Michael J. Fox quotes:

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

What other people think about me is not my business.

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

Some of the best friends you'll ever meet in your life, you'll meet though your children--mothers and fathers of their friends, parents from school. You'll see. That's the way it was for Bill and me. It's one of the many gifts of parenting.

You suffer the blow, but you capitalize on the opportunity left in its wake.

Listening to people espouse beliefs different from mine is informative, not threatening, because the only thing that can alter my worldview is a new and undeniable truth, and contrary to what Jack Nicholson says in 'A Few Good Men', "I CAN handle the truth.

Listening to people espouse beliefs different from mine is informative, not threatening, because the only thing that can alter my worldview is a new and undeniable truth, and contrary to what Jack Nicholson says in 'A Few Good Men', "I CAN handle the truth."

It is ironic that in the same year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA, some would have us ban certain forms of DNA medical research. Restricting medical research has very real human consequences, measured in loss of life and tremendous suffering for patients and their families.

There's an idea I came across a few years ago that I love: My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance and in inverse proportion to my expectations. That's the key for me. If I can accept the truth of 'This is what I'm facing - not what can I expect but what I am experiencing now' - then I have all this freedom to do other things.

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'.

I don't want people to kick my ass, I just want to get to a point where they can't kick it.

I think I benefited from being equal parts ambitious and curious. And of the two, curiosity has served me best.

Pity is a benign form of abuse.

To be associated with a film that just flat-out makes people happy is such a blessing and a tremendous privilege, and I'll always be grateful for it. People's eyes light up when they talk about it. I've been in Asia, Africa, Europe and even Bhutan; people know the movie there. It's just an amazing thing.

I saw a birthday card the other day, and it said, "If you didn't know how old you were, how old would you think you were?" I started changing it in my mind right away to, "If you didn't know how sick you were, how sick would you think you were?"

Only a few of us will admit it, but actors will sometimes read a script like this: bullshit...bullshit...my part...blah, blah, blah...my part...bullshit...

[Constant curiousity leads to happiness:] I wake up curious every day and every day I'm surprised by something. And if I can just recognize that surprise every day and say, 'Oh, that's a new thing, that's a new gift that I got today that I didn't even know about yesterday,' it keeps me going. It keeps me more than going. It keeps me enthusiastic and grateful!

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

The oldest form of theater is the dinner table.

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.

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'm glad I don't have a drinking problem,' I confided, 'because I don't think I'd ever be able to quit.

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

Almost instantly [after my announcement of Parkinson's], I saw the first couple of days the coverage was about, you know, "Fox's Parkinson's, blah, blah, blah." Then, two days after that, I saw the coverage turn. It started to become, "Can young people get Parkinson's?" All of a sudden, the conversation turned to become about that. And that was one of the first eye-opening things.

Pain is temporary, film is forever.

Don't spend a lot of time imagining the worst-case scenario. It rarely goes down as you imagine it will, and if by some fluke it does, you will have lived it twice.

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

Life is good, and there's no reason to think it won't be--right up until the moment when everything explodes into a fireball of tiny, unrecognizable fragments, or it all goes skidding sideways, through the guardrail, over the embankment, and down the mountain. This will happen (and probably more than once).

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

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.

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.

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 think [Parkinson's] is Gothic nastiness. There's nothing on the surface that's horrible about someone with a shaky hand. There's nothing horrible about someone in their life saying, "God, I'm really tired of this shaky hand thing" and me saying, "Me, too." That's our reality. We have no control over it.

Chris[topher] Reeve wisely parsed the difference between optimism and hope. Unlike optimism, he said, 'Hope is the product of knowledge and the projection of where the knowledge can take us.

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.

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.

When prescribing one of the drugs I take, my doctor warned me of a common side effect: exaggerated, intensely vivid dreams. To be honest, I've never really noticed the difference. I've always dreamt big.

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.

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.

Lance Armstrong showed up, and I started talking to him; I saw all these people with cancer who followed him to Paris for the Tour de France, and I saw the difference he was making in their lives. That put it together for me...having it be not so much about me, but [my being] a vehicle for it.

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.

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

Why do you think it is...', I asked Dr. Cook ... 'that brain surgery, above all else-even rocket science-gets singled out as the most challenging of human feats, the one demanding the utmost of human intelligence?' [Dr. Cook answered,] 'No margin for error.'

One's dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but it can never be taken away unless it is surrendered.

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

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.

After all that I'd been through, after all that I'd learned and all that I'd been given, I was going to do what I had been doing every day for the last few years now: just show up and do the best that I could do with whatever lay in front of me.

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.

The American political experience can therefore be viewed as optimism in the collective.

The purpose that you wish to find in life, like a cure you seek, is not going to fall from the sky. ...I believe purpose is something for which one is responsible; it's not just divinely assigned.

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

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

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 can get sad, I can get frustrated, I can get scared, but I never get depressed - because there's joy in my life.

I'm not a shill for the Democratic Party.

My tattoo is that I don't have a tattoo.

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 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.

My age makes me think how valuable life is. How bad is something like Parkinson's in relation to not having life at all?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

[My son] will have a fairly stable future. Not one where the schoolyard talk is whose father grossed $8 million on his last picture.

A creative mess is better than idle tidiness.

A lot of times, when you have a disability, one of the things you deal with is other people's projections of what your experience is and their fear about it, and not seeing the experience you're having. There's nothing horrifying about [Parkinson's disease] to me. It is what I deal with. It is my reality and my life, but it's not horrible.

Acceptance is the key to everything.

After all that I'd been through, after all that I'd learned and all that I'd been given, I was going to do what I had been doing every day for the last few years now: just show up and do teh best that I could do with whatever lay in front of me.

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.

As for my own truncated secondary education, my head was in the clouds as my mom would say, or if you asked my father, up my ass.

As with any turning point or instance when a new road is chosen and an old one forsaken, there are consequences.

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