Selected family quotes

1. Happy bridegroom, Hesper brings All desired and timely things. All whom morning sends to roam, Hesper loves to lead them home. Home return who him behold, Child to mother, sheep to fold, Bird to nest from wandering wide: Happy bridegroom, seek your bride.

2. Don't let's go to the dogs tonight, For mother will be there.

3. You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.

4. The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life.

5. Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

6. I have also considered many scientific plans during my pushing you around in your pram!

7. The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.

8. Every time I decide I want a child I get another pet. I have 3 dogs, 13 birds and 3 horses, what does that tell you?

9. For me, the moral difficulties lie in the continual pressure brought to bear on my friends and immediate family, pressure which is not directed against me personally but which at the same time is all around me.

10. Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them.

11. And my dad, you're a great actor but you're a better father.

12. When young Mark Robarts was leaving college, his father might well declare that all men began to say all good things to him, and to extol his fortune in that he had a son blessed with so excellent a disposition.

13. A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

14. The appropriate age for marriage is around eighteen for girls and thirty-seven for men.

15. If you don't believe in ghosts, you've never been to a family reunion.

16. Is there life in other families?

17. If it wasn't for baseball, I'd be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery. I have the same violent temper my father and older brother had. Both died of injuries from street fights in Baltimore, fights begun by flare-ups of their tempers.

18. Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.

19. Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

20. I really learned it all from mothers.

21. Don't take too seriously all that the neighbors say. Don't be overawed by what the experts say. Don't be afraid to trust your own common sense.

22. The fact is that child rearing is a long, hard job, the rewards are not always immediately obvious, the work is undervalued, and parents are just as human and almost as vulnerable as their children.

23. In automobile terms, the child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering.

24. All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.

25. Every child senses, with all the horse sense that's in him, that any parent is angry inside when children misbehave and they dread more the anger that is rarely or never expressed openly, wondering how awful it might be.

26. Having a good time together is the essence of lovingness and the best means of increasing it.

27. I wanted to be supportive of parents rather than to scold them. The book set out very deliberately to counteract some of the rigidities of pediatric tradition, particularly in infant feeding. It emphasized the importance of great differences between individual babies, of the need for flexibility and of the lack of necessity to worry constantly about spoiling.

28. If I could make only one wish for a child, I'd wish him the quality of lovingness.

29. If you've never been hated by your child, you've never been a parent.

30. My sister bought me a set at a candy store and taught me the moves.

31. Oh, I've wept. Yeah, I've definitely wept just with the world, you know, how judgmental they are. You know what, I know I'm a good mom.

32. Gays being gay is wrong. Two women can't produce a baby, two men can't produce a baby, so it's not how it's supposed to be. ... I don't believe in gay marriages. I don't believe in being gay.

33. It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.

34. A baby is born into this world in a state of fear. Total paranoia and awareness. He sees the world with eyes not used yet. As he grows up, his parents lay all this stuff on him. They tell him, when they should be letting him tell them. Let the children lead you.

35. Daddy pays for the water, daddy pays for the gas, daddy pays for the electricity, and if daddy didn't pay for the electricity, he'd pay for the candle on your nightstand, so you can study for the big test tomorrow.

36. Whoever you hate will end up in your family. You don't like gays? You're gonna have a gay son. You don't like Puerto Ricans? Your daughter's gonna come home with Livin' La Vida Loca!

37. We have preachers and savants who dilate endlessly on the sanctity of family and childhood but who tolerate a system in which a casual observer can correlate a child's social origin with its physical well-being.

38. Ancestors do not mean so much. The rebel who succeeds generally makes it easier for the posterity that follows him; so these descendants are usually contented and smug and soft. Rebels are made from life, not ancestors.

39. The first half of our lives are ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.

40. The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence.

41. More than ten million women march to work every morning side by side with the men. Steadily the importance of women is gaining not only in the routine tasks of industry but in executive responsibility. I include also the woman who stays at home as the guardian of the welfare of the family. She is a partner in the job and wages. Women constitute a part of our industrial achievement.

42. Summertime and the livin' is easy, Fish are jumpin', and the cotton is high. Oh yo' daddy's rich, and yo' ma is good lookin', So hush, little baby, don' yo' cry.

43. I don't think is for children, but I think if you went home and looked at the video games that your kids are playing, you'd be much more shocked.

44. I was raised around a lot of artists, musicians, photographers, painters and people that were in theatre. Just having the art-communal hippie experience as a child, there wasn't a clear line that was drawn. We celebrated creative experience and creative expression. We didn't try and curtail it and stunt any of that kind of growth.

45. Politics is not my life. I have a career in radio and another career in film. I have a wife who is the sweetest person in the world and two kids who are growing up into terrific, well-rounded people. I don't want to spend the rest of my life in politics. When I'm finished with my term as governor, I'm going back to the life that's waiting for me in the private sector.

46. I'm not disparaging suicides when I call them weak, I'm pointing out that anybody who would consider doing a thing like that needs help. I don't think a normal, mentally healthy person commits suicide. Of course, there are exceptions; people who are terminally ill are a different issue. But in the vast majority of cases, suicide is a tragedy that does unbelievable damage to the family and friends the suicide leaves behind. You don't want to encourage people to do such a thing.

47. We're like actors, turned loose in this world to wander in search of a phantom, endlessly searching for a half-formed shadow of our lost reality. When others demand that we become the people they want us to be, they force us to destroy the person we really are. It's a subtle kind of murder. The most loving parents and relatives commit this murder with smiles on their faces.

48. I knew I was unwanted when I saw that my bath toys were a toaster and radio.

49. When I went home to my family in May, 1770, from the town meeting in Boston, which was the first I had ever attended, and where I had been chosen in my absence, without any solicitation, one of their representatives, I said to my wife, 'I have accepted a seat in the House of Representatives, and thereby have consented to my own ruin, to your ruin, and to the ruin of our children. I give you this warning, that you may prepare your mind for your fate.' She burst into tears, but instantly cried out in a transport of magnanimity, 'Well, I am willing in this cause to run all risks with you, and be ruined with you, if you are ruined.' These were times, my friend, in Boston, which tried women's souls as well as men's.

50. My Mama always said she wanted her roses while she was living... not after she was gone. That's why everyone should always honour their mother and father. No matter how much you may disagree with their beliefs, those that have lived longer than us always have something to teach us, that we can take with us for the rest of our lives.

51. Madonna is my role model she's such a powerful woman. I love Gwyneth Paltrow, she's an actress I aspire to be like. And, of course, my mom. She drove me from New Jersey to New York every day for commercials so I could get where I am today.

52. In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness.

53. All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, or a scientist, or an artist, or an independent business creator. In the service of their goals they lay down time and energy and many other choices and pleasures; in return, they become most truly themselves. A false destiny may be spotted by the fact that it consumes without transforming, without giving back the enlarged self. Becoming a parent is one of these basic human transformational deeds. By this act, we change our fundamental relationship with the universe--if nothing else, we lose our place as the pinnacle and end-point of evolution, and become a mere link. The demands of motherhood especially consume the old self, and replace it with something new, often better and wiser, sometimes wearier or disillusioned, or tense and terrified, certainly more self-knowing, but never the same again.'

54. Our children change us:whether they live or not.

55. You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.

56. Aren't family squabbles jolly fun? Bleeding ulcers run in my family, we give them to each other.

57. 'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,' grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. 'It's so dreadful to be poor!' sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress. 'I don't think it's fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all,' added little Amy, with an injured sniff. 'We've got Father and Mother, and each other,' said Beth contentedly from her corner. The four young faces on which the firelight shone brightened at the cheerful words, but darkened again as Jo said sadly, 'We haven't got Father, and shall not have him for a long time.' She didn't say 'perhaps never,' but each silently added it, thinking of Father far away, where the fighting was.

58. I had no reason to doubt that brains were suitable for a woman. And as I had my father's kind of mind- which was also his mother's- I learned that the mind is not sex-typed.

59. 'They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.'

60. I have always considered my life a private affair and the business of no one beyond my family and those I love. Except for moral and political issues that aroused in me a desire to speak out, I have done my utmost throughout my life, for the sake of my children and myself, to remain silent ... But now, in my seventieth year, I have decided to tell the story of my life as best I can, so that my children can separate the truth from the myths that others have created about me, as myths are created about everyone swept up in the turbulent and distorting maelstrom of celebrity in our culture.

61. I wanted my wild things to be frightening. But why? It was probably at this point that I remembered how I detested my Brooklyn relatives as a small child. They came almost every Sunday, and there was my week-long anxiety about their coming the next Sunday... They'd lean way over with their bad teeth and hairy noses, and say something threatening like 'You're so cute I could eat you up.' And I knew if my mother didn't hurry up with the cooking, they probably would.

62. I know an awful lot of Hollywood people, who are so self-important, I can't understand it. My father was a good Irish saloon-keeper, my mother always said to him, 'Jack, how come you know everybody here' and he'd say, 'because I say hello'. I'm just like that, I've always been that way.

63. All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.

64. My father taught me that you have to stand by your principles. He was president of the bar association and was preaching civil liberties and human rights during some of the most repressive years of the Nasser era. He was the focus of a lot of pressure and intimidation, but he stood by his principles. And I think that's a lesson I remember from him - that you stand up for what you believe in.

65. I thought: if I could just make a good family, if I could just learn to be to a mother to the children, their whole lives, what [he] was, coming so late into ours, then that would mean more in the long run, it would be a finer accomplishment than anything I could ever do with my mind or my hands.

66. This is all the inheritance I can give my dear family. The religion of Christ can give them one which will make them rich indeed.

67. It isn't surprising that many children consider their parents to be a little dim, and that they sometimes try to update them. The fact that they don't usually try to hard is just as well; a thoroughly updated parent is an unappetizing sight.

68. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

69. Of all animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.

70. The child learns so easily because he has a natural gift, but adults, because they are tyrants, ignore natural gifts and say that children must learn through the same process that they learned by. We insist upon forced mental feeding and our lessons become a form of torture. This is one of man's most cruel and wasteful mistakes.

71. I want kids, a family of my own. I'd like to give them the first eight years of their lives in the country. Then I'd want them educated, which I wasn't formally, although I had a tutor once when I was twelve. At times I miss a formal education, but at others I thank God for everything else I have now. What I have got from my childhood aren't toys, but memories. And happy memories are better than any toy.

72. There are two classes of travel - first class, and with children.

73. I have good-looking kids. Thank goodness my wife cheats on me.

74. I'm convinced that today the majority of Americans want what those first Americans wanted: A better life for themselves and their children; a minimum of government authority. Very simply, they want to be left alone in peace and safety to take care of the family by earning an honest dollar and putting away some savings. This may not sound too exciting, but there is something magnificent about it. On the farm, on the street corner, in the factory and in the kitchen, millions of us ask nothing more, but certainly nothing less than to live our own lives according to our values - at peace with ourselves, our neighbors and the world.

75. 'Yes, I do have a close circle of friends and I am very fortunate to have them as friends. I feel very close to them I think friends are everything in life after your family. You come across lots of people all the time but you only make very few friends and you have to be true to them otherwise what's the point in life?'

76. Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death. [p.277]

77. I have seen these liberal psychologists and sociologists talk about there is no need for the man in the family. The woman can take care of it. 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.[5][6]

78. It may be true that there is no God here, but there must be one not far off, and at such a moment one feels His presence; which comes to the same as saying (and I readily give this sincere profession of faith): I believe in God, and that it is His will that man lives not alone but with a wife and a child, when everything is normal.

79. I don't believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn't treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should. Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil, and that is what our pictures attempt to do.

80. The inclination of my life - the motto, you might call it - has been to do things which will give pleasure to people in new and amusing ways. By doing that I please and satisfy myself. It is my wish to delight all members of the family, young and old, parent and child, in the kind of entertainment my associates and I turn out of our Studio in Burbank, California.

81. The kind of entertainment we create is meant to appeal to every member of the family.

82. Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family - but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.

83. It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.

84. Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour's household, and, underneath, another - secret and passionate and intense - which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him.

85. All women dote upon an idle man Although their children need a rich estate. No man has ever lived that had enough Of children's gratitude or woman's love.

86. To suppose such a thing possible as a society, in which men, who are able and willing to work, cannot support their families, and ought, with a great part of the women, to be compelled to lead a life of celibacy, for fear of having children to be starved; to suppose such a thing possible is monstrous.

87. For there's nae luck about the house, There's nae luck at a'; There's little pleasure in the house When our gudeman's awa'.

88. If a man's character is to be abused, say what you will, there's nobody like a relation to do the business.

89. Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects.

90. Death is not an easy thing for anyone to understand, least of all a child, but every life shall one day end. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us. His body can be taken, but not him. You shall know your father better as you grow and know yourself better. He is not dead, because you are alive. Time and accident, illness and weariness took his body, but already you have given it back to him, younger and more eager than ever. I don't expect you to understand anything I'm telling you. But I know you will remember this - that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world - no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life.

91. In those days, there was something more to the world than there is now. Well, my kids were little, let's put it that way, and of course if you like your kids, if you love them from the moment they begin, you yourself begin all over again, in them, with them, and so there is something more to the world again.

92. It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.

93. ...The only person I do worry about, that I want to be a good person for, I think is my responsibility, is my sister. I'm going to be cool for you, okay. I like, I need to, I like being by myself right now. I think it's good for me.

94. There is no good father who would want to resemble our Heavenly Father

95. I'm a - I'm a, um, a godmother which is just, that's fun to be a godmother, she is so precious, she's the light of my life, she's two... or five or something, and she's, uh... I don't know, I've never seen her - the pictures are precious, she just seems so, y'know... She lives clear across town, I don't have that kind of time, but, um... Well, I send money and stuff, it's not like I don't have a connection....

96. It wasn't until some time later that I realized that, without it being one of the most momentous encounters in western literature, my mother had met T. S. Eliot. I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success, The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam's scheme of things. 'The thing is,' I said finally, 'he won the Nobel Prize.' 'Well,' she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, 'I'm not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.'

97. There once was an old lady who lived in a shoe, She had so many kids her uterus fell out!

98. Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.

99. Biologically and temperamentally, I believe women were made to be concerned first and foremost with child care, husband care and home care.

100. Children must be under authority, and are themselves aware that they must be, although they like to play a game of rebellion at times. The case of children is unique in the fact that those who have authority over them are sometimes fond of them. Where this is the case, the children do not resent the authority in general, even when they resist it on particular occasions. Education authorities, as opposed to teachers, have not this merit, and do in fact sacrifice the children to what they consider the good of the State by teaching them 'patriotism,' i.e., a willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.