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, 1919Quotes
The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other.
—Mario Puzo, 2001He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
—Francis Bacon, 1625It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.
—Friedrich Schiller, 1781In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.
—Herodotus, 440 BCFew sons are equal to their fathers; most fall short, all too few surpass them.
—Homer, c. 750 BCA family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family—and, often, is all that remains of it.
—Susan Sontag, 1977Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
—H.L. Mencken, 1919A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!
—Philip Roth, 1969The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.
—Paul Johnson, 1989If parents would only realize how they bore their children!
—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910Again, men in general desire the good, and not merely what their fathers had.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BCFamily! 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