Father Quotations | Page 6

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

I couldn't stand back and watch the strong economy that my father envisioned go to ruins.

My father always told me I should be a writer, and I found I loved writing my autobiography; writing is such an interesting process.

People do think I'm Jewish. But we're Irish Catholic. My father had a brogue.

I didn't expect to be doing a whole bunch of Amber Browns. And because it was just one book, and the father had moved away, I didn't realize I was going to have to deal more with shared custody, divorce and all those issues

We were living in the Slad Road when my father left us. I was about three.

My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English.

The modern minds in each generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world, who will not leave us to walk undisturbed in the ways of our fathers.

So the news that divorced fathers are to be denied a legal right to a relationship with their children, in the long overdue review of family law published this week, fills me with horror and despair.

For the freedoms our founding fathers not only dreamed about, but made into reality. It is that same pursuit of freedom today that is helping to make our world a safer place.

My father's values and vision of this country obviously form everything I have as values and ideals. But this is not the ghost of my father running for the leadership of the Liberal party. This is me.

I discovered the 7th art at home when I was kid, through Charlie Chaplin's movies and those of my father who shot documentaries. He was my biggest influence. So I took his camera and started shooting.

The purpose of my life is being a father to my kids and being a husband to my wife.

My father was the most rational and the most dispassionate of men.

Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morning you awake in Heaven: see yourself in your Father's palace; and look upon the skies, the earth, and the air as celestial joys: having such a reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the angels.

One of my strongest memories is my father playing bongos in the living room in Detroit listening to Motown radio. He was this skinny white bald guy, but he was really moved by blues and Motown and funk.

Having a better and more productive life than my monster father has been my most significant accomplishment.

One of Obama's most impressive attributes is his quiet confidence: Voters sense that he is comfortable in his own skin, a dedicated father and friend who won't waste time with the phony rituals of Washington.

I think we all live dichotomies. I'm a father of three boys and a loyal homebody sort of husband and father. And yet I act in movies and write and direct movies.

I made friends with a boy who was a communist when I was 13 and that broadened my political views, but it also brought me into conflict with my father who was very Right-wing.

The public saw my father right out of central casting. He looked the part, acted the part... he was the part! The real life Godfather.

In my early years, my father was away as a soldier in the war. When he came back, work was very difficult to come by. Even though he was a highly skilled man, a maker of furniture, the payment for that work was very poor.

My father was a preacher in Maryland and we had crab feasts - with corn on the cob, but no beer, being Methodist - outside on the church lawn.

I look a lot like my father when he was my age.

With The Key, it was, I had gone through a divorce and losing my father, and just kinda really reminiscing about how much I loved the traditional side of country music, so I made a record that was really traditional from start to finish.

The Pirate is surrealism and so, in a curious way, is Father of the Bride.

My children, as long as you live, the shadow of the Hiss Case will brush you. In every pair of eyes that rests on you, you will see pass, like a cloud passing behind a woods in winter, the memory of your father - dissembled in friendly eyes, lurking in unfriendly eyes.

I never complain. I chose the road of fighting with the Ukrainian oligarchy in 1996, and have paid for this with my freedom and that of my husband, my father and my close friends.

I was kosher until I had my Bar Mitzvah, and I parlayed officially becoming a man into telling my father I wanted to eat cheeseburgers.

My great-grandfather Melvin had been a carpenter - so was my father - and they taught me the value of tools: saws, hammers, chisels, files and rulers. It all dealt with conciseness and precision. It eliminated guesswork. One has to know his tools, so he doesn't work against himself.

My father taught me that the easiest thing to do was to quit. He'd say, 'It doesn't take any talent to do that.'

I understood the power of Heinz since I was a kid, and I started to work for my father selling food to restaurants.

I wanted to be an actor ever since I got on stage for the first time, aged 13. Before that, I thought I might follow in the medical footsteps of my parents: my father was a doctor, my mother a pharmacist.

I think that it's important if you run for President that you have to make those important decisions. And your father, if he can help, probably, he helps just by being your father without getting intimately involved.

The thing that drives me more than anything else is being a father.

A friend at school was always being laughed at because his father emptied dustbins for a living. But those who laughed worshipped famous footballers. This is an example of our topsy-turvy view of 'success.' Who would we miss most if they did not work for a month, the footballer or the garbage collector?

My kids are just waiting for me at home. I'm their father. They're wondering, 'When's Daddy coming home?'

My mother and father were never frightened of anything. They always felt that they should go through life happily and without fear, and they did that. And it was a great boon to my brother and myself.

I always saw myself as really ugly. My father even told me I was ugly because I would shave my head and look like a boy.

My father always said, 'If you love what you do, you won't mind slogging through it for several hours a day.

Tim on the show does a lot of that posturing, of course, and feels sort of threatened by women. But even at that, you do see him cooking, and ultimately he's a good father because he spends a lot of time with the boys.

I was in Vietnam, and I was exposed to Agent Orange. And there's a high relationship between people that were exposed to Agent Orange and the kind of lymphoma that I had. The prostate cancer was genetic in my family. My father had prostate cancer, my - three of my four uncles had prostate cancer.

I was adopted by two amazing people: a Salvadoran mother and a white father who were incredibly supportive of me and my work. I am eternally grateful for them.

Since my brother died in 1982, my parents and I had formed a shaky tripod of a family; now that I'd lost my father too, it was too easy for me to glimpse a future point where I alone was the keeper of not just my own childhood memories, but of my family lore.

I've done my work and I'm happy with it... I respect my father very much, but I'm a very different person than he was.

Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers - none can equal the Internet.

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

My father wanted me to be a pharmacist like himself. He had been a doctor, but he no longer believed in medicine; so he became a pharmacist, but he believed in that hardly more.

My father and Mary Pickford were the reigning stars of not just Hollywood but of the world. Well, to bear my father's name was hard enough, but to work in pictures to boot was pretty foolhardy. In fact, my father was totally against it. He thought I should be off getting a good education and go into some safe profession.

The food we ate was Indian, and both my mother and father were very deep into the ancient philosophy of India, so it could well have been an Indian household.

My father, who died a few years ago, was a good, simple, very honest man. His faith and affection for his family was just unassailable, without question.

Keep in my mind my dad didn't become a huge, huge mega actor until I was halfway through high school, so right around the time he's going through his big renaissance is right when I'm starting to do my high school revolting.

My father helped me become a ballplayer and take the good with the bad.

I obviously have a great love and appreciation of jewelry, thanks to my mother, much to the dismay of both my father and my boyfriends.

No, I never thought about my father's money as my money.

When I was a kid, my father didn't really have much hope for me. He thought I was a dreamer; he didn't think I would amount to anything. My mother also.

The Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to bare the secrets of government and inform the people.

Arnold Bennett was a writer I admired. He was actually taking notes at his father's deathbed.

To this day, I am the least materialistic person I know, because my father didn't raise me to just go out and buy this or that car. The only reason I wanted to make money as an actor was because I'm passionate about food!

My dad's not a very intimidating father figure.

My father, though, could run very much faster. It was impossible to compete with him on the grass. But it was astonishing how slow old people were. Some of them could not run up a hill and called it trying to climb stairs.

Pinocchio, spurred on by the hope of finding his father and of being in time to save him, swam all night long.

To all those mothers and fathers who are struggling with teen-agers, I say, just be patient: even though it looks like you can't do anything right for a number of years, parents become popular again when kids reach 20.

I really cite Walt Disney as teaching me everything I know. It sounds crazy, but I'm serious! In 'Bambi,' the mother dies, but you don't see the corpse. You see the father, the stag, come up and you see 'Bambi' alone, and that has so much more impact than seeing a mutilated deer.

The America I know is great - not because government made it great but because ordinary citizens like me, like my father and like you are given the opportunity every day to do extraordinary things.

I was surprised by how much I like being a father; surprised at what a decent father I am, because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to dump my selfishness.

In our house, Mother's Day is every day. Father's Day, too. In our house, parents count. They do important work and that work matters. One day just doesn't cut for us.

I'd seen my father. He was a poor man, and I watched him do astonishing things.

I was five years old when I wrote my first song. It was out of longing for my father that I wrote it.

I am now known as Nina Conti's father and it's wonderful.

My father had to flee from what is today Pakistan when he was a child, and he became a manager at IBM, and any item of consumption he would acquire was a direct measurement of his success in life. But that same equation wasn't going to work for me - I was quite clear about that in my early teens.

The Hadley Street Dream is a tribute to making a vision come to life. My father built a compound on a dessert city block, he saw something in that space we couldn't see. It was years later the album was born right there on Hadley St. He built the studio I started recording the album at.

My father was a painter and he taught art. He once said to me, 'I never knew an Indian child who could not draw.'

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

Every parent is at some time the father of the unreturned prodigal, with nothing to do but keep his house open to hope.

I started out mopping floors, waiting tables, and tending bar at my dad's tavern. I put myself through school working odd jobs and night shifts. I poured my heart and soul into a small business. And when I saw how out-of-touch Washington had become with the core values of this great nation, I put my name forward and ran for office.

In consequence of our limited ideas of the sufferings of Christ, we place a low estimate upon the great work of the atonement. The glorious plan of man's salvation was brought about through the infinite love of God the Father. In this divine plan is seen the most marvelous manifestation of the love of God to the fallen race.

My father would tell anyone who would listen that this dentist thing he was doing was not his passion; cinematography was.

My own special relationship with America began at an early age. My father, a fellow journalist, named me after Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.

The first 10 years of my professional life had only to do with running away from my father. He was a wonderful cabinet-maker, and me being the eldest son, I had to take over his shop, his profession and so on and so on. I tried to escape by going to art school and then going on to industrial design and then interior design.

I came from an intellectual family. Most were doctors, preachers, teachers, businessmen. My grandfather was a small businessman. His father was an abolitionist doctor, and his father was an immigrant from Germany.

My father was a television director, and I always knew I wanted to be in the industry, but I had thought my role was behind the camera as opposed to in front.

I'm a huge fan of the Navy. My father was a Naval historian, and I've been studying Naval battles forever.

My mother was an actress and my voice teacher, an incredible voice teacher. My biological father is an actor, and my stepfather, who raised me along with my mother, is a psychotherapist. I was always supported in creative ventures.

The 'New Testament', now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say, and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work with wood - a material that couldn't have been widely available in Palestine.

Afflictions are but as a dark entry into our Father's house.

When my mother died, my father was in a crisis, my sister was in a crisis, everyone was in a crisis. I went round the night my mother was lying in the kitchen, and I organised everything, from the undertaker to the funeral... I looked after everybody, I sorted it all out and Ive done so ever since.

I want to live with that sense with the music I make, with the art I make, with the way I love my kids, with the way I am a father and a husband and a friend and a follower of Christ, I want to live with reckless abandonment to the truth of the Gospel.

I wasn't anything special as a father. But I loved them and they knew it.

When my father made 'Jean de Florette' and 'Manon des Sources' back to back, everybody said, 'Why two movies?' But you need two movies to show how criminality evolves, and to tell the story: You can't show a man in love with so many women in one big biopic.

Prosecutors say my father was the biggest crime boss in the nation... If you really want to know what John Gotti was like, you need to talk to my family. We lived this life.

A lot of people say, 'Wow, you're a single father of twin boys, that's crazy!' Two toddlers can get hectic, but I wouldn't change it for anything. Every day they teach me different things. The love is there. When you have a two-year-old saying every other hour, 'Papi, te amo. Papi, I love you,' it can't get better.

To a father, when a child dies, the future dies; to a child when a parent dies, the past dies.

My mother and my father were teachers. My grandmother and my grandfather were teachers. This is something I really know about. Even when I was a kid, it was a profession my father couldn't stay in, because he couldn't make enough money.

When we believe that God is Father, we also believe that such a father's hand will never cause his child a needless tear. We may not understand life any better, but we will not resent life any longer.

My parents took an interest in nothing, at home no books, no records. My mother and my father are the emblem of indifference, dryness and bad taste. My father is also terribly stingy, in life as well as in feelings: I have never seen him filling up the bathtub.

I like to feel that what I'm doing portrays this: a family where there is love between mother, father and the kids. It's a subject that is near and dear to me.

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.

My grandson Sam Saunders has been playing golf since he could hold a club and I spent a lot of time with him over the years. Like my father taught me, I showed him the fundamentals of the game and helped him make adjustments as he and his game matured over the years.