Archive

Quotes

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

Men are what their mothers made them.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

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

—Susan Sontag, 1977

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

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

Few sons are equal to their fathers; most fall short, all too few surpass them. 

—Homer, c. 750 BC

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

Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.

—André Gide, 1897

I cannot bear a parent’s tears.

—Virgil, c. 25 BC

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

—Edward, Duke of Windsor, 1957

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

—H.L. Mencken, 1919

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

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

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