Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.

- Michael Levine

It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.

- Christopher Lasch

We don't need sugar, flour or rice or anything else. We just want to see our dear ones.

- Hafiz of Persia

For everyone of us that succeeds, it's because there's somebody there to show you the way out. The light doesn't always necessarily have to be in your family; for me it was teachers and school.

- Oprah Winfrey

No ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as responsible as the work of a woman who is bringing up a family of small children; for upon her time and strength demands are made not only every hour of the day but often every hour of the night.

- Theodore Roosevelt

Wherever I look, I see signs of the commandment to honor one's parents and nowhere of a commandment that calls for the respect of a child.

- Alice Miller

And it is time for those who talk about family values to start valuing families.

- John Kerry

The first half of our lives is spoiled by our parents, and the last half by our children.

- Jennifer James

The family endures because it offers the truth of mortality and immortality within the same group. The family endures because, better than the commune, kibbutz, or classroom, it seems to individualize and socialize its children, to make us feel at the same time unique and yet joined to all humanity, accepted as is and yet challenged to grow, loved unconditionally and yet propelled by greater expectations. Only in the family can so many extremes be reconciled and synthesized. Only in the family do we have a lifetime in which to do it.

- Letty Cottin Pogrebin

My wife has been my closest friend, my closest advisor. And ... she's not somebody who looks to the limelight, or even is wild about me being in politics. And that's a good reality check on me. When I go home, she wants me to be a good father and a good husband. And everything else is secondary to that.

- Barack Obama

Early rising is also essential to the good government of a family. A late breakfast deranges the whole business of the day, and throws a portion of it on the next, which opens the door for confusion to enter. (preface, The Virginia House-Wife, 1824)

- Mary Randolph

The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.

- Christopher Lasch

To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

- Marilyn French

Any problem, big or small, within a family, always seems to start with bad communication. Someone isn't listening.

- Emma Thompson

When a family is free of abuse and oppression, it can be the place where we share our deepest secrets and stand the most exposed, a place where we learn to feel distinct without being "better," and sacrifice for others without losing ourselves.

- Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Home is the place where boys and girls first learn how to limit their wishes, abide by rules, and consider the rights and needs of others.

- Sidonie Gruenberg



Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.

- Evelyn Waugh



A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.

- Carl Sandburg



The voice of parents is the voice of gods, for to their children they are heaven's lieutenants.

- William Shakespeare



If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

- George Bernard Shaw



No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.

- Margaret Mead



In every dispute between parent and child, both cannot be right, but they may be, and usually are, both wrong. It is this situation which gives family life its peculiar hysterical charm.

- Isaac Rosenfeld



All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

- Leo Tolstoy



As states subsist in part by keeping their weaknesses from being known, so is it the quiet of families to have their chancery and their parliament within doors, and to compose and determine all emergent differences there.

- John Donne



There was a time when ladies knew nothing, beyond their own family concerns; but in the present day there are many who know nothing about them. Each of these extremes should be avoided. (1831)

- H. L. Barnum



American families have always shown remarkable resiliency, or flexible adjustment to natural, economic, and social challenges. Their strengths resemble the elasticity of a spider web, a gull's skillful flow with the wind, the regenerating power of perennial grasses, the cooperation of an ant colony, and the persistence of a stream carving canyon rocks. These are not the strengths of fixed monuments but living organisms. This resilience is not measured by wealth, muscle or efficiency but by creativity, unity, and hope. Cultivating these family strengths is critical to a thriving human community.

Family Life Specialist with the University of Wyoming's Cooperative Extension Service

- Ben Silliman



Every single person has capabilities, abilities and gifts. Living a good life depends on whether those capabilities can be used, abilities expressed and gifts given. If they are, the person will be valued, feel powerful and well-connected to the people around them. And the community around the person will be more powerful because of the contribution the person is making.

- John P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight



In each family a story is playing itself out, and each family's story embodies its hope and despair.

- Auguste Napier



If you as parents cut corners, your children will too. If you lie, they will too. If you spend all your money on yourselves and tithe no portion of it for charities, colleges, churches, synagogues, and civic causes, your children won't either. And if parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out.

- Marian Wright Edelman



It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.

- Colette



It is a wise father that knows his own child.

- William Shakespeare



The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.

- Theodore Hesburgh



Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. - opening line from Anna Karenina

- Leo Tolstoy



Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.

- Margaret Mead



The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.

- Thomas Jefferson



In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

- Alex Haley



He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.

- Francis Bacon



The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.

- Bertrand Russell



Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to this country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

- George Bernard Shaw



Important families are like potatoes. The best parts are underground.

- Francis Bacon



Family life is full of major and minor crises -- the ups and downs of health, success and failure in career, marriage, and divorce -- and all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all of these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality. It's difficult to imagine anything more nourishing to the soul.

- Thomas Moore



The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

- George Santayana



Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible -- the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family.

- Virginia Satir



Making the decision to have a child - it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body.

- Elizabeth Stone



To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

- Marilyn French