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

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.

Yup, the whole birther movement was racist.

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

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

Regardless of what society says, we can’t go on much longer in the sea of immorality without judgment coming.

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

I have noticed… that men usually leave married women alone and are inclined to treat all wives with respect. This is no great credit to married women.

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.

The public doesn’t mind people living together without being married, providing they don’t overdo it.

Say there’s a white kid who lives in a nice home, goes to an all-white school, and is pretty much having everything handed to him on a platter – for him to pick up a rap tape is incredible to me, because what that’s saying is that he’s living a fantasy life of rebellion.

The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt.

I think a lot of people love to convolute what everyone else does in order to disempower women.

Nothing can be more absurd than the practice that prevails in our country of men and women not following the same pursuits with all their strengths and with one mind, for thus, the state instead of being whole is reduced to half.

Regarding marriage, it – somehow, it didn’t happen. One fellow in such a big family not getting married is not an issue.

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

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.

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.

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

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.

Until blacks and whites see each other as brother and sister, we will not have parity. It’s very clear.

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.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

If you see everything from the point of view of women being victims in some way, you don’t see the wood for the trees. It is better to be a person than a woman.

My mother was a professional sick person; she took a lot of pain pills. There are many people like that. It’s just how they are used to getting attention. I always remember she’s the daughter of alcoholics who’d leave her alone at Christmas time.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

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.

When you’re around the kids, you feel like you act the most grown up just because you’re supposed to lead. I say things, like every other parent, that reminds you of your own parents. One thing I do know about being a parent, you understand why your father was in a bad mood a lot.

Smooth functioning of social life has always depended on the recognition of certain basic limits to behavior. We cannot simply say or do anything we wish, or offend people, without paying consequences – isolation, ostracism, etc.

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

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

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

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

Consciously or unconsciously most of us adhere to what is expected of our role because we realize our social success depends on this. Some may refuse to play this game, but in the end they are marginalized and forced to play the outsider role, with limited options and decreasing freedom as they get older.

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.

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.

I have observed that society in general always seems to honor its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It’s fine to be a pop star. ‚Oh, it’s great, lots of fun, aren’t they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!‘

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

I’m an only child.

I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father.

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

The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too.

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

Our modern society – especially in the West, and especially now – reveres youth.

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

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

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.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

It takes three to make a child.

To conclude that women are unfitted to the task of our historic society seems to me the equivalent of closing male eyes to female facts.

The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion.

The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.

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 think any man who lets a woman pick what he should wear… I mean, you gotta draw the line somewhere as a man. I see these guys, ‚My wife told me to wear this!‘ And I just shake my head.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

My own eight children all march to the beat of their inner music, and in some cases, it is definitely far away from what I hear. I’ve had to honor their instincts and their choices, and merely guided them out of harm’s way until they could be their own guides.

Your children will see what you’re all about by what you live rather than what you say.

Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

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.