Archive

Quotes

Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.

—Mark Twain, c. 1900

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

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

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

—Friedrich Schiller, 1781

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

—Susan Sontag, 1977

Family! 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, 1886

The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.

—Edward, Duke of Windsor, 1957

Again, men in general desire the good, and not merely what their fathers had.

—Aristotle, c. 350 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

If parents would only realize how they bore their children!

—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910

Men are what their mothers made them.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

God is our father, but even more is God our mother.

—Pope John Paul I, 1978