Family Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

American families are in the process of passing along a $9 trillion legacy from one generation to the next. This is a lot of money, but it is distributed very unevenly..... Hand in hand with this money, I submit, what is really being handed down from generation to generation is the profound legacy of reproducing racial inequality. The legacy is difficult to discern because the language of family heritage hides it from our political consciousness.

There's another thing not everyone figures out right away: It's almost impossible to go through life all alone. We need to find our support group — family, friends, companion, therapy gatherings, team, church or whatever. The kindergarten admonition applies as long as we live: When you go out into the world, hold hands and stick together. It's dangerous out there — lonely, too. Everyone needs someone. Some assembly is always required.

Straight men who visit prostitutes are valiantly striving to keep sex free from emotion, duty, family—in other words, from society, religion, and procreative Mother Nature.

Throughout the winter, nature's active and crescent principle seems never held wholly in abeyance. From time to time, some precocious member of a dormant family, plant or animal, may be observed awake and stirring, as one who, having much on hand to accomplish, makes an early start by candle-light.

Edith M. Thomas

Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.

Barbara Kingsolver

The development of a country has to start at the foundation of the society, the "family".

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, … back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

It would take more than long-stemmed roses to change my view that you're a despicable cowardy custard and a disgrace to a proud family. Your ancestors fought in the Crusades and were often mentioned in despatches, and you cringe like a salted snail at the thought of appearing as Santa Claus before an audience of charming children who wouldn't hurt a fly. It's enough to make an aunt turn her face to the wall and give up the struggle.

P. G. Wodehouse

I like to take things easy. I don't constantly think about music. I never plan concerts, practise or even hum. When I go up on the stage, music courses through me. My family members attend my concerts because they do not hear me sing at home. I have entrusted you [Prince Rama Varma] with the task of popularising my style of singing among others, especially in foreign countries. I have heard some of your foreign students sing my compositions and was surprised. They sound better than many Indian students. I want to be known more as a composer than as a musician. You are now making this happen.

M. Balamuralikrishna

I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.

A lot of kids do get married at 15. I would have had my family ten years younger. Instead of starting the Revolution at 50, I would have been 40. And man, did I have a lot of sex drive at 40! Whew! I was out on the road chasing women most of the time!

The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it — whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.

Farm policy, although it's complex, can be explained. What it can't be is believed. No cheating spouse, no teen with a wrecked family car, no mayor of Washington, D.C., videotaped in flagrante delicto has ever come up with anything as farfetched as U.S. farm policy.

This is one of those things - a contradiction. It was an emotional issue for me. I was born and raised in a Sikh family. I still keep my beard and turban and identify myself with the Sikh community.

Khushwant Singh

I would like to stress that the obligation [of being Queen] has always been driven by joy. The joy is rooted in the warmth that has met me and my family everywhere through every year, in celebration and joy as in sorrow, in the so-called "big days", as well as in everyday life.

Margrethe II of Denmark

Doing the opposite might make you feel uncomfortable. It can be scary and make you feel lonely and exposed. It is never easy to be seen as going against the grain and ignoring the advice of your colleagues, friends or family, but if you are prepared to explain what you are doing and why, they will come round.

Nigel Cumberland

It was easy to see how one could think of the family as a single terrible creature stretching back through time, some genetic flaw or chemical magic binding the spirit to the blood.

There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren't even a memory, you're only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.

Curiously enough, and this is what his family could not understand, the more religious he became the less he could tolerate the churches.

Robert Hunter (author)

I always had the uncomfortable feeling that if I wasn't sitting in front of a computer typing, I was wasting my time - but I pushed myself to take a wider view of what was "productive." Time spent with my family and friends was never wasted.

'This is the place' is what the divinely-inspired leader is reported to have said when Salt Lake Valley opened out before the slavering oxen with blood on their hooves and the men who had managed to cross the wilderness even though their children and sweethearts still tarried in the sand. Sometimes I have the feeling that I am dead and have come to the land of eternity. Of such a land it says in a hymn I once knew, that there stood a wondrous palace on pillars, inlaid with gold and brighter than the sun... When I now look back across the ocean to the land whence I came, I glimpse behind me a sparse and barren coast... There stands my family, and looks sorrowing out to sea.

Halldór Laxness

The family we choose for ourselves is more important than the one we were born into; that people have to earn our respect and trust, not have it handed to them simply because of genetics.

Charles de Lint

After all is said that can be said upon the liquor traffic, its influence is degrading upon the individual, the family, politics and business, and upon everything that you touch in this old world.

A movie should present its characters with a problem and then watch them solve it, not without difficulty. So says an old and reliable screenplay formula. Countless movies have been made about a boy and a girl who have a problem (they haven't slept with each other) and after difficulties (family, war, economic, health, rival lover, stupid misunderstanding) they solve it by sleeping with each other. Now we have a movie about two homosexuals that follows the same reliable convention.

Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.