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

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

If parents would only realize how they bore their children!

—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.

—Rebecca West, 1959

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

—Friedrich Schiller, 1781

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

—Homer, c. 750 BC

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

—Pope John Paul II, 1986

My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother, and on her bosom I will recline.

—Tecumseh, 1810

The root of the kingdom is in the State. The root of the State is in the family. The root of the family is in the person of its Head.

—Mencius, c. 270 BC

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

I cannot bear a parent’s tears.

—Virgil, c. 25 BC

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

—Quentin Crisp, 1968

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

—Herodotus, 440 BC