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.

Mothers unless they were very poor didn't work. Both of my parents had to leave education. My mother had to work in a cotton mill until 18 or 19 when she took some training in domestic science.

My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford and her own mother was a doctor.

My mother was born on a tiny farm in County Mayo. She was meant to stay at home and look after the farm while her brother and sister got an education. However she came to England on a visit and never went back.

Education is the mother of leadership.