quotations about family
Better a loving single-parent family than a 'conventional' family where the parents hate each other and the father is a demagogue.
MOBY
I Like to Score
A woman can take care of the family. It takes a man to provide structure. To provide stability. Not that a woman can't provide stability, I'm not saying that... It does take a father, though.
TOM DELAY
interview, Feb. 2004
In that family where the husband is pleased with his wife, and the wife with her husband, happiness will assuredly be lasting.
BRAHMA
The Laws of Manu
It's very hard to grow up in a perfect family when you're not perfect.
E. L. JAMES
Fifty Shades of Grey
I'm from such an old family, it's been condemned.
PHYLLIS DILLER
Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse
In the family, happiness is in the ratio in which each is serving the others, seeking one another's good, and bearing one another's burdens.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
We all hold on to some image of the family we want, based one way or another on the family we had. Lots of people are thrilled about the families they came from, others couldn't get away fast enough. Most people fall into that vast middle ground: great affection mixed with a few ideas for improvement. A couple of things they wish could have perhaps been done differently.
PAUL REISER
Familyhood
Raising a family wasn't something I put on my resumé, but I have to ask myself, would I apply for the same job again?
ERMA BOMBECK
Family: The Ties that Bind--and Gag!
In retrospect, it was only a matter of time before the Family Dinner passed into history and fast foods took over. I knew its days were numbered the day our youngest propped my mouth open with a fork and yelled into it, "I want a cheeseburger and two fries and get it right this time." I just didn't serve meals with show business pizzazz.
ERMA BOMBECK
Family: The Ties that Bind--and Gag!
No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.
MARGARET MEAD
Kate Rowinski's The Quotable Mom
Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?
ELIZABETH JANEWAY
Ms., Nov. 1981
The number one need in all people is the need for acceptance, the need to experience a sense of belonging to something and someone. The need for acceptance is more powerful in your family than anywhere else.... If that need is not met by your family, trust me, your kids will go elsewhere to seek it in order to find approval and acceptance.
PHIL MCGRAW
Family First
Family traditions counter alienation and confusion. They help us define who we are; they provide something steady, reliable and safe in a confusing world.
SUSAN LIEBERMAN
New Traditions
The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.
ERMA BOMBECK
The Family: The Ties that Bind--and Gag!
The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have past at home in the bosom of my family.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Francis Willis, Jr., April 18, 1790
Imitation both unconscious and conscious is par excellence the educational method of the family. It is plain that a considerable part of the adaptation of living beings to their environment, i.e., of beings that are born plastic, is passed on from generation to generation through imitation. Were this not so, much if not all of the road traversed by one generation would have to be travelled by the next generation from the very beginning and without short-cuts. Consequently there would be little chance for the novel adaptation, the propitious individual variation, that constitutes progress.
ELSIE WORTHINGTON CLEWS PARSONS
The Family: An Ethnographical and Historical Outline
The trouble with the family is that children grow out of childhood, but parents never grow out of parenthood.
EVAN ESAR
The Comic Encyclopedia
Family ... the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
The Son of a Servant
Rampant nostalgia for the modern family system, or more precisely, for an idealized version of a 1950s Ozzie and Harriet image of the family, has become an increasingly potent ideological force in the United States, with milder versions evident in Canada and England. Fundamentalist Christians and right-wing Republicans spearheaded the profamily movement that abetted the Reagan "revolution" of the 1980s. By the 1994 electoral season, however, even President Clinton had embraced the ideology of an explicitly centrist campaign for family values led by a small group of social scientists. This ongoing campaign portrays family breakdown as the primary source of social malaise in the United States, blaming the decline of the married-couple family for everything from crime, violence, and declining educational standards to poverty, drug abuse, and sexually transmitted disease.
JUDITH STACEY
In the Name of the Family
Marriage is the agreement to let a family happen.
BETTY JANE WYLIE
Family: An Exploration