Archive

Quotes

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

—Quentin Crisp, 1968

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1919

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

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

—Herodotus, 440 BC

It is impossible to please all the world and one’s father.

—Jean de La Fontaine, 1668

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

—Pope John Paul I, 1978

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

—Oscar Wilde, 1895

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

—Edward, Duke of Windsor, 1957

Men are what their mothers made them.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

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

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

—Homer, c. 750 BC

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

—Friedrich Schiller, 1781

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

—Gertrude Stein, 1940