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Quotes

There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

Men are what their mothers made them.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1919

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!

—Philip Roth, 1969

The root of the kingdom is in the State. The root of the State is in the family. The root of the family is in the person of its Head.

—Mencius, c. 270 BC

To be a successful father… there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.

—Ernest Hemingway, 1954

Again, men in general desire the good, and not merely what their fathers had.

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.

—Jane Austen, 1815

In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.

—Herodotus, 440 BC

I cannot bear a parent’s tears.

—Virgil, c. 25 BC

It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.

—Friedrich Schiller, 1781

It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself… it seems unfair. You can’t assume the responsibility for everything you do—or don’t do.

—Simone de Beauvoir, 1966

My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother, and on her bosom I will recline.

—Tecumseh, 1810