It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.

Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.

My father was a mean, controlling and manipulative person for most of his life. He was unpredictable and unstable. As a result, the atmosphere of our home was super-charged with fear because you never knew if what you did would make him mad or not.

We do not want the men of another color for our brothers-in-law, but we do want them for our brothers.

Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.

Faith, there hath been many great men that have flattered the people who ne’er loved them.

I was an only child, and Mother was always right with me all my life. I used to get very angry at her when I was growing up-it’s a natural thing.

For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.

I think daughters can change the perception of their fathers.

I grew up upper-class. Private school. My dad had a Jaguar. We’re African-American, and we work together as a family, so people assume we’re like the Jacksons. But I didn’t have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.

I don’t think that much about my relationship with my mother and what it did to me. I sometimes feel terrible regret about her, what her life must have been like. Often, when I’m enjoying something, I think of how meager her rewards were and how much courage, in a way, she needed to go on living.

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

People change because of kids. They change how they eat. They change the way they think. They change the way they see one another.

I was raised in a family where vulnerability was barely tolerated: no training wheels on our bicycles, no goggles in the pool, just get it done. And so I grew up not only with discomfort about my own vulnerability, I didn’t care for it in other people either.

Now that I’m a parent, I understand why my father was in a bad mood a lot.

There have been many great men that have flattered the people who ne’er loved them.

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

It’s true that I’ve never had a burning desire to rebel against my parents.

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.

It’s very hard for our parents who see us enter a world that they can’t imagine.

To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother, is not something I could forgive. I could not look at myself in the morning if I did that. I wouldn’t be attracted to a man who would cheat on his wife.

Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.

I got a lot of support from my parents. That’s the one thing I always appreciated. They didn’t tell me I was being stupid; they told me I was being funny.

My mom’s one of 13 siblings, and they all got six kids, and till I was 13 everybody was in Compton.

I’m an only child.

My mother was a powerful influence. She made me toe the line. If I didn’t have a perfect report card, she showed her disappointment.

I have talked with great men, and I do not see how they differ from others.

I don’t think my parents liked me. They put a live teddy bear in my crib.

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

I praticed making faces in the mirror and it would drive my mother crazy. She used to scare me by saying that I was going to see the devil if I kept looking in the mirror. That fascinated me even more, of course.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

I always wanted to do what my brothers were doing. I always wanted to play the games they played and play rough and wear pants and go outside.

I’ve never been pregnant, so I just feel God didn’t mean for me to have kids so that everybody else’s children could be mine.

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

I want my kids to see me as Dad, for God’s sake, not a television personality.

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.

You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.

The roots of the problems we face in the world, in our national life, and in our family and personal lives are spiritual.

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

A child who is allowed to be disrespectful to his parents will not have true respect for anyone.

My dad was never married. He was kind of a rolling stone. But he was never disrespectful. At the same time, even though he had women in his life when I was a kid, there wasn’t any consistency.

Do you know what you call those who use towels and never wash them, eat meals and never do the dishes, sit in rooms they never clean, and are entertained till they drop? If you have just answered, ‚A house guest,‘ you’re wrong because I have just described my kids.

I’m not great at bedtime stories. Bedtime stories are supposed to put the kid to sleep. My kid gets riled up and then my wife has to come in and go, ‚All right! Get out of the room.‘

My father was a mean, controlling and manipulative person for most of his life. He was unpredictable and unstable.

It’s much worse to read criticism about your son than yourself.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.

There’s a schizoid streak within the family anyway so I dare say that I’m affected by that. The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution, as for my brother he doesn’t want to leave. He likes it very much.

Like all best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements.

The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat.

We were never intimate mother and children while she was our mother – but… when she became our child, the affection came.

A lot of preachers‘ kids are some of the most rebellious kids in the world. I never was like that.

I have always marched to my own beat, and most frequently, it was inconsistent not only with my own immediate family, but with my culture as well.

Me and my dad are friends. We’re cool. I’ll never be disappointed again, because I don’t expect anything anymore from him. I just let him exist, and that’s how we get along.

As a father, I always want my son to be perfect. When he was young, I tried to train him in martial arts, but he said, ‚I don’t want to become like Bruce Lee’s son, with everybody telling me how good my father was.‘ I just think my son is too lazy.

Occasionally I’ve seen children become heavy-handed and insensitive when dealing with their aging parents, and it only caused resentment and hard feelings.

My mother never made me do anything for my brothers, like serve them. I think that’s an important lesson, especially for the Latino culture, because the women are expected to be the ones that serve and cook and whatever. Not in our family. Everybody was equal.

My fans saw me get engaged, saw me make that woman my wife, me having kids, me divorcing, me talking about divorce before the divorce, me talking about my kids‘ reaction to that divorce.

My daughter doesn’t even get my humor. She’s like, ‚Um, no. I don’t get it, Dad. Mmm, no, not that one, Dad.‘

It takes three to make a child.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.