Men are what their mothers made them.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860Quotes
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, 1815In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.
—Herodotus, 440 BCBy 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, 1955A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family—and, often, is all that remains of it.
—Susan Sontag, 1977He 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, 1786Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.
—Rebecca West, 1959Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
—H.L. Mencken, 1919One race there is of men, one of gods, but from one mother we both draw our breath.
—Pindar, c. 450 BCIt is impossible to please all the world and one’s father.
—Jean de La Fontaine, 1668Family! 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, 1886In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
—V.S. Pritchett, 1968There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580