Michael J. Fox Quotations

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

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.

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

I find as long as I acknowledge the truth of something, then that's it. I know what it is and then I can operate. But if I overestimate the downside of something or the challenge of something and I get too obsessed about the difficulty of it, then I don't leave enough room to be open to the upside, the possibility.

I still play hockey every now and then, and I still golf. But my biggest exercise is walking my big dog in the park every day.

But the key to our marriage is the capacity to give each other a break. And to realize that it's not how our similarities work together; it's how our differences work together.

Life delivered me a catastrophe, but I found a richness of soul.

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.

The thing that brings people to wail at a wall, or face Mecca, or to go to church, is a search for that feeling of purity.

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

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

I can't be smug, because I know that you can lose anything at any point. And I can't be angry, because I haven't lost it.

My view of life is colored by humor and looking at the best in any situation.

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

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'.

The moment I understood this - that my Parkinson's was the one thing I wasn't going to change - I started looking at the things I could change, like the way research is funded.

I was eccentric, even as a kid. I was an early reader, an early talker. I was very curious in a way that maybe the other kids weren't. I was a little more outgoing.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

When you're a short actor you stand on apple boxes, you walk on a ramp. When you're a short star everybody else walks in a ditch.

I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm an activist, I'm a writer and I'm just a student of the world.

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.

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.

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

What other people think about me is not my business.

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.

I truly believe that we have infinite levels of power that we don't even know are available to us.

I can't always control my body the way I want to, and I can't control when I feel good or when I don't. I can control how clear my mind is. And I can control how willing I am to step up if somebody needs me.

I discovered that I was part of a Parkinson's community with similar experiences and similar questions that I'd been dealing with alone.

That's the way I look at things - if you focus on the worst case scenario and it happens, you've lived it twice. It sounds like Pollyanna-ish tripe but I'm telling you - it works for me.

Medical science has proven time and again that when the resources are provided, great progress in the treatment, cure, and prevention of disease can occur.

Certainly people have a lot tougher situations than I've had to deal with. But I will say we are all dying from the moment we are born. This is not just rehearsal.

You know what I want? The answer is, I truly don't know what I want. I don't want to do a television series. I want to do dramas as well as comedies, but I have no idea what kind or in what order. Just give me the chance at them.

I didn't just want to be a poster boy and sign on to publicize somebody else's method of operations. If I was going to put myself out there, I wanted to make sure that it was to an end. So I got involved with this congressional hearing about Parkinson's being underfunded.

I wouldn't have wanted to miss the opportunity to make those three films that didn't do well. They were really important to me, and the things I learned doing them were important to me.

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

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.

I've never gotten up to see something one of my kids wanted to show me and not been rewarded.

I don't have any affirmations, I don't have any of that stuff. My natural state is to look at things as possibilities and as opportunities.

I don't look at myself as a leader. I do look at myself as part of a community.

I always felt that I came up short in the education department, but I've come to the conclusion that we all get an education.

Vanity's really overrated. When I was 20, teenage girls had my picture on the wall... I don't need to be pretty anymore. I just am who I am.

My whole life, meeting people is like a blind date, because I feel like they've already seen the video on me.

The only thing worse than an opportunity you don't deserve is blowing an opportunity.

When I was younger, I was always described as happy-go-lucky.

If I were overweight because I ate too much, I would have far more of a complex. I would know if I just stopped eating and showed a little discipline I would be thin. But there's not a hell of a lot I can do about being short. You just gotta run with it.

I don't subscribe to any particular doctrine or ideology. I just think that there's kind of a good and bad, the good being life in its purest, happiest form, and the other being the darker side of existence.

I believe that the majority of times the scale tilts toward the good. It's this amazing thing that rolls on and if we get in the flow of it, that's God. And if we fight it, if we swim the other way, we're swimming away from the purest expression of this life.

I have times when I'm off-balance. I have times when I slur my words. I have times when I walk into walls. I have times when I can't remember somebody's name.

Always be available to your kids. Because if you say, 'Give me five minutes, give me ten minutes,' it'll be 15, it'll be 20. And then when you get there, the shine will have worn off whatever it is they wanted to share with you.

So what I say about Tracy is this: Tracy's big challenge is not having a Parkinson's patient for a husband. It's having me for a husband. I happen to be a Parkinson's patient.

I had all the usual ambition growing up. I wanted to be a writer, a musician, a hockey player. I wanted to do something that wasn't nine to five. Acting was the first thing I tried that clicked.

Life is the power that's greater than I can ever comprehend. The way life runs through everything, even the tiniest elements of nature - that makes me humble.

As a kid, I was into music, played guitar in a band. Then I started acting in plays in junior high school and just got lost in the puzzle of acting, the magic of it. I think it was an escape for me.

I'm kind of private and I keep things inside a lot, but it's been so wonderful to realize that people care about you in a very deep way and that there is some bond between an actor and his audience. I don't even know how to describe that feeling.

No, I got a GED in my 30s. My kids know that I never stop learning, and they know I love reading. I have books overflowing everywhere. I am current on today's events and I read the paper every day, and we talk about it, so they see that appetite.

In my 50s I'll be dancing at my children's weddings.

No matter how much money you have, you can lose it.

After a year or so I really thought I was Howard Hughes. Here I was at eighteen years old, getting all these checks.

By 21, I was earning six figures a week. By 23, I had a Ferrari. It was nuts.

By the time I entered high school, I had forsaken academics altogether in favor of my burgeoning acting career.

Everybody in the world knew who I was before I knew who I was.

I don't look at life as a battle or as a fight. I don't think I'm scrappy. I'm accepting.

I'm not a shill for the Democratic Party.

So I never spend a lot of time analyzing why people respond to my work. But I think that it's just the joy, a passion for life, that I think has always been in my characters. Beyond that, I'm just grateful for it.

As much as Parkinson's is about movement, the end stage is being frozen. So the more I let that happen, the more I'm gonna be stuck within that and unable to reverse it.

I'm also very proud to be a part of a trilogy of films that, if they do nothing else, allow people to check their problems at the door, sit down and have a good time.

I've learned some exciting things - mostly, that people really want to help each other; and that, if you can lay out a vision for them - and that vision is sincere and genuine - they'll get interested.

I take the medication for myself so I can transact, not for anyone else. But I am aware that it is empowering for people to see what I do and, for the most part, people in the Parkinson's community are just really happy that Parkinson's is getting mentioned, and not in a pitying way.

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.

I didn't want o do metal work and get my hands all nicked up and be around guys. So I took drama because there were a lot of girls.

I love the irony. I'm perceived as being really young and yet I have the clinical condition of an old man.

The 'Rescue Me' gig was a unique opportunity to play a character - a misanthropic, angry guy - who was so contrary to how people think of me.

I don't set a whole lot of goals. It smacks a little bit of will to me, and I find that will is not the way to go for me.

I have so many things that I say to my kids, I just drive them crazy.

I worked very hard on those movies but there was some creative connection that wasn't being made.

Just as Parkinson's isn't a big topic of conversation in my house, neither is my career.

My wife is Jewish, and therefore, it's my children's birthright to be Jewish.

Tracy is more a help to me than I am to her.

The oldest form of theater is the dinner table. It's got five or six people, new show every night, same players. Good ensemble; the people have worked together a lot.

If you asked my kids to describe me, they'd go through a whole list of words before even thinking about Parkinson's. And honestly, I don't think about it that much either. I talk about it because it's there, but it's not my totality.

Now I feel and I say all the time that vanity is, like, long gone. I'm really free of worrying about what I look like, because it's out of my shaky hands. I don't control it. So why would I waste one second of my life worrying about it?

If I don't get food in my mouth, I'm still happy. If my pants are round my ankles, as long as I don't get arrested for indecent exposure, I'm happy. I'm worried about keeping my hair, not how it's combed.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it saved my ass.

People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand.

I remember my son wanted to go to bed with his cowboy boots on, and we had this fight for like an hour. Then I realized that the only good reason I had for him not to do it is because I didn't want him to. There was really no other reason. And finally I said, "OK, fine." It was a great victory for me, because I realized it doesn't really matter.

If you fixate on the worst-case scenario and it actually happens, you’ve lived it twice.

The first part of my life was to be an actor and maybe have some success at that. Then [it was time] to find somebody to be in a relationship with and have a life that way. Because of Parkinson's, I had to change: How can I be of service here? Is there something unique to my situation that I can use to help people? I did not have the wherewithal to invent that. It just happened in front of me and had me join in.

I urge you to be challenged and inspired by what you do not know.

Our challenges don’t define us, our actions do.

My experience is to deal with things through humor.

One of the great things about Parkinson's, in a superficial way, is it relieved me of vanity. I don't worry about what I look like, because it's literally out of my hands. But on a deeper level, it gives you a real humility, because you have to deal every day with the fact that you compromise.