Archive

Quotes

Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.  

—Gertrude Stein, 1940

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

—Quentin Crisp, 1968

If parents would only realize how they bore their children!

—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910

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

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

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

—Friedrich Schiller, 1781

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

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

—Oscar Wilde, 1895

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

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

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