Archive

Quotes

It is impossible to please all the world and one’s father.

—Jean de La Fontaine, 1668

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

—Pope John Paul I, 1978

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

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

—Susan Sontag, 1977

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

I cannot bear a parent’s tears.

—Virgil, c. 25 BC

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

—V.S. Pritchett, 1968

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

—H.L. Mencken, 1919

Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.

—André Gide, 1897

The root of the kingdom is in the State. The root of the State is in the family. The root of the family is in the person of its Head.

—Mencius, c. 270 BC

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

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC
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