One race there is of men, one of gods, but from one mother we both draw our breath.
—Pindar, c. 450 BCQuotes
Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.
—Albert Camus, 1942Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.
—Gertrude Stein, 1940In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
—V.S. Pritchett, 1968I cannot bear a parent’s tears.
—Virgil, c. 25 BCFamily! Thou art the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.
—August Strindberg, 1886In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.
—Herodotus, 440 BCHe that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
—Francis Bacon, 1625My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
—H.L. Mencken, 1919The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.
—Edward, Duke of Windsor, 1957A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!
—Philip Roth, 1969All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
—Oscar Wilde, 1895