Pastoral Resources

I was born and raised in China, and my parents were missionaries.

Parents decide to accept the responsibility of raising children. Any thanks they get for doing that is gravy. Grateful children are a blessing, but they aren't a necessity.

Under these conditions it is not astonishing that learning was highly prized; in fact, my parents made sacrifices to be able to give their children a good education.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

I was born in my parents' bedroom on January 16. The World Almanac says it was 1909. I say it was 1912. But what difference does it make as long as I feel 33?

Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication.

Parents today are under a lot of stress, sometimes working two jobs just to make ends meet. They're trying to find day care for their kids and elder care for their own parents. The Federal Government shouldn't add to their worries by not living up to its obligations.

It was just expected that I would go to college. Both my parents are teachers and they tolerated acting, but I was going to go to a school of quality or bust. Which made my downshifting back to acting afterward a little difficult.

The reason why parents mistreat their children has less to do with character and temperament than with the fact that they were mistreated themselves and were not permitted to defend themselves.

Wherever I look, I see signs of the commandment to honor one's parents and nowhere of a commandment that calls for the respect of a child.

Social Security, for example - I'm 43. I've paid into the system. You know what? That money has been stolen from me. I know that my parents who are on Social Security - they've got to continue to receive it. They're dependent on it. It is their primary source of income.

The reason kids like rock 'n roll is their parents don't.

You see, that's another thing that my parents gave me: an enormously great sense of humor.

Well, when I was growing up it was Ozzie and Harriet on TV - nobody's parents were like that.

I think my parents see my life now as very conservative.

I really owe everything to my parents and their devotion and drive to see to it that their children had the education which led to the opportunities that they never were able to have.

From my parents, I learned a very strong work ethic, and all of my brothers and sisters all worked from the earliest days of life right through to the present time.

My father was the orphaned son of immigrants to the United States from Ireland. My father never knew his parents. His mother died - we're not sure - either at or shortly after his birth, and he and all of his siblings were placed in orphanages in the Boston area.

My parents were very poor, but we never felt any sense of need or want. It was a very close, loving, tightly-knit family growing up, and I never felt any sense of deprivation or anything like that.

We are all members of a single humanity, inside our hearts we all speak the same language, we all love our children and our parents, we all live in the same world.