Archive

Quotes

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

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

—Herodotus, 440 BC

In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.

—V.S. Pritchett, 1968

If parents would only realize how they bore their children!

—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910

Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.

—Mark Twain, c. 1900

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

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

My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother, and on her bosom I will recline.

—Tecumseh, 1810

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

—Paul Johnson, 1989

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

—Edward, Duke of Windsor, 1957

Few sons are equal to their fathers; most fall short, all too few surpass them. 

—Homer, c. 750 BC

Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.  

—Gertrude Stein, 1940