Archive

Quotes

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

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

—Pope John Paul II, 1986

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

—Paul Johnson, 1989

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

If parents would only realize how they bore their children!

—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910

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

—H.L. Mencken, 1919

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

—V.S. Pritchett, 1968

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

—Susan Sontag, 1977

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

—André Gide, 1897

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

—Tecumseh, 1810

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

—Friedrich Schiller, 1781

I cannot bear a parent’s tears.

—Virgil, c. 25 BC

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

—Jean de La Fontaine, 1668