Mum's the word

• "To nourish children and raise them against odds is any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons." -- Marilyn French

• "Women's rights in essence is really a movement for freedom, a movement for equality, for the dignity of all women, for those who work outside the home and those who dedicate themselves with more altruism than any profession I know to being wives and mothers, cooks and chauffeurs, and child psychologists and loving human beings." -- Jill Ruckelshaus

• "No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother." -- Margaret Sanger

• "Motherhood is neither a duty nor a privilege, but simply the way that humanity can satisfy the desire for physical immortality and triumph over the fear of death." -- Rebecca West

• "My mother could make anybody feel guilty -- she used to get letters of apology from people she didn't even know." -- Joan Rivers

• "The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant -- and let the air out of the tires." -- Dorothy Parker

• "A wise parent humors the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and advisor when his absolute rule shall cease." -- Elizabeth Gaskell

• "So when the great word 'Mother!' rang once more,

I saw at last its meaning and its place;

Not the blind passion of the brooding past,

But Mother -- the World's Mother -- come at last,

To love as she had never loved before --

To feed and guard and teach the human race." -- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

• "No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement." -- Florida Scott-Maxwell

• "A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie." -- Tenneva Jordan

• "Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at de sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground." -- Zora Neale Hurston

• "At work, you think of the children you have left at home. At home, you think of the work you've left unfinished. Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself. Your heart is rent." -- Golda Meir

• "And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see -- or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read." -- Alice Walker

• "Why do grandparents and grandchildren get along so well? They have the same enemy -- the mother." -- Claudette Colbert.