Quotes & Sayings About Fathers And Mothers

Some people misunderstand evil and believe it will relent, and because their misplaced hope inspires dark hearts to dream darker dreams, they are the fathers and mothers of all wars. Evil does not relent; it must be defeated. And even when defeated, uprooted, and purified by fire, evil leaves behind a seed that will one day germinate and, in blooming, again be misunderstood. — Dean Koontz

To all fathers and mothers of the Church, tell your children that you love them and that you are so happy to have them in your family. — Patricia P. Pinegar

To the Pilgrim Mothers, who not only had their full share of the hardships and privations of pioneer life but also had the Pilgrim Fathers to endure. — Fanny Fern

Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can't bless it, get ready to make it new. — Marge Piercy

We perversely see mother love as the problem
when it is all we have to sustain us
rather than blaming the fathers who have run out on our mothers and on us. We seem willing to forgive fathers for loving too little even as we still shrink in terror from mothers who love too much. — Frank Pittman

We are born haunted, he said, his voice weak, but still clear. Haunted by our fathers and mothers and daughters, and by people we don't remember. We are haunted by otherness, by the path not taken, by the life unlived. We are haunted by the changing winds and the ebbing tides of history. And even as our own flame burns brightest, we are haunted by the embers of the first dying fire. But mostly, said Lord Jim, we are haunted by ourselves. — Jonathan Evison

The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers. — Henry David Thoreau

Don't fear the terrorists. They're mothers and fathers. — Rosie O'Donnell

And the way I loved her was like nothing else. This, I decided, was the love all other loves were measured against. They say girls look to marry their fathers, but I decided after having Maxie that we all, every one of us, were looking to marry our mothers. Sitting on the sofa with her wrapped in a soft blanket in my arms, I'd think, 'This baby has it so good.'
It just seemed that the love I'd been searching and hoping for all my life was what Maxie already had right now: two big arms and a lap, a warm blanket, the background music of a heartbeat and a pair of lungs, food at a moment's notice, sleep at every urge, and a person totally obsessed with her, whose every moment - waking or otherwise - was totally devoted to her comfort and care. Was that so much to ask for? — Katherine Center

The concept of 'Momism' is male nonsense. It is the refuge of a man seeking excuses for his own lack of virility. I have listened to many women in various countries, and I have never found a woman who willingly 'mothers' her husband. The very idea is repulsive to her. She wants to mother the children while they are young, but never their fathers. True, she may be forced into the role of mother by a man's weaknesses and childishness, and then she accepts the role with dignity and patience, or with anger and impatience, but always with a secret, profound sadness unexpressed and inexpressible. — Pearl S. Buck

What was unspoken between us, what need never be explained or said, was that nobody would ever love us again like our mothers did. Yes, we would be loved, by our fathers, our friends, our siblings, our aunts and uncles and grandparents and spouses
and our children if we chose to have them
but never would we experience that kind of unconditional, nothing-you-can-do-will-turn-me-away-from-you kind of mother love. — Melanie Gideon

Neither man nor woman is perfect or complete without the other. Thus, no marriage or family, no ward or stake is likely to reach its full potential until husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, men and women work together in unity of purpose, respecting and relying upon each other's strengths. — Sheri L. Dew

What good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best after all. — Benjamin Spock

Anything can hurt you, Harper. Even things you're supposed to be able to count on can hurt you."
"These things you speak of, do they include how we're supposed to rely on mothers and fathers never to die or leave us alone?"
"Exactly, but that's life, Harper. Nothing is guaranteed."
"You're right."
"But I can promise you that I would never intentionally hurt you and, although a promise is not a guarantee, it is still a promise and you can ask anyone I know, I'm good on my word."
"I don't know why but I believe you. — Fisher Amelie

And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

I despised how those pale-faced vegans held their little spoons, humbling themselves. Who do they think they are fooling, those bleached Brahmins? We all know that their low sitting is just another passage in their short lives. In the end, they will get bigger spoons and dig up the earth for their fathers' and mothers' inheritances. — Rawi Hage

Fathers and mothers are too absorbed in business and housekeeping to study their children, and cherish that sweet and natural confidence which is a child's surest safeguard, and a parent's subtlest power. So the young hearts hide trouble or temptation till the harm is done, and mutual regret comes too late. Happy the boys and girls who tell all things freely to father or mother, sure of pity, help, and pardon; and thrice happy the parents who, out of their own experience, and by their own virtues, can teach and uplift the souls for which they are responsible. — Louisa May Alcott

Gone are the days when girls used to cook like their mothers and boys used to dress like their fathers.
Now girls drink like their fathers and boys dress like their mothers. — Habeeb Akande

Because the uncomfortable truth is that no one is all bad, or all good. Not mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, or husbands and wives. Life would be much easier if that were the case. Instead, everyone - Charlotte, Willow, Mr. Rigg, even Sister Briganti - was a confusing mixture of love and hate, joy and sorrow, longing and forgetting, misguided truth and painful deception. — Jamie Ford

So, the total number of hours spent on the stuff you have to do to take care of a family, working and caring for stuff at home, the total number of hours is actually about the same for mothers and fathers. — James Levine

Children are nature's flower and our future. They are the future fathers and mothers. They are our mind's adventure in the future. — Debasish Mridha

Uncles and aunts, and cousins, are all very well, and fathers and mothers are not to be despised; but a grandmother, at holiday time, is worth them all. — Fanny Fern

I know something happens between the time our mothers and fathers and teachers and mentors send us out into the world telling us, "The world is yours," and "You are beautiful," and "You can be anything," and the time we return to them.

Something happens when people tell me I have a pretty face, ignoring me from the neck down. When I watch the news and see unarmed black men and women shot dead over and over, it's kind of hard to believe this world is mine.

Sometimes it feels like I leave home a whole person, sent off with kisses from Mom, who is hanging her every hope on my future. By the time I get home I feel like my soul has been shattered into a million pieces.

Mom's love repairs me. — Renee Watson

Most children would rather preserve the fantasy of a loving connection with their fathers and mothers, at all costs, even if it costs them their self-esteem. When you're three or seven years old, it's less frightening to think of yourself as an unlovable, disappointing screwup than to recognize the fact that you're living with a monster. — Keith Ablow

Though I did not know her exact address, that she appeared to live almost within breathing distance of Robin, and that I lived with him, and that her pictures showed that she was now dating the mysterious Rupert Hunter, our despotic mothers, our absent fathers, the borders we had both crossed, all our many parallels and connections at every point, could not be chance. I saw it as evidence of the hidden connections between things, an all-powerful algorithm that sifted through chaos, singling out soulmates. — Olivia Sudjic

The bottom line in my view is that America's mothers and fathers deserve to have confidence in law enforcement's ability to ensure that their children are being raised in the safest possible environment. — Bob Ney

Even though fathers, grandparents, siblings, memories of ancestors are important agents of socialization, our society focuses on the attributes and characteristics of mothers and teachers and gives them the ultimate responsibility for the child's life chances. — Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

We are all so broken. Pick up a person, shake them around and you'll hear the rattling of their broken pieces. Pieces our fathers broke, or our mothers, or our friends, strangers, or our loves. — Tarryn Fisher

A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day. — Sarah Ruhl

In the United States, the typical caregiver in the family suffers from depression, is usually stressed out and exhausted, physically and mentally. The emotional toll on members of the family who take care of husbands or wives, mothers or fathers, or grandparents is always high. Taking for instance in Washington, it was once reported that more than half of the caregivers in that state were found to be extremely depressed. A caregiving expert has opined that family caregivers are possibly the most depressed individuals in the United States. — Sophia A. Beren

Mitochondria, as we have seen, are only passed on in the egg, so all 13 mitochondrial genes come from our mothers. If these genes really do influence lifespan, and we can only inherit them from our mothers, then our own lifespan should reflect that of our mothers but not our fathers. — Nick Lane

They watch her when she comes to City Hall, they watch her at the social events, they watch the way she walks, hips rolling with no suggestion of provocation but with every sense that she knows more than any of the rest. A woman like that, they seem to be thinking, a woman like that has lived.
Their wives from Orange County, they come from Minnesota or Dallas or St.Louis. They come from places with families, with sagging mothers and fathers with dead eyes and heavy-hanging brows. They carry their own promise of future slackness and clipped lips and demands. They have sisters, sisther with more babies, babies with sweet saliva hanging and more appliance and with husbands with better salaries and two cars and club membership. They iron in housedresses in front of the television set or by the radio, steam rising, matting their faces, as the children with the damp necks cling on them, sticky-handed. They are this. And Alice ... and Alice ... — Megan Abbott

Imitations don't have mothers and fathers. We don't have family. We just are. Until we're not. — Heather Hildenbrand

Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life? — Sean Hannity

It is important to note that research has shown that men who have abusive mothers do not tend to develop especially negative attitudes toward females, but men who have abusive fathers do; the disrespect that abusive men show their female partners and their daughters is often absorbed by their sons.
So while a small number of abusive men do hate women, the great majority exhibit a more subtle-though often quite pervasive-sense of superiority or contempt toward females, and some don't show any obvious signs of problems with women at all until they are in a serious relationship. — Lundy Bancroft

Our mythology tells us so much about fathers and sons ... What do we know about mothers and daughters? ... Our power is so oblique, so hidden, so ethereal a matter, that we rarely struggle with our daughters over actual kingdoms or corporate shares. On the other hand, our attractiveness dries as theirs blooms, our journey shortens just as theirs begins. We too must be afraid and awed and amazed that we cannot live forever and that our replacements are eager for their turn, indifferent to our wishes, ready to leave us behind. — Anne Roiphe

Employed mothers and fathers both struggle with multiple responsibilities, but mothers also have to endure the rude questions and accusatory looks that remind us that we're shortchanging both our jobs and our children. — Sheryl Sandberg

I keep saying that i wish our black women would not stop raising their sons to be like the niggas who left them. I see mothers covering for their deadbeat sons, putting some other child's mother through the same shit, her babyfather put her through.
We have spent the last few decades blaming absentee fathers for the lack of "graces" among our young men forgetting that they are raised by women. Women have always been other women's worst enemies. Maybe we need to start asking our mothers, what have they been doing wrong. Trying to smother the only man who won't leave them cause he can't, hes biologically linked to her. Trying to make up for the men who dumped her.
Raising monstrous, spoiled brats and then unleashing them on the female population. What we have today is a culture of men raised like daughters who do not know how to be a partner, a man and a father. — Crystal Evans

*marissa tries to get her single, working mother's attention by suggesting something outrageous, to which mom replies:*

'You're a smart girl. Use your head and avoid any guy who reminds you of your father. — Camille Pagan

And that was fine, except that she didn't have any old friends anymore. Kids back home who'd been friendly were now ... respectful, because of the hat. There was a kind of wall, as if she'd grown up and they hadn't. What could they talk about? She'd been to places they couldn't even imagine. Most of them hadn't even been to Twoshirts, which was only half a day away. And this didn't worry them at all. They were going to do the jobs their fathers did, or raise children like their mothers did. And that was fine, Tiffany added hurriedly to herself. But they hadn't decided. It was just happening to them, and they didn't notice. — Terry Pratchett

We fall into the great continuing circle of dancers. Some leave the floor, tired but giddy; others have only just arrived. They are eager to wear their new status as ladies, to be paraded about and lauded until they see themselves with new eyes. The fathers beam at their daughters, thinking them perfect flowers in need of their protection, while the mothers watch from the margins, certain this moment is their doing. We create illusions we need to go on. And one day, when they no longer dazzle or comfort, we tear them down, brick by glittering brick, until we are left with nothing but the bright light of honesty. The light is liberating. Necessary. Terrifying. We stand naked and emptied before it. Adn when it is too much for our eyes to take, we build a new illusion to shield us from its relentless truth.
But the girls! Their eyes glow with the fever dream of all they might become. They tell themselves this is the beginning of everything. And who am I to say it isn't? — Libba Bray

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

But the majority of mothers work - and are responsible for taking care of the kids and home. And more fathers are spending more time doing child care and housework, and still working long hours. That work-life conflict is weighing on everybody. — Brigid Schulte

I remember the first time I read Freud, I was 25 or 30, and I was expecting it to be about the Oedipus complex. But what I actually discovered confirmed my own common experience, that you also had little boys who loved their fathers and little girls who loved their mothers. — Arnaud Desplechin

Give me faith to step aside and let You work, especially in those times when I desire to influence, to persuade, to make my opinion known. Help me to be silent, trusting Your Holy Spirit to be at work in the hearts of those I love. Thank You for never giving up on prodigals, for loving them even more than we as mothers or fathers or brothers or sisters can love them. — Shelly Beach

Over and over and with the least provocation, they pulled from their stock of stories tales about the old folks, their grands and great-grands; their fathers and mothers. Dangerous confrontations, clever manoeuvres. Testimonies to endurance, wit, skill and strength. Tales of luck and outrage. But why were there no stories to tell of themselves? About their own lives they shut up. Had nothing to say, pass on. As though past heroism was enough of a future to live by. As though, rather than children, they wanted duplicates. — Toni Morrison

Patrick Henry said 'give me liberty or give me death.' I think his famous quote makes it crystal clear that the Constitutional framework of this country values liberty as an essential element of life, worth dying for. If something is worth such a sacrifice, how can the loss of it be justified for the argument that it will make us safer to give up our liberty and our civil rights? Are we to tell the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers of all the soldiers lost in foreign wars that it was all a big lie? That they died for nothing? — Kenneth Eade

Knowledge is the key to stopping the spread of AIDS. Yet millions of children are missing an education. Missing their teachers who have died of the disease. Missing from class as they stay home to care for their dying mothers and fathers. Children are missing your support. United for Children. Unite against AIDS. — Susan Sarandon

I am very lucky. I have known wonderful romantic love in my life but to actually see this little creature and find him to be the most beautiful creature in the world. I know all mothers and fathers feel that way. — Anne-Marie Duff

The television, iPod, and Internet have trespassed upon the innocence of America's children, while preoccupied mothers and dispassionate fathers stare aghast wondering what went wrong. They don't stop to think of their own contributions to the persuasions influencing their children. After all, where do kids as young as elementary age get money to rent rock videos and the latest rap DVDs? — Billy Graham

She breathed that air he'd forgotten, of high-school loveliness, come uninvited to bloom in the shadow of railroad overpasses, alongside telephone poles, within earshot of highways with battered aluminum center strips, out of mothers gone to lard and fathers ground down by gray days of work and more work, in an America littered with bottlecaps and pull-tabs and pieces of broken muffler. — John Updike

Operation Peter Pan spanned from 1960-62 whereby over 14,000 children were sent away from their families in Cuba, some never to reunite again. Pan Am flights took the children to Miami FL, 'Never-Never Land', and the children became known as the 'Peter Pans.' I wrote this song for my daughter, and it is sung for all the daughters and mothers, fathers and brothers who felt this pain of separation all because of governments and their politics. — Tori Amos

Whatever the era ... one thing will never change: Fathers and mothers, if you have children, they must come first. — Barbara Bush

Alongside this [apostolic succession], largely hidden, existing on a "charismatic" rather than an official level, there is secondly the apostolic succession of the spiritual fathers and mothers in each generation of the Church - the succession of the saints, stretching from the apostolic age to our own day, which St. Symeon the New Theologian termed the "golden chain."... — Herman A. Middleton

We believe in honoring our mothers and fathers and keeping our smallest residents - our children - healthy. The politicians in charge of Texas now clearly don't. Perry has refused to even consider expanding health care coverage in Texas because he cares more about scoring political points than he does about our Texas families. — Wendy Davis

Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. And barn owls. — Julian Barnes

But wouldn't we see more women willing to give their children life if they'd seen with their own eyes what an adoption culture looks like? And wouldn't these mothers and fathers, who may themselves feel unwanted, be a bit more ready to hear our talk about a kingdom where all are welcomed? — Russell D. Moore

No sin is so great but the satisfaction of Christ and His mercies are greater; it is beyond comparison. Fathers and mothers in tenderest affections are but beams and trains to lead us upwards to the infinite mercy of God in Christ. — Richard Sibbes

The knowledge that you were beaten and that this, as your parents tell you, was for your own good may well be retained (although not always), but the suffering caused by the way you were mistreated will remain unconscious and will later prevent you from empathizing with others. This is why battered children grow up to be mothers and fathers who beat their offspring — Alice Miller

Take a company like GM. For years, people were warning its execs that the company was too dependent on big SUVs and trucks, that it was falling behind other companies in innovation. A lack of knowledge wasn't the problem. And mothers and fathers everywhere try to warn their kids that maybe a giant tattoo isn't such a good idea. Good luck in that fight, Knowledge. — Dan Heath

It is very important that children learn from their fathers and mothers how to love one another- not in the school, not from the teacher, but from you. It is very important that you share with your children the joy of that smile. There will be misunderstandings; every family has its cross, its suffering. Always be the first to forgive with a smile. Be cheerful, be happy. — Mother Teresa

Good-bye, I say to Grandfather, and to my father, and I hold the tube in the river and pause a moment. We hold the choices of our fathers and mothers in our hands and when we cling on or let them slip between our fingers, those choices become our own. — Ally Condie

What mothers need, as well as fathers, spouses, and the children of aging parents, is an entire national infrastructure of care, every bit as important as the physical infrastructure of roads, bridges, tunnels, broadband, parks and public works. — Anne-Marie Slaughter

Here's the progression. Feminism won; you can have it all; of course you want children; mothers are better at raising children than fathers; of course your children come first; of course you come last; today's children need constant attention, cultivation, and adoration, or they'll become failures and hate you forever; you don't want to fail at that; it's easier for mothers to abandon their work and their dreams than for fathers; you don't want it all anymore (which is good because you can't have it all); who cares about equality, you're too tired; and whoops
here we are in 1954. — Susan Douglas

Although I am good at enumerating my father's flaws, it's hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he's dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than it is for mothers. — Alison Bechdel

Our mothers and fathers want change. They worked all of their lives, but today live in destitution. — Viktor Yushchenko

The thing is that I am a member of that sad, ever-dwindling minority ... the child of an unbroken home. I have carried this albatross since the age of eleven, when I started at grammar school. Not a day would pass without somebody I knew turning out to be adopted or illegitimate, or to have mothers who were about to hare off with some bloke, or to have dead fathers and shabby stepfathers. What busy lives they led. How I envied their excuses for introspection, their ear-marked receptacles for every just antagonism and noble loyalty. — Martin Amis

We are the girls with anxiety disorders, filled appointment books, five-year plans. We take ourselves very, very seriously. We are the peacemakers, the do-gooders, the givers, the savers. We are on time, overly prepared, well read, and witty, intellectually curious, always moving ... We pride ourselves on getting as little sleep as possible and thrive on self-deprivation. We drink coffee, a lot of it. We are on birth control, Prozac, and multivitamins ... We are relentless, judgmental with ourselves, and forgiving to others. We never want to be as passive-aggressive as our mothers, never want to marry men as uninspired as our fathers ... We are the daughters of the feminists who said, "You can be anything," and we heard, "You have to be everything. — Courtney Martin

Since God had commanded it, it was necessary that I do it. Since God commanded it, even if I had a hundred fathers and mothers, even if I had been a King's daughter, I would have gone nevertheless. — Joan Of Arc

She saw it over and over again in her male patients, she said - it could probably qualify as an epidemic among American men: this stubborn reluctance to embrace our wholeness - this stoic denial that we had come from our mothers as well as our fathers. It was sad, really - tragic. So wasteful of human lives, as our wars and drive-by shootings kept proving to us; all one had to do was turn on CNN or CBS News. And yet, it was comic, too - the lengths most men went to to prove that they were tough guys. — Wally Lamb

I hope the film will help mothers and fathers to be aware that 15 is a very vulnerable age. — Ellen Muth

Let me tell you that the children from their very birth are born to evil. Satan seems to have control of them. He seems to take possession of their young minds, and they are corrupted. Why do fathers and mothers act as though a lethargy was upon them? They do not mistrust that Satan is sowing evil seed in their families. — Ellen G. White

Today, Arizona's sons and daughters, mothers and fathers are proudly serving their country. — Jane D. Hull

Mothers, of course, are all right. They pay a chap's bills and don't bother him. But fathers bother a chap and never pay his bills. — Oscar Wilde

The Vale is not real.

It's a lie told by mothers and fathers to give their starving children a reason for the horror. There is no reason.

There is nothing but this world. It is our beginning and our end. Our one chance at joy before the dark. — Pierce Brown

We are other than what we would have been if we had crossed the oceans, if or mothers and fathers had not crossed the skies in search of work and dignity and a better life for their children. We have been made again: but I say that we shall also be the ones to remake this society, to shape it from the bottom to the top. — Salman Rushdie

Fathers and mothers are just people, which means they make mistakes. Don't hold that against them. Whatever flaws they may have, they created you in a moment of love, and are among the few who knew you when. When they're gone, there won't be anyone to take their place. — Ernest Borgnine

Look at the children of the land leaving in droves, leaving their own land with bleeding wounds on their bodies and shock on their faces and blood in their hearts and hunger in their stomachs and grief in their footsteps. Leaving their mothers and fathers and children behind, leaving their umbilical cords underneath the soil, leaving the bones of their ancestors in the earth, leaving everything that makes them who and what they are, leaving because it is no longer possible to stay. They will never be the same again because you cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same. — NoViolet Bulawayo

We need to insist on fathers and mothers sharing the care of their offspring as well as the opportunity to enjoy the fulfillment of individual rights. — Mary Frances Berry

That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighbourhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swallen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts ( ... ) they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls ( ... ) They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings? — Elena Ferrante

If things went according to death notices, man would be absolutely perfect. There you find only first-class fathers, immaculate husbands, model children, unselfish and self-sacrificing mothers, grandparents mourned by all, businessmen in contrast with whom Francis of Assisi would seem an infinite egoist, generals dripping with kindness, humane prosecuting attorneys, almost holy munitions makers - in short, the earth seems to have been populated by a horde of wingless angels without one's having been aware of it. — Erich Maria Remarque

The people whom the sons and daughters find it hardest to understand are the fathers and mothers, but young people can get on very well with the grandfathers and grandmothers. — Simeon Strunsky

Sometimes, they wait. Sometimes, you see the dead come in to the harbor, and their old dogs are all along the docks, wagging their tails, for they have waited for their masters and mistresses for many years. You see mothers who have missed their sons. Fathers who had never spoken of love to their children, ready to embrace them as they voyage from the end of life. It shows the lies of this world, you see. We are wrong about so many things here. Mankind has done terrible things, yet we are forgiven. — Douglas Clegg

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers. — Norman Schwarzkopf

Mothers and fathers act in mostly similar ways toward their young children. Psychologists are still highlighting small differencesrather than the overwhelming similarities in parents' behaviors. I think this is a hangover from the 1950s re-emergence of father as a parent. He has to be special. The best summary of the evidence on mothers and fathers with their babies is that young children of both sexes, in most circumstances, like both parents equally well. Fathers, like mothers, are good parents first and gender representatives second. — Sandra Scarr

He'd stood amidst the ranks more than once, sensing the soldiers alongside him seeking and finding that place in the mind, cold and silent, the place where husbands, fathers, wives and mothers became killers. And practice made it easier, each time. Until it becomes a place you never leave. — Steven Erikson

Female education ... has occupied my attention so far only as the education of my own daughters ... I thought it essential to give them a solid education which might enable them, when become mothers, to educate their own daughters, and even to direct the course for sons, should their fathers be ... — Thomas Jefferson

Of all evils, indeed, famine is the worst, and it destroys nothing so effectively as shame. For that which under other circumstances is worthy of respect, in the midst of famine is despised. Thus women snatched the food from the very mouths of their husbands and children, from their fathers, and what was most pitiable of all, mothers from their babes. And while their dearest ones were wasting away in their arms, they were not ashamed to take away from them the last drops that supported life. — Eusebius

Liar! I know that you humans build your life in lies. It starts with your mortal lords and their fabricated gods. They use fictitious stories to impregnate the minds of people, and like herds of sheep they do as their told. With manipulation alone is enough to secure their reign. After all, is it not in your nature to be wanted and purposeful? It is such an easy game to play. I have observed this falsehood accepted by fathers and mothers over and over again. The idiocy becomes one with their children, and they become the infrastructure that not only sedates but corrodes the soul with instructed conformity. In the end, lies are all that you are. — H.S. Crow

The sad truths I've been taught by the families of the dead are these: seeing is believing; knowing is better than not knowing; to name the hurt returns a kind of comfort; the grief ignored will never go away. For those whose sons and daughters, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers and friends went off alive and never did return, the worst that can happen has already happened. The light and air of what is known, however difficult, is better than the dark. The facts of death, like the facts of life, are required learning. — Thomas Lynch

The Americans say that we are ungrateful-but I ask them for heaven's sake, what should we be grateful to them for-for murdering our fathers and mothers?-Or do they wish us to return thanks to them for chaining and handcuffing us, branding us, cramming fire down our throats, or for keeping us in slavery, and beating us nearly or quite to death to make us work in ignorance and miseries, to support them and their families. They certainly think we are a gang of fools. — David Walker

I cannot shift the blame for Chechnya, for the sorrow of numerous mothers and fathers. I made the decision, therefore I am responsible. — Boris Yeltsin

With this understanding of love's meaning it is clear that more often than not slavery made it all but impossible for black people to love one another. When emotional ties were established between individuals, when children were born to enslaved mothers and fathers, these attachments were often severed. No matter the tenderness of connection, it was often overshadowed by the trauma of abandonment and loss. — Bell Hooks

Good mothers and good fathers and good families don't always have great children. — Cissy Houston

Mothers and fathers must be gentle at least some of the time. Mothers and fathers must also be strict at least some of the time. Most of the time, though, most mothers and fathers must be mostly strict and gentle together. — Connie Kerbs

These women, genteel and beautiful, are the rebels who say no to the choices made by silly mothers, incompetent fathers (there are seldom any wise fathers in Austen's novels) and the rigidly orthodox society. They risk ostracism and poverty to gain love and companionship, and to embrace that elusive goal at the heart of democracy: the right to choose. — Azar Nafisi

Scanty and insufficient suppers those, and innocent of meat, as if most other sauce to wretched bread. Yet, human fellowship infused some nourishment into the flinty viands, and struck some sparks of cheerfulness out of them. Fathers and mothers who had had their full share in the worst of the day, played gently with their meager children; and lovers, with such a word around then and before them, loved and hoped. — Charles Dickens

Have you ever asked yourselves what you are going to do when you grow up? In all likelihood you will get married, and before you know where you are, you will be mothers and fathers; and you will then be tied to a job, or to the kitchen, in which you will gradually wither away. Is that all that your life is going to be? — Jiddu Krishnamurti

This life is difficult. We lose fathers, brothers, mothers, songbirds and pieces of ourselves. Whips strike the innocent, honors go to the guilty, and there is too much loneliness. I would be a fool to pray for my children to escape all of that. Ask for too much and it might actually turn out worse. But I can pray for small things, like fertile fields, a mother's love, a child's smile - a life that's less bitter than sweet. — Nadia Hashimi

People should be _very_ careful when choosing the future fathers and mothers of their children. For that reason alone, it is extremely mean to demand a marriage certificate for life, just for one night of embracement. — Wilhelm Reich