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Quotes

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

—Tecumseh, 1810

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

—Pope John Paul II, 1986

The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended—and not to take a hint when a hint isn’t intended.

—Robert Frost, 1939

He that raises a large family, does indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand…a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too. 

—Benjamin Franklin, 1786

In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.

—V.S. Pritchett, 1968

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

—Susan Sontag, 1977

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

—Oscar Wilde, 1895

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

If parents would only realize how they bore their children!

—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910

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

—Herodotus, 440 BC

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

—H.L. Mencken, 1919

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

—Homer, c. 750 BC