Poverty was my mother's midwife. She had her children in poverty. But she also found a road to bring us a sense of purpose, and she taught us how to be valiant in the face of oppression.
As a son of Jamaican immigrants whose father cut sugarcane as a contract farm worker for over a decade and whose mother was a cook who fed those migrant workers out in the fields, the odds have always been against me growing up in rural South Bay, Fla.
I'm just one woman away, my mother, from being the same as Mike Tyson. I would've ended up like him if my mama had not been so tough and strong. A lot of people, including Mike, don't know I came from the ghetto. They think I'm too nice and proper. But that's the way my mama raised me - to look people in the eye and respect them.
My first ambition in life, I made up my mind I was going to become Miles Davis. I studied music, music theory. I played trumpet for nine years. One day, my mother explained, 'You can't be Miles Davis. There's one, and he's got that job.'
Tonight, tonight we've reached a milestone in our nation's march toward a more perfect union: the first time that a major party has nominated a woman for president. Standing here, standing here as my mother's daughter, and my daughter's mother, I'm so happy this day has come.
My mother gave me a push. If I hadn't had her, maybe I wouldn't have had the push. If I hadn't gone to military school, maybe I wouldn't have decided to get with the program. Maybe I'd be running a bulldozer, rather than going on and doing something more.
My mother did all she could to control me, but at age 14 she sent me to a military school.
Money is the mother's milk of everything, and it certainly is the mother's milk of politics.
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.
Several millennia ago, the words were written that a man should leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. It was not our idea; it was God's idea.
We've been playing in the sandbox of creation for millions of years. We ruin one environment, we move on to the next - manifest destiny. Now it's hitting us collectively: Our mother's life is in our hands.
The only ones who like Milton Berle are his mother - and the public.
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.
I am very career minded, and I think my personality is more suited to America. I am a working mother.
We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface.
I came from a very, very small valley in the middle of South Wales. I grew up there with my father, who's a coal miner, and my mother worked in a normal factory.
I'm from Pemberton, Wigan, and was born into a poor family. I grew up on a council estate. My dad was at first in the Army and then in the coal mines. My mother had four children by the time she was 23 so money was always tight.
The person earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 isn't going out to eat at restaurants. They're not taking piano lessons. They're not going to the gym or the yoga studio. They're not sending mom flowers on Mother's day. What good is this person in the economy? If you raise it to $15 an hour, they're doing all of those things.
Between 1958 and 1963, I sold about 40 million records - to the shock of my mother and father because I was always playing Beethoven. But I bought my mother a mink stole. She was very happy, and she said, 'I think this is better than Beethoven.'
My mother's families were Mennonites or Anabaptists that came to Minnesota from Russia. They were actually moving around Europe doing diking and lowland reclamation work, and they moved into Minnesota.
