Happy Birthday Michael J. Fox!

Family is not an important thing. It's everything.

Acceptance doesn't mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there's got to be a way through it.

I like to encourage people to realize that any action is a good action if it's proactive and there is positive intent behind it.

My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.

I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence I can reach for; perfection is God's business.

I have no choice about whether or not I have Parkinson's. I have nothing but choices about how I react to it. In those choices, there's freedom to do a lot of things in areas that I wouldn't have otherwise found myself in.

I often say now I don't have any choice whether or not I have Parkinson's, but surrounding that non-choice is a million other choices that I can make.

Discipline is just doing the same thing the right way whether anyone's watching or not.

Teenagers blithely skip off to uncertain futures, while their parents sit weeping curbside in the Volvo, because the adolescent brain isn't yet formed enough to recognize and evaluate risk.

Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.

The least amount of judging we can do, the better off we are.

I think the scariest person in the world is the person with no sense of humor.

I mean, I enjoy my work as an actor. But to make a difference in people's lives through advocacy and through supporting research - that's the kind of privilege that few people will get, and it's certainly bigger than being on TV every Thursday for half an hour.

The more I expect, the more unhappy I am going to be. The more I accept, the more serene I am.

The laughs mean more to me than the adoration. If two girls walk up to me and one says 'you're cute', I'll say thank you, but I appreciate it much more when the other one says 'you make me laugh so much'.

There's always failure. And there's always disappointment. And there's always loss. But the secret is learning from the loss, and realizing that none of those holes are vacuums.

I'm going to marry a Jewish woman because I like the idea of getting up Sunday morning and going to the deli.

In fact, Parkinson's has made me a better person. A better husband, father and overall human being.

I really love being alive. I love my family and my work. I love the opportunity I have to do things. That's what happiness is.

One's dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but cannot be taken away unless it is surrendered.

I see possibilities in everything. For everything that's taken away, something of greater value has been given.

You've probably read in People that I'm a nice guy - but when the doctor first told me I had Parkinson's, I wanted to kill him.

Humility is always a good thing. It's always a good thing to be humbled by circumstances so you can then come from a sincere place to try to deal with them.

I don't have a set of tenets, but I live an ethical life. I practice a humility that presupposes there's a power greater than myself. And I always believe, don't inflict harm where it's not necessary.

If you have doubts about someone, lay on a couple of jokes. If he doesn't find anything funny, your radar should be screaming. Then I would say be patient with people who are negative, because they're really having a hard time.