Maya Angelou Quotes

When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one - it's the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky - in the big cities, too, for that matter.

I'd always been insecure. Being the fourth of five kids means attention is divided five ways, and to do this equally is impossible. I grew up feeling like the little orphan in the family, the one who didn't fit in.

I don't think in my family anyone looked after anyone. It didn't matter how old they were.

Since 2005, I have not spent much time with my family. In fact I have spent more time at the Taj Landsend in Mumbai. It was my 100th visit recently, which means I have spent more than 400 days in that hotel, and that is a lot more than I have spent with my family.

I wanted a baby of color, to be honest, because I wasn't attached to the idea that I look like the biological mother. I liked the idea of the adoption being clear; it was and is not something I am interested in hiding.

Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman's natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.

He that loves not his wife and children feeds a lioness at home, and broods a nest of sorrows.

I think if you look at the themes that are presented in the film, some are inherently social, and I think that any film which deals with the family is dealing with the smallest social unit in our society - and in a sense it is a question of scope.

Many of my books come from what if questions that I can't answer, things that I'm worried about as either a woman, a wife, a mom, an American.

As a husband and as a father of girls, I cannot imagine any woman in my family making the sacrifice of sanity required to run for office. The limited reward for public service cannot blunt the cost.

People will sooner aid a sick dog lying on the sidewalk than to try to find shelter for a sick person. It's too much to deal with.

Children are born into a society in which they are not a priority.

Those who are not hard-hearted enough to murder themselves leave it to others, to parish nurses who leave the babies to starve.

No government should ever be big enough to substitute for the family.

My father, my Mormon father, took off when I was a young man and, or actually very young, I was like six years old, so a young boy.

I haven't put an ounce of effort into my families. I never have.

I was an absent dad. Once the magazine started, I really had two families. The dream was the magazine. I worked through the night all the time.

I look upon indolence as a sort of suicide; for the man is effectually destroyed, though the appetites of the brute may survive.

I have nine children. It breaks my heart to think that it might be their blood is needed to redeem something, to reclaim something that we, through our apathy and our indifference, have given away.

The truth is that those who join gangs - more often than not they are young men in their later teens - often do come from the most difficult family backgrounds, from an environment where they feel neglected and unwanted. Gang membership can bring a perverse sense of belonging which they may not have ever got at home.

Mum grew up in Wythenshawe, one of 12. My mum didn't really go to school and didn't see the need for education, she got bullied so she excluded herself.

I've been slogging ever since I was 10. Yet, when I come home there's not a kind word I get to hear from my family.

I realised that being a mother is similar to being an entrepreneur. You set up a system that is your family and you invest... you take risks and you actually have the most important job of rearing up the future of not just your family or an individual, but of the entire world. That is a tough and risky job.

Community and families are what we're neglecting. This is what's holding us back as people, and instead, we want to look at everything else.