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The family is both the fundamental unit of society as well as the root of culture. It ... is a perpetual source of encouragement, advocacy, assurance, and emotional refueling that empowers a child to venture with confidence into the greater world and to become all that he can be.
MARIANNE E. NEIFERT, Dr. Mom's Parenting Guide
A family in harmony will prosper in everything.
The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.
All happy families resemble each other, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
LEO TOLSTOY, Anna Karenina
Family traditions counter alienation and confusion. They help us define who we are; they provide something steady, reliable and safe in a confusing world.
SUSAN LIEBERMAN, New Traditions
The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other.
Family ... the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.
AUGUST STRINDBERG, The Son of a Servant
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, Changing Times
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
Family values are a little like family vacations -— subject to changeable weather and remembered more fondly with the passage of time. Though it rained all week at the beach, it’s often the momentary rainbows that we remember.
LESLIE DREYFOUS, New York Times, Oct. 25, 1992
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, "Notebook O," The Crack-Up
A family with an old person has a living treasure of gold.
If the family were a boat, it would be a canoe that makes no progress unless everyone paddles.
LETTY COTTIN POGREBIN, Family and Politics
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, Marriage, and Family
In truth a family is what you make it. It is made strong, not by number of heads counted at the dinner table, but by the rituals you help family members create, by the memories you share, by the commitment of time, caring, and love you show to one another, and by the hopes for the future you have as individuals and as a unit.
MARGE KENNEDY, The Single Parent Family
GIGI KAESER, Love Makes a Family
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
Better a loving single-parent family than a 'conventional' family where the parents hate each other and the father is a demagogue.
Frankly, I'm fed up with politicians in Washington lecturing the rest of us about family values. Our families have values. But our government doesn’t.
BILL CLINTON, speech at Democratic National Convention, July 16, 1992
If your family tree does not fork, you might be a redneck.
JEFF FOXWORTHY, stand-up routine
No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.
MARGARET MEAD, Kate Rowinski's The Quotable Mom
Family life is not a computer program that runs on its own; it needs continual input from everyone.
NEIL KURSHAN, Raising Your Child to Be a Mensch
Every family has a story that it tells itself, that it passes on to the children and grandchildren. The story grows over the years, mutates, some parts are sharpened, others dropped, and there is often debate about what really happened. But even with these different sides of the same story, there is still agreement that this is the family story. And in the absence of other narratives, it becomes the flagpole that the family hangs its identity from.
A.M. HOMES, O Magazine, Apr. 2007
Family is what grounds you.
ANGELINA JOLIE, interview, Jun. 13, 2001
The Family is the Country of the heart.
GIUSEPPE MAZZINI, The Duties of Man
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