Family Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

America cannot continue to lead the family of nations around the world if we suffer the collapse of the family here at home.

During the periods in my marriage when I chose to stay home with my kids rather than work as an attorney, it caused me no end of anxiety. Despite the fact that I knew I was contributing to our family by caring for our children, I still felt that my worth was less because I wasn't earning.

For the last five or six years the most important thing in my life has been my family.

Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.

The family is our refuge and our springboard; nourished on it, we can advance to new horizons. In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

I assume the closest members of my family don't actually want to kill me, but the truth is that I have shamed and hurt them; they have to deal with the outrage that my public statements cause, and undoubtedly some members of my clan do want to kill me for that.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The family, that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor in our innermost hearts never quite wish to.

After a hundred years the son of the King then reigning, who was of another family from that of the sleeping Princess, was a-hunting on that side of the country, and he asked what those towers were which he saw in the middle of a great thick wood.

Charles Perrault

Noah and his family were the only loyal and obedient subjects to the legal power: they alone were saved

A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.

Having a holiday weekend without a family member felt like putting on a sweater that had an extra arm.

DURING the first years of my service in Dr. Flint's family, I was accustomed to share some indulgences with the children of my mistress

I left school at age 13. I was illiterate with no role models. The great psychobabble today is the dysfunctional family. Well, I've never met one that was functional. In Limerick, a family that was dysfunctional was one who could afford to drink but didn't.
I had the taste of the alcohol since I was 11 … It allowed me to be clever, charming and to behave outrageously. Acting also allowed me not to be me. So I could indulge every fantasy in this paradise of America.

Malachy McCourt

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.

When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places. That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

Letty Cottin Pogrebin

That is the thankless position of the father in the family-the provider for all, and the enemy of all.

August Strindberg

Expecting to be able to get rid of the competitive drive, first of all, flies in the face of human nature — and little girls certainly have this drive, as much as little boys do, or at least the little girls I have observed in my immediate family have it.

My throttle was wide open. I approached everything, my job, my family, my romances, with intensity.

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us.

The family—that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever wish to.

Always reward your long hours of labor and toil in the very best way, surrounded by your family. Nurture their love carefully, remembering that your children need models, not critics, and your own progress will hasten when you constantly strive to present your best side to your children. And even if you have failed at all else in the eyes of the world, if you have a loving family, you are a success.

In the West, the basic economic and social unit is the individual; in Africa, it is the extended family or the collective.

Twins are usually hailed with delight, because they swell the power of the family, though in some instances they are put to death.

John Hanning Speke