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, 1954Quotes
If parents would only realize how they bore their children!
—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910The 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 BCFamilies, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.
—André Gide, 1897By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1955Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.
—Rebecca West, 1959It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.
—Friedrich Schiller, 1781It’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, 1966Nobody, 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, 1815He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
—Francis Bacon, 1625In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.
—Herodotus, 440 BCEvery man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
—H.L. Mencken, 1919The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.
—Paul Johnson, 1989