“I may be the only mother in America who knows exactly what their child is up to all the time.”

I love talking to people, but what I really love is to feel you’re doing something instead of sitting home and twiddling your thumbs.

Family and friends and faith are the most important things in your life and you should be building friendships.

I don’t like attacking.

I’m not going to jump out of airplanes or anything like someone else I know.

Nancy Reagan was a perfectionist, and I am not.

You may think the president is all-powerful, but he is not. He needs a lot of guidance from the Lord.

Giving frees us from the familiar territory of our own needs by opening our mind to the unexplained worlds occupied by the needs of others.

I mean you can learn how to build a bullet or build a gun or build a bomb on the Internet.

And who knows? Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the President’s spouse. I wish him well!

I’m worried about parents who aren’t parenting.

At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child, or a parent.

You have to love your children unselfishly. That’s hard. But it’s the only way.

I’m a little old-fashioned.

Whatever the era…one thing will never change: Fathers and mothers, if you have children, they must come first.

The winner of the hoop race will be the first to realize her dream, not society’s dream, her own personal dream.

Whether you are talking about education, career, or service, you are talking about life. And life must really have joy. It’s supposed to be fun.

You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.

My mom always says, “Pack your smile,” but [the sound guy] articulated it beautifully, because he saw me go from Joe Schmo who had been on food stamps to Adam Richman from Man V. Food.

The longer one lives in this hard world motherless, the more a mother’s loss makes itself felt.

Okay, using the dreaded middle name is not the best way to forge a bond.

I grew up with a single mom who was a waitress. We were on food stamps.

My mom then got Pell Grants, put herself through college to get a degree to get a better job. Because we were broke, I then had to go to a state school.

You eat and sleep it all day long and play on the streets until mom calls you in.

In baseball, it’s tough to get up for every single game, every single moment. In football, you have 90,000 fans screaming and the band’s playing. I do miss that