My family frankly they weren't folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn't raise me in the church so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead.

No matter how old we become we can still call them 'Holy Mother' and 'Father' and put a child-like trust in them.

By presenting a faithful and honest record of my experience as a mother I hope to show both my readers and my children how truth can redeem even what you fear might be the gravest of sins.

I feel that between my experience and my mother's breast cancer is a little bit like someone who lives next door. I know what that person looks like and what their daily habits are.

My father respected and admired my mother and was a person who was always standing by my side encouraging me to do more and believed in my capacity. So in that sense my own experience was very good in becoming an empowered woman. From early on I carried that strong message: 'You can do it.' So I never had any doubt that women can do a lot.

My worst hair experience was when I was trying to relax my hair and my grandmother did it. It went all straight and I looked like a black Bee Gee.

Being a biological mother just isn't part of my experience this time around. However I am a mother who continues to give birth to ideas and ways of experiencing life that challenge the norm.

I believe there's no proverb but what is true they are all so many sentences and maxims drawn from experience the universal mother of sciences.

I had no expectations about fatherhood really but it's definitely a journey I'm glad to be taking. Number one it's a great learning experience. When my mother told me it's a 24/7 job she wasn't kidding.

Motherhood has completely changed me. It's just about like the most completely humbling experience that I've ever had. I think that it puts you in your place because it really forces you to address the issues that you claim to believe in and if you can't stand up to those principles when you're raising a child forget it.

I didn't fully realize it at the time but the goal of my life was profoundly molded by this experience - to help produce in the next generation more Mother Teresas and less Hitlers.

As a partner in a firm full of women who work outside of the home as well as stay at home mothers all with plenty of children gender equality is not a talking point for me. It is an issue I live every day.

I believe that as women we must commit ourselves to sustaining the progress made by our foremothers who fought so hard for women's equality and liberation.

Rosa Parks was the queen mother of a movement whose single act of heroism sparked the movement for freedom justice and equality. Her greatest contribution is that she told us a regular person can make a difference.

Until women learn to want economic independence and until they work out a way to get this independence without denying themselves the joys of love and motherhood it seems to me feminism has no roots.

The real cure for our environmental problems is to understand that our job is to salvage Mother Nature. We are facing a formidable enemy in this field. It is the hunters... and to convince them to leave their guns on the wall is going to be very difficult.

They claim this mother of ours the Earth for their own use and fence their neighbors away from her and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.

My mother was the influence in my life. She was strong she had great faith in the ultimate triumph of justice and hard work. She believed passionately in education.

Today there are people trying to take away rights that our mothers grandmothers and great-grandmothers fought for: our right to vote our right to choose affordable quality education equal pay access to health care. We the people can't let that happen.

Our mother was a very religious and observant Jew our father less so. She was kind of driving the religious education so for us it was more a burden and an obligation when we were kids at that age.

I think that every child grows up with the ideas that what we are given is our society. Your education and your mother and father they tell you this is how it is but then you hit adolescence and you think 'Is it? Why? Why is it like that?' Sometimes that questioning leads to something more.

I'm sure everything has a bearing on what I'm doing. My family is a lower-middle-class family there's lots of children seven brothers two sisters grew up together fighting with each other went to school. My mother went to school up to 4th grade. My father went to school up to 8th grade. So that's about the education level we had in the family.

And really the basis I think of achieving some success in what I want to do today comes from my mother's push to get me to read and to make something of myself from the standpoint of an education.

My mother is a professor of early childhood education. When I was two she would say she knew I was going to be an actor.