Collection copyright 1999-2012 © Jone Johnson Lewis
• "A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother — and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment." -- Anna Jarvis, promoter of the establishment of Mother's Day
• "Arise then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts! ... We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs...." [ more] -- Julia Ward Howe, promoter of a Mother's Day for Peace
• "No one who traces the history of motherhood, of the home, of child-rearing practices will ever assume the eternal permanence of our own way of institutionalizing them." -- Jessie Bernard
• "To nourish children and raise them against odds is any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons." -- Marilyn French
• "Women's rights in essence is really a movement for freedom, a movement for equality, for the dignity of all women, for those who work outside the home and those who dedicate themselves with more altruism than any profession I know to being wives and mothers, cooks and chauffeurs, and child psychologists and loving human beings." -- Jill Ruckelshaus
• "No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother." -- Margaret Sanger
• "Motherhood is neither a duty nor a privilege, but simply the way that humanity can satisfy the desire for physical immortality and triumph over the fear of death." -- Rebecca West
• "My mother could make anybody feel guilty -- she used to get letters of apology from people she didn't even know." -- Joan Rivers
• "The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant -- and let the air out of the tires." -- Dorothy Parker
• "A wise parent humors the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and advisor when his absolute rule shall cease." -- Elizabeth Gaskell
•
"So when the great word 'Mother!' rang once more,
I saw at last its meaning and its place;
Not the blind passion of the brooding past,
But Mother -- the World's Mother -- come at last,
To love as she had never loved before --
To feed and guard and teach the human race." --
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• "No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement." -- Florida Scott-Maxwell
• "Sometimes when I look at all my children, I say to myself, 'Lillian, you should have stayed a virgin.'" -- Lillian Carter, at the 1980 Democratic Convention, where her son was nominated for a second term as US President
• "A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie." -- Tenneva Jordan
• "Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at de sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground." -- Zora Neale Hurston
• "At work, you think of the children you have left at home. At home, you think of the work you've left unfinished. Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself. Your heart is rent." -- Golda Meir
• "And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see -- or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read." -- Alice Walker
• "Why do grandparents and grandchildren get along so well? They have the same enemy -- the mother." -- Claudette Colbert
• "There was never a great man who had not a great mother -- it is hardly an exaggeration." -- Olive Schreiner
• "A mother's arms are more comforting than anyone else's." -- Diana, Princess of Wales
