The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.
—Paul Johnson, 1989Quotes
God is our father, but even more is God our mother.
—Pope John Paul I, 1978One race there is of men, one of gods, but from one mother we both draw our breath.
—Pindar, c. 450 BCMen are what their mothers made them.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.
—Rebecca West, 1959If parents would only realize how they bore their children!
—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
—Oscar Wilde, 1895It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.
—Friedrich Schiller, 1781My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother, and on her bosom I will recline.
—Tecumseh, 1810There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!
—Philip Roth, 1969In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.
—Herodotus, 440 BCTo 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