Archive

Quotes

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

—Pope John Paul II, 1986

Family! 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, 1886

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

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 thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.

—Edward, Duke of Windsor, 1957

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

—Friedrich Schiller, 1781

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

—Herodotus, 440 BC

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

—Oscar Wilde, 1895

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

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

—Susan Sontag, 1977

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

—Paul Johnson, 1989

It is impossible to please all the world and one’s father.

—Jean de La Fontaine, 1668