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Quotes

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

—Paul Johnson, 1989

In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.

—Herodotus, 440 BC

Men are what their mothers made them.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

If parents would only realize how they bore their children!

—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

—Oscar Wilde, 1895

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

—André Gide, 1897

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

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

He that raises a large family, does indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand…a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too. 

—Benjamin Franklin, 1786

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

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

By 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, 1955

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!

—Philip Roth, 1969

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