quotations about family
The family uses people, not for what they are, nor for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for-- its own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them, but as the something which it has arranged that they shall be.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
Cassandra
Families are nothing other than the idolatry of duty.
ANN OAKLEY
Taking It Like a Woman
In the family, from the first, the idea of authority has appeared. Protection and order are requisites of the family; and these cannot exist without recognition of an authority.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
It seems to be almost inevitable that the man who accepts a subordinate economic position in the Family degenerates into a loafer and a tyrant.
HELEN DENDY BOSANQUET
The Family
Of all our social institutions, the family is perhaps the one with which we are most familiar. As we proceed through our lives, our experiences within the family give rise to some of our strongest and most intense feelings. Within the family context lies a paradox, however: although most of us hope for love and support within the family -- a haven in a heartless world, so to speak -- the family can also be a place of violence and abuse.
MARILYN POOLE
Family: Changing Families
A large family party is rather too much like a flight of tomtits; everlasting twitter, but no conversation; gregariousness without companionship.
CHARLES BUXTON
Notes of Thought
The dynamics and structures found in those groups called families in our society may not be evident in those groups called families in other places and times.
RONALD DAVID LAING
The Politics of the Family and Other Essays
The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Life of Reason
Of all our social institutions, the family is perhaps the one with which we are most familiar. As we proceed through our lives, our experiences within the family give rise to some of our strongest and most intense feelings. Within the family context lies a paradox, however: although most of us hope for love and support within the family--a haven in a heartless world, so to speak--the family can also be a place of violence and abuse.
MARILYN POOLE
Family: Changing Families
As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
JOHN PAUL II
London Observer, Dec. 7, London Observer, Dec. 7, 1986
What until now has been considered a "normal" family, made up of a father, a mother, and a number of children, has in recent years increasingly begun to be viewed as one among several options, which can no longer claim to be the only or even superior form of ordering human relationships. The Judeo-Christian view of marriage and the family with its roots in the Hebrew Scriptures has to a significant extent been replaced with a set of values that prizes human rights, self-fulfillment, and pragmatic utility on an individual and social level. It can rightly be said that marriage and the family are insitutions under siege in our world today, and that with marriage and the family, our very civilization is in crisis.
ANDREAS J. KOSTENBERGER
God
All my family, my blood, is mixed up now. They don't even all know each other. I just hope they don't never hate or fight each other, not knowin who they are. Cause all these people livin are brothers and sisters and cousins. All these beautiful different colors! We!... We the human Family. God says so! FAMILY!
J. CALIFORNIA COOPER
Family
The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government.
GLORIA STEINEM
speech, July 1981
In one family, every little plan or question is discussed amid bickering and irritation. In another, without the least effort, every discussion goes on amid perfect peace. This is just as easy, and infinitely more agreeable: only, in many homes it does not happen to be the family habit.
CHARLES BUXTON
Notes of Thought
A dysfunctional family is like a poker game in which each player holds certain cards, yet no one will put them on the table. As a result, the same old game keeps being played. Because no one will risk losing (or winning) by playing a new card.
IRA D. GLICK
Marital and Family Therapy
The family is an absolute monarchy in miniature.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
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
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
You can choose your friends but you sho' can't choose your family, an' they're still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge 'em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don't.
HARPER LEE
To Kill a Mockingbird
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