quotations about family
Rampant nostalgia for the modern family system, or more precisely, for an idealized version of a 1950s Ozzie and Harriet image of the family, has become an increasingly potent ideological force in the United States, with milder versions evident in Canada and England. Fundamentalist Christians and right-wing Republicans spearheaded the profamily movement that abetted the Reagan "revolution" of the 1980s. By the 1994 electoral season, however, even President Clinton had embraced the ideology of an explicitly centrist campaign for family values led by a small group of social scientists. This ongoing campaign portrays family breakdown as the primary source of social malaise in the United States, blaming the decline of the married-couple family for everything from crime, violence, and declining educational standards to poverty, drug abuse, and sexually transmitted disease.
JUDITH STACEY
In the Name of the Family
If your family tree does not fork, you might be a redneck.
JEFF FOXWORTHY
stand-up routine
A family, to be complete, must consist of freemen and slaves; and as every complex object naturally resolves itself into simple elements, we must consider the elements of a family--the master and servant, the husband and wife, the father and children; what all of these are in themselves, and what are the relations which they naturally and properly bear to each other.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
The family that stays together probably has only one car.
KNOFEL STATON
Check Your Homelife
I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.
FRED ALLEN
Much Ado about Me
A good many family trees are shady.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
If the world around us is chaotic and sometimes incomprehensible, then the family is an oasis, an anchor of reliability and loyalty, a place where we are important because we are there.
SUSAN LIEBERMAN
New Traditions
No matter how much television dramas go on singing the cloying praises of the family, it is the outside world, full of enemies and lechers, that passes on a man's worth, pays his wages, and guarantees him the right to live.
KOBO ABE
The Face of Another
If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.
QUENTIN CRISP
Manners from Heaven
The striking point about our model family is not simply the compete-compete, consume-consume style of life it urges us to follow.... The striking point, in the face of all the propaganda, is how few Americans actually live this way.
LOUISE KAPP HOWE
The Future of the Family
Break up the institution of the family, deny the inviolability of its relations, and in a little while there would not be any humanity.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
A family without a black sheep is not a typical family.
HEINRICH BÖLL
"Die schwarzen Schafe"
Woman is the highest, holiest, most precious gift to man. Her mission and throne is the family, and if anything is withheld that would make her more efficient, useful, or happy in that sphere, she is wronged, and has not her rights.
JOHN TODD
Woman's Rights
The family was an art ... and the dinner table was the place it found expression.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
Where love exists with self-respect and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that modern men are seeking to create.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
The great want in family life that strikes me is this, that there are so few tête-à-têtes. You live on from year's end to year's end, surrounded by those whom you love, and chatting together; but it is rare to be thrown alone with any one individual, and have really intimate talk with him or her. Yet the difference in value is immense between mere social chat, and that mingling of mind with mind, which is impossible if others are by. But the real fact is, that unless some effort is made for it, or unless circumstances are unusually favourable, the very members of the same family live, one might say, on parallel lines, without ever touching.
CHARLES BUXTON
Notes of Thought
There is one class of men who from time to time have taken a keen and practical interest in the constitution of the Family, and they are the Statesmen. They have realized how intimately the welfare of the State depends upon the influence and nature of the Families from which it is constituted; and they have endeavoured that the State in turn should mould and influence the Family to its own purposes.
HELEN DENDY BOSANQUET
The Family
Family time is the best time.
CARMELO ANTHONY
Twitter post, Jan. 1, 2014
Forms of family life vary from one society to another. There are no universal rules about who is considered to be "in" a family, who lives with whom, who is socially allowed to have sex with whom, who shares economic resources and who has responsibility for children.
MARILYN POOLE
Family: Changing Families
That was what you did with family when you'd been worried about them, you grabbed them and held on to them and told them how much they'd pissed you off, and it was okay, because no matter how angry you got, they still belonged to you.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Glass