quotations about family
There are certain functions that the family performs. In the first place the family provides society with an orderly means of reproduction, while at the same time the norms of marriage control the potentially disruptive forces of sexuality. Second, the family provides physical and economic support for the child during the early years of dependence. The child receives its primary socialization in the family, learning the essential ideas and values required for adult life.
ADRIAN WILSON
Family
God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.
ANNE ENRIGHT
The Gathering
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Marriage and Single Life"
As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals--or indeed, why it should be an ideal at all. A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?
ROSE MACAULAY
The World My Wilderness
Family is what grounds you.
ANGELINA JOLIE
interview, Jun. 13, 2001
The most socially subversisve institution of our time is the one-parent family.
PAUL JOHNSON
Sunday Correspondent Magazine, Dec. 24, 1989
I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
OSCAR WILDE
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Family values are a little like family vacations --- subject to changeable weather and remembered more fondly with the passage of time. Though it rained all week at the beach, it’s often the momentary rainbows that we remember.
LESLIE DREYFOUS
New York Times, Oct. 25, 1992
Love makes a family.
GIGI KAESER
Love Makes a Family
What family has no mariner in its tree? No fool, no felon. No fisherman.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Suttree
Woman is the salvation or destruction of the family. She carries its destinies in the folds of her mantle.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
journal, Dec. 11, 1872
Under any system of society ... the family holds the future in its bosom.
CHARLES FRANKLIN THWING
The Family: An Historical and Social Study
The family spirit has rendered man carnivorous.
FRANCIS PICABIA
"Pithecomorphes"
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
Fancies Versus Fads
The family is ... like a little kingdom, and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Heretics
If we could know as intimately as we know our more immediate parents the long line of ancestors through whom the family spirit has passed on its way to us, we should probably become fatalists in face of the apparently overwhelming evidence that there is nothing in us that has not come to us from, or at least through, the Family. Family portrait galleries are a striking confirmation of the persistence of characteristics which ultimately govern the fortunes of successive generations.
HELEN DENDY BOSANQUET
The Family
If the family were a boat, it would be a canoe that makes no progress unless everyone paddles.
LETTY COTTIN POGREBIN
Family and Politics
As a single dried tree, if fired, sets a whole forest on fire, so does a bad son destroy a whole family.
CHANAKYA
Vridda-Chanakya
In houses where, in place of that sacred, inmost flame of love, there is discord at the centre, the whole household becomes hypocritical.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
Family jokes, though rightly cursed by strangers, are the bond that keeps most families alive.
STELLA BENSON
Pipers and a Dancer