembered the kind of woman my mother had been — in a lot of ways, I was acting out, I was performing the same thing.”

Jaquira Díaz Puerto Rican writer

On becoming a juvenile delinquent in “In New Memoir 'Ordinary Girls,' Jaquira Díaz Searches For Home” https://www.npr.org/2019/10/29/774306278/jaquira-d-az-on-her-memoir-ordinary-girls in NPR (2019 Oct 29)

Way , Rage

“I have to march because my mother could not have an abortion.”

Maxine Waters (1938) U.S. Representative from California

mentioned 3 May 2004 by Tucker Carlson on CNN crossfire http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0405/03/cf.00.html
2000s

Quotes about mother page 26

Quotes about mother
page 26