Archive

Quotes

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

—Homer, c. 750 BC

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

—Quentin Crisp, 1968

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

—V.S. Pritchett, 1968

The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended—and not to take a hint when a hint isn’t intended.

—Robert Frost, 1939

If parents would only realize how they bore their children!

—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910

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

—H.L. Mencken, 1919

A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family—and, often, is all that remains of it.

—Susan Sontag, 1977

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

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

—Pope John Paul I, 1978

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

Men are what their mothers made them.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

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

—Pope John Paul II, 1986