Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.
—Rebecca West, 1959Quotes
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, 1966Men are what their mothers made them.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860God is our father, but even more is God our mother.
—Pope John Paul I, 1978Family! 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, 1886Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.
—Gertrude Stein, 1940A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!
—Philip Roth, 1969As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
—Pope John Paul II, 1986There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother, and on her bosom I will recline.
—Tecumseh, 1810He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
—Francis Bacon, 1625It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.
—Friedrich Schiller, 1781The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.
—Edward, Duke of Windsor, 1957