Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed he who fears corruption fears life.

If a politician murders his mother the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.

A conservative is someone who makes no changes and consults his grandmother when in doubt.

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

My mother carried on and supported us her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

I never thought I'd be doing poetry books. I never really studied poetry. But the first one I did was after my mother died and I realized that people sort of think and talk about her style and fashion but in fact what made her the person she was was really her love of reading and ideas.

Write verse not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry then don't by any means mother it but try your hand at verse.

It doesn't work if the bad guys kill his mother's uncle's friend's neighbor's pet dog. You've got to make the stakes high.

Like any other people like fathers mothers sons and daughters in every land when the issue of peace or war has been put squarely to the American people they have registered for peace.

The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.

As I pass it I feel as if I saw a dear old mother sweet in her weakness trembling at the approach of her dissolution but not appealing to me against the inevitable rather endeavouring to reassure me by her patience and pointing to a hopeful future.

My grandmother was a kind of Scarsdale New York society woman best known in her day as the author of the 1959 book 'Growing Your Own Way: An Informal Guide for Teen-Agers' - this despite being a person whose parenting style made Joan Crawford's wire hangers look like pool noodles.

My father was a farmer and my mother was a farmer but my childhood was very good. I am very grateful for my childhood because it was full of gladness and good humanity.

We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook?

I get whatever placidity I have from my father. But my mother taught me how to take it on the chin.

I don't think children's inner feelings have changed. They still want a mother and father in the very same house they want places to play.

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.

No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly.

The interesting thing about being a mother is that everyone wants pets but no one but me cleans the kitty litter.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

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

Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president but they don't want them to become politicians in the process.