“A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.”
“A man ought to live so that everybody knows he is a Christian... and most of all, his family ought to know.”
“Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.”
“There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.”
“Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other.”
“Nor need we power or splendor, wide hall or lordly dome; the good, the true, the tender- these form the wealth of home.”
“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.”
“Women know what men have long forgotten. The ultimate economic and spiritual unit of any civilization is still the family.”
“The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.”
“You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren't dying. They're merging into big conglomerates.”
“The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended -- and not to take a hint when a hint isn't intended.”
“The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.”
“Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice. It can be sustained by a spirit of love which goes beyond justice.”
“He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.”
“Parents: persons who spend half their time worrying how a child will turn out, and the rest of the time wondering when a child will turn in.”
“Lord, confound this surly sister, blight her brow with blotch and blister, cramp her larynx, lung and liver, in her guts a galling give her.”
“Family... the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.”
“Women's liberationists spread the word that the only peaceful family is one in which either the wife is enslaved or the husband is androgynous.”
“I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.”
“I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.”
“When I do something in my family because I really enjoy it, then my duty has become my pleasure. And it is a pleasure for all the people around me.”
“One of life's greatest mysteries is how the boy who wasn't good enough to marry your daughter can be the father of the smartest grandchild in the world.”
“He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.”
“Our notion of the perfect society embraces the family as its center and ornament, and this paradise is not secure until children appear to animate and complete the picture.”
“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.”
“Parents and children seldom act in concert: each child endeavors to appropriate the esteem or fondness of the parents, and the parents, with yet less temptation, betray each other to their children.”
“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.”
“Sisters are always drying their hair. Locked into rooms, alone, they pose at the mirror, shoulders bare, trying this way and that their hair, or fly importunate down the stair to answer the telephone.”
“The roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through the window pane are my children. The mighty abstract idea I have of beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness.”
“When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.”