Quotes About Mothers

Daughters could survive a powerful mother, but boys found it almost impossible. Such boys were often severely damaged and spent the rest of their lives running away from their mothers, or from anybody who remotely reminded them of their mothers; either that, or they became their mothers, in a desperate, misguided act of psychological self defence.

Ideas about mothers have swung historically with the roles of women. When women were needed to work the fields or shops, experts claimed that children didn't need them much. Mothers, who might be too soft and sentimental, could even be bad for children's character development. But when men left home during the Industrial Revolution to work elsewhere, women were "needed" at home. The cult of domesticity and motherhood became a virtue that kept women in their place.

I think because mothers usually are the people who take care of us when we're little, and when we're little those mothers are omnipotent, perhaps men even more than women don't like to think about that dependency. That dependency is horror.

Gilbert put his arm about them. 'Oh, you mothers!' he said. 'You mothers! God knew what He was about when He made you.

I will tell you what I can't abide - and I think the Internet has really created a space for it - women criticizing other women and mothers criticizing other mothers.

A question may be asked, 'Will mothers have their children in eternity?' Yes! Yes! Mothers, you shall have your children.

My coming to England in this way is, as I realize, so unusual that nobody will easily understand it. I was confronted by a very hard decision. I do not think I could have arrived at my final choice unless I had continually kept before my eyes the vision of an endless line of children's coffins with weeping mothers behind them, both English and German, and another line of coffins of mothers with mourning children.

Single mothers have as much to teach their children as married mothers and as much love to share--maybe more. Yet their motives are often labeled selfish and single-minded--never mind all the babies brought into the world to snag husbands, "save" faltering marriages or produce heirs.

In a noted 1943 Harvard study, there were no cases of toxemia, congenital anomalies, or neonatal deaths among a group of well-fed woman. In contrast two~thirds of the children born to women who were on poor prenatal diets had congenital abnormalities, dies, or (had) neurological dysfunction. and 44% of the mothers had developed toxemia.

I didn't really know anything about Romany culture going into this [Glue series]. The one thing that I liked the most about it is that it's so family based. They don't have mothers and fathers in the same way we do. They're really in a community, so parenting is shared between the community.

And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

Mothers easily become jealous of their sons' friends when they are particularly successful. As a rule a mother loves herself in her son more than she does the son himself.

If you can just see all the children of the world as your own, all the mothers of the world as you are, we can make a huge difference.

Most female CEOs have been more understanding than their male counterparts, of the stress that new mothers experience to 'do it all,' which often means, 'all by themselves.' Why? They've been there. They understand the policies needed to keep women in the workforce.

We can learn a great deal from whales. It is the same lesson we can learn from our close genetic relatives, the bonobo apes of the Congo. Here mothers have a great deal of authority, there is very little violence (with no signs of sexual violence against females), and their society is held together by sharing and caring rather than by fear and force.

I thought of all the magazine article I'd read on mothers who worked and constantly felt guilty about leaving their children with someone else. I had trained myself to read pieces like that and silently say to myself, 'See how lucky you are?' But it had been gnawing at the inside, that part that didn't fit, that I never let myself even think about. After all, wasn't it a worse kind of guilt to be with your child and to know that you wanted to be anywhere but there?

This country has not been made by politicians, kings or governments. It has been made by farmers, labourers, our mothers and sisters and youth.

Women, in all fields - whether mothers or not - still encounter an extraordinary number of obstacles. They have to hold too many things together and often sacrifice their aspirations in the name of affections.

With organic approaches, women - who have been gardeners for millennia and mothers forever - can rise because of their intimate knowledge of nature.

I feel about mothers the way I feel about dimples: because I do not have one myself, I notice everyone who does.

Militant mothers hiding in the basement using pots and pans as their shields and their helmets.

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

In order to provide the German housewife, above all mothers of many children...with tangible relief from her burdens, the Fuhrer has commissioned me to bring into the Reich from the eastern territories some four to five hundred thousand select, healthy, and strong girls.

Daughters hate their mothers; I think it's the law of nature. But you know what? Then they come back.

There will never be a generation of great men until there has been a generation of free women - of free mothers.

Most mothers entering the labor market outside the home are naive. They stagger home each evening, holding mail in their teeth, the cleaning over their arm, a lamb chop defrosting under each armpit, balancing two gallons of frozen milk between their knees, and expect one of the kids to get the door.

Career mothers are not kidding anybody. Being a mom is the hardest job of all. You got to work to rest.

Right now you're seeing more and more families reporting that they are skipping meals. They're having to give up meat. Mothers are foregoing food so their kids can have something. People are growing their own vegetables, not because they've gone organic, but because it's one of the few assured sources of food they have. For low-income Americans food is costly right now. The price of food has been going up, and wages haven't. This puts working Americans in a real bind. The fact that the mainstream media hasn't reported it doesn't mean that it's not happening.

How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?

Arizona may be the only state in America where mothers don't tell their children that someday, they can grow up and be president of the United States.

Mothers are only human, you turn it over to God and then you just wing it.

Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.

In the past there was not much social acceptance of men taking a primary care taking role at home. That has changed, and along with it, the opportunities for mothers to take on more demanding executive roles.

It is the mothers not the warriors who create a people and guide their destiny.

Women gain social influence through their roles as mothers, transmitters of culture, and parents for the next generation.

Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers' incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them?

I'm a parent. I think we're responsible for the problems that young people have. I believe that. I don't blame them for any of it. I blame us for what we haven't done as mothers and fathers, not sticking together as a unit.

God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.

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.

Mothers, unless they were very poor, didn't work. Both of my parents had to leave education. My mother had to work in a cotton mill until 18 or 19, when she took some training in domestic science.

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

The fabric of my life is under my skin; [but] it's definitely not something that comes up in a conscious way when I read material. I have an incredible relationship with my mom, so I'm fascinated by mothers who do not have that. But I've never done anything that resembled my life. People always jump to that conclusion, and I wish life were that simple, but it's not.

Of all the peoples whom I have studied, from city dwellers to cliff dwellers, I always find that at least 50 percent would prefer to have at least one jungle between themselves and their mothers-in-law.

There was a certain power beautiful mothers held over their less beautiful daughters.

Mothers and daughters can stay very connected during teenage years. In the middle of your life, you can become very alone. Even though you're connected deeply to other family members, lovers, husbands, friends.

When war ends, women are the first to pick up the pieces. Where there is no market place, they go door to door. When homes are destroyed, mothers and daughters haul stones to rebuild or plow fields together.

The tension to mother the "right" way can leave a peculiar silence within mother daughter relationships--the silence of a mother'sown truth and experience. Within this silence, a daughter's authentic voice can also fall silent. This is the silence of perfection. This silence of perfection prevents mothers from listening and learning from their daughters.

Bill Clinton, talking about the need to financially empower wives and mothers in regressive countries, once remarked that women have 'the responsibility gene.' No one has that gene more markedly than his wife.