The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.
—Paul Johnson, 1989Quotes
Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.
—Albert Camus, 1942Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.
—Gertrude Stein, 1940In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
—V.S. Pritchett, 1968To 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, 1954A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family—and, often, is all that remains of it.
—Susan Sontag, 1977The 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, 1919Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
—H.L. Mencken, 1919Men are what their mothers made them.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.
—Friedrich Schiller, 1781Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.
—Mark Twain, c. 1900A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!
—Philip Roth, 1969I cannot bear a parent’s tears.
—Virgil, c. 25 BC