Role Models Quotes

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
― James Baldwin

“If your kid needs a role model and you ain't it, you're both fucked.”
― George Carlin, Brain Droppings

“Find someone who has a life that you want and figure out how they got it. Read books, pick your role models wisely. Find out what they did and do it.”
― Lana Del Rey

“A father has to be a provider, a teacher, a role model, but most importantly, a distant authority figure who can never be pleased. Otherwise, how will children ever understand the concept of God?”
― Stephen Colbert, I Am America

“I want an Oompa-Loompa!' screamed Veruca.”
― Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

“Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes”
― Bertolt Brecht, Galileo

“Being a role model is the most powerful form of educating...too often fathers neglect it because they get so caught up in making a living they forget to make a life.”
― John Wooden, Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court

“Who's to blame when your kid goes nuts? Is it a blessing to not have children? 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' became a hit cult book for women without offspring who were finally able to admit they didn't want to give birth. They felt complete, thank you very much, and lived in silent resentment for years at other women's pious, unwanted sympathy toward them for not having babies. With even gay couples having children these days, aren't happy heterosexual women who don't want to have kids the most ostracized of us all? To me they are beautiful feminists. If you're not sure you could love your children, please don't have them, because they might grow up and kill us.”
― John Waters

“I think the best role models for women are people who are fruitfully and confidently themselves, who bring light into the world.”
― Meryl Streep

“I don’t want to be a supermodel; I want to be a role model.”
― Queen Latifah

“The only people you have to look out for in life are the people that don't care about anything or anyone. These are the people that end up teaching your children.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Role models are only of limited use. For no-one is as important, potentially powerful and as key in your life and world as you.”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“Perseverance is the act of true role models and heroes.”
― Liza Wiemer

“We wish we could have been there for you. We didn't have many role models of our own--we latched on to the foolish love of Oscar Wilde and the well-versed longing of Walt Whitman because nobody else was there to show us an untortured path. We were going to be your role models. We were going to give you art and music and confidence and shelter and a much better world. Those who survived lived to do this. But we haven't been there for you. We've been here. Watching as you become the role models.”
― David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing

“All the role models are being exposed and this is good because role models are shit. The quicker we exposed them the better. The whole concept of role models is frightful! You gotta make your own role.”
― William S. Burroughs

“We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“I do not feel that we should set up people as “models”; rather actions, thoughts, principles.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Polar north can't get away from a magnet; the magnet finds it, no matter what.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.”
― W.H. Auden

“When you have lived your individual life in your own adventurous way and then look back upon its course, you will find that you have lived a model human life, after all.”
― Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

“Leaders are more powerful role models when they learn than when they teach.”
― Rosabeth Moss Kantor

“-When I was growing up, Lieutenant Uhura was a major role model for me, a strong black woman on the bridge of a starship…
-In a miniskirt, answering the interplanetary telephone?”
― Suzanne Brockmann

“If we fail to provide boys with pro-social models of the transition to adulthood, they may construct their own. In some cases, gang initiation rituals, street racing, and random violence may be the result.”
― Leonard Sax, Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men

“When gangs took over the [abandoned public land in Philadelphia] and the neighborhood took a turn for the worse, horses became a way of saving lives. By getting boys interested in raising a horse rather than killing another human being, these cowboys gave the youth something positive: father figures, focus, and the ability to stand tall.”
― G. Neri, Ghetto Cowboy

“My author role model is Kurata Misako. I want to be rich enough to drive from room to room in my home but also down to earth enough to let squirrels live in my hair.”
― Christy Leigh Stewart

“Preparatory men. I welcome all signs that a more manly, a warlike, age is about to begin, an age which, above all, will give honor to valor once again. For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength which this higher age will need one day - this age which is to carry heroism into the pursuit of knowledge and wage wars for the sake of thoughts and their consequences. To this end we now need many preparatory valorous men who cannot leap into being out of nothing - any more than out of the sand and slime of our present civilisation and metropolitanism: men who are bent on seeking for that aspect in all things which must be overcome; men characterised by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness, and contempt for all great vanities, as well as by magnanimity in victory and forbearance regarding the small vanities of the vanquished; men possessed of keen and free judgement concerning all victors and the share of chance in every victory and every fame; men who have their own festivals, their own weekdays, their own periods of mourning, who are accustomed to command with assurance and are no less ready to obey when necessary, in both cases equally proud and serving their own cause; men who are in greater danger, more fruitful, and happier! For, believe me, the secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities under Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors, as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you lovers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be satisfied to live like shy deer, hidden in the woods! At long last the pursuit of knowledge will reach out for its due: it will want to rule and own, and you with it!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche

“Instead of seeking out role models, we need to start seeking out role model qualities. This will allow us to see the negatives even in those we like and stop us from aping their negative qualities. At the same time, this will allow us to study the good qualities even in those we do not like, the application of which can take us to the next level.”
― Anubhav Srivastava, UnLearn: A Practical Guide to Business and Life

“Even in literature -- a possible resort in the nineteenth century for for such intelligent and creative women as the Brontes and George Eliot -- there were no female role models for her to follow,”
― Katie Whitaker, Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by Her Pen

“While it’s easy to criticize terrible role models, it’s better to learn from them.”
― Frank Sonnenberg, BECOME: Unleash the Power of Moral Character and Be Proud of the Life You Choose