Henry Steele Commager Quotes

I know plenty of Hollywood kids who still struggle with being whole. Their lives are never fully their own - always in the grip of a parent who put celebrity ahead of them.

My wife and I have a schizophrenic son. We didn't want to accept this for 30 years, so we put him under great pressure when we shouldn't have. He just wanted to be looked after, and we didn't respect that. We tried to make him independent.

'Empire' deals with the black experience, the human experience, sibling rivalry, what it feels like to be ignored or doted upon by a parent, illness, death. There are so many things that I think the audience can identify with.

Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.

The first half of our lives are ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.

My mother was a sociologist and an intellectual, and my father was an industrialist with a business in copper and aluminum wire. He was very strict and he wanted me to work in the family business - for him, the worst thing was having a daughter who worked in fashion.

I don't know of any great man who ever had a great son.

When you have parents who are a little out of their minds, somebody has to take responsibility.

John Adams and John Quincy Adams had six sons. Two of these were great statesman and four were drunks. For the Adams family it was the White House or the Ale House …. Family pressure is part of what drives people to drink.

I didn't want to be the daughter of the crazy people.

I am in agreement with everything my father taught me and nothing my mother taught me.

My mother's feeling about men in general were always a bit of a mystery to me. She had difficulties in Puerto Rico with the men in her life. Her brothers abused her. It's very easy to be judgmental, but more often than not, there are mitigating circumstances, and children are not usually aware of those.

That's why I'm so crazy because my mom is crazy.

My dad is this typical orthodox, narrow-minded Punjabi man in front of whom you can't even utter the word called 'boyfriend.'

I've never really turned to my dad for anything, I think out of fear of the label of nepotism.

If I refused to get married, my parents would be brokenhearted and confused. Like any child close to her parents, I could not watch them suffer.

Watching promos of my dad and stepdad... it's a lot to live up to. I don't want to make them look stupid.

My house is full of paintings by my mother Pam. She was a fantastic, prolific artist but had no confidence in herself, thanks to my father running her down. They married during the war when she was 19 - she had planned to go to art school. But my father didn't want her to work, so she became a housewife.

Growing up with a famous father, and one who mastered his craft, it's one of those things where, do you really want to be in the same profession? I can't imagine the pressure on, say, Michael Jordan's kids. But for me, I think it's molded me into the character that I am today.

I trained in medicine in India, and after that, I chose psychiatry as my specialty, much to the dismay of my mother and all my family members who kind of thought neurosurgery would be a more respectable option for their brilliant son.

Acting, for me, was kind of a way of survival, honestly. I'm the baby boy out of four different sisters, and I grew up in a house with so many different personalities that acting was the only way to not go to therapy.

I was closest to my dad and he always knew that I am responsible and would look after my family. For him, I was always the boy child and not his girl.

My father was always pushing me to become a basketball player. In Africa, when you're a kid, every kid loves to play soccer, and I loved playing soccer. But my dad didn't want me playing soccer. He would joke, 'C'mon, man, you're too tall!' Then he promised me, 'If you start playing basketball, I'm going to give you my jersey.'

In the summer of 1956, my mother was pregnant with me, which caused my father to confess his fear that I was going to be too much of a burden for him because he had a history of depression.

Compared to Alia, it's little more difficult for Shaheen, as she has a famous father and a famous sibling, too. So, I always tell my daughters to not to pay much heed to these expectations and give more importance to their dreams. They should keep working hard and find their own talent.