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

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

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.

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

Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know. 

It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself… it seems unfair. You can’t assume the responsibility for everything you do—or don’t do.

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

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

Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.

As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.

Men are what their mothers made them.