“I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.”
Sigmund Freud
“Dad, how much I’ve grown tall does not matter because it’s to you I’ll always look up.”
Kurt Avish
“My father was a statesman; I’m a political woman. My father was a saint. I’m not.”
Indira Gandhi
“Fathers, like mothers, are not born. Men grow into fathers and fathering is a very important stage in their development.”
David Gottesman
“I just owe almost everything to my father [and] it’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.”
Margaret Thatcher
“A good father is one of the most unsung, unpraised, unnoticed, and yet one of the most valuable assets in our society.”
Billy Graham
“None of you can ever be proud enough of being the child of such a Father who has not his equal in this world – so great, so good, so faultless. Try, all of you, to follow in his footsteps and don’t be discouraged, for to be really in everything like him none of you, I am sure, will ever be. Try, therefore, to be like him in some points, and you will have acquired a great deal.”
Queen Victoria of England
“Sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritance.”
Ruth E. Renkel
“You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s. He’s more particular.”
Robert Frost
“What a dreadful thing it must be to have a dull father.”
Mary Mapes Dodge
“My father always used to say that when you die, if you’ve got five real friends, then you’ve had a great life.”
Lee Iacocca
“Train up a child in the way which he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.”
Proverbs 22:6
“Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
Bob Dylan
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.”
“When we were visiting New York City, I took my kids to the same playground where I went growing up. It was fun to feel that connection of having gone there as a kid and being there as a parent.”
Ben Stiller
“Just stick with your kids. There’s no set of rules on how to be a parent. No handbook. Just hang around your kids and ask them a lot of questions. You have to stay involved in your children’s lives and monitor everything they’re doing whether they like it or not. You’re not in the job of making them like it. You’re there to protect them in a world that can be troubling.”
Denzel Washington
“The best advice I can give to new parents is to realize immediately that your children will be unique individuals. Give them the space to be themselves and to develop their own personalities and characteristics.”
Donald Trump
“Just be loving. You also have to recognize that you need to take the focus off yourself and put it on your children to give them a proper start in life.”
Benjamin Bratt
“When you have a child, your relationship with every child in the world changes. It’s like you’re in a club you didn’t know existed before a child came into your life. I believe you should make the world more beautiful for all children in any way that you can.”
Matt Damon
“The older I get, the smarter my father seems to get.”
Tim Russert
“A new father quickly learns that his child invariably comes to the bathroom at precisely the times when he’s in there, as if he needed company. The only way for this father to be certain of bathroom privacy is to shave at the gas station.”
Bill Cosby
“If you’re flying with your children, it’s best to book them on the same flight and not on one where they have more legroom and are leaving at a different time. They could get there earlier than you, and that causes resentment. Two-year-olds can also never figure out those connecting flights. It just makes it harder, so travel as a family.”
Will Ferrell