quotations about family
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
I'm from such an old family, it's been condemned.
PHYLLIS DILLER
Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse
Marriage is the agreement to let a family happen.
BETTY JANE WYLIE
Family: An Exploration
No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.
MARGARET MEAD
Kate Rowinski's The Quotable Mom
In one family, all goes by two and two. If a member of it has any interest, he or she will confide it to some one other; but the rest know nothing. In another family, all feel what touches one; nothing is kept dark from the father and mother, brothers and sisters--all share. This family habit is by far the better, it strengthens the tie between the members, and makes the home one home.
CHARLES BUXTON
Notes of Thought
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
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!
A family is a unit composed not only of children, but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
OGDEN NASH
quoted in 20,000 Quips & Quotes
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
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
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
The family that stays together probably has only one car.
KNOFEL STATON
Check Your Homelife
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
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
If your family tree does not fork, you might be a redneck.
JEFF FOXWORTHY
stand-up routine
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!
If the world around us is chaotic and sometimes incomprehensible, then the family is an oasis, an anchor of reliability and loyalty, a place where we are important because we are there.
SUSAN LIEBERMAN
New Traditions
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
Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love's own product. The child, this in-between, to which the lovers now are related and which they hold in common, is representative of the world in that it also separates them; it is an indication that they will insert a new world into the existing world. Through the child, it is as though the lovers return to the world from which their love had expelled them. But this new worldliness, the possible result and the only possibly happy ending of a love affair, is, in a sense, the end of love, which must either overcome the partners anew or be transformed into another mode of belonging together.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Human Condition
The trouble with the family is that children grow out of childhood, but parents never grow out of parenthood.
EVAN ESAR
The Comic Encyclopedia