Archive

Quotes

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

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

—H.L. Mencken, 1919

A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family—and, often, is all that remains of it.

—Susan Sontag, 1977

He that raises a large family, does indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand…a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too. 

—Benjamin Franklin, 1786

In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.

—V.S. Pritchett, 1968

As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.

—Pope John Paul II, 1986

The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended—and not to take a hint when a hint isn’t intended.

—Robert Frost, 1939

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

Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know. 

—Albert Camus, 1942

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

—Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1955

The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.

—Paul Johnson, 1989

Men are what their mothers made them.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

God is our father, but even more is God our mother.

—Pope John Paul I, 1978