Lapham’s Quarterly

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.

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

To be a successful father… there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.

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

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

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

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

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!

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

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

Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know. 

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

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.

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

It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.

My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother, and on her bosom I will recline.

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.

Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

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

The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other.

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.

I cannot bear a parent’s tears.

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

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

The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.

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

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

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

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

Men are what their mothers made them.

One race there is of men, one of gods, but from one mother we both draw our breath.

He that raises a large family, does indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand…a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too. 

If parents would only realize how they bore their children!

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.

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