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Quotes

The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.

—Paul Johnson, 1989

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

—Homer, c. 750 BC

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.

—Simone de Beauvoir, 1966

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

—Jane Austen, 1815

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

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

—Pope John Paul II, 1986

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

—Herodotus, 440 BC

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

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

—Gertrude Stein, 1940

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

—Oscar Wilde, 1895

Again, men in general desire the good, and not merely what their fathers had.

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC
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