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None but a mule denies his family.
-Arabic Proverb
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All people are your relatives, therefore expect only trouble from them.
-Chinese Proverb
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Govern a family as you would cook a small fish -- very gently.
-Chinese Proverb
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In a broken nest there are few whole eggs.
-Chinese Proverb
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Man is the head of the family, woman the neck that turns the head.
-Chinese Proverb
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A small family is soon provided for.
-English Proverb
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Look for the good, not the evil, in the conduct of members of the family.
-Yiddish Proverb
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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.
-Yiddish Proverb
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When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry.
-Yiddish Proverb
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A friend who is near and dear may in time become as useless as a relative.
-George Ade
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The family is the school of duties... founded on love.
-Felix Adler
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A farmer who had a quarrelsome family called his sons and told them to lay a bunch of sticks before him. Then, after laying the sticks parallel to one another and binding them, he challenged his sons, one after one, to pick up the bundle and break it. They all tried, but in vain. Then, untying the bundle, he gave them the sticks to break one by one. This they did with the greatest ease. Then said the father, Thus, my sons, as long as you remain united, you are a match for anything, but differ and separate, and you are undone.
-Aesop
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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.
-Amos Bronson Alcott
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Even as the cell is the unit of the organic body, so the family is the unit of society.
-Ruth Nanda Anshen
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Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love's own product. The child, this in-between to which the lovers now are related and which they hold in common, is representative of the world in that it also separates them; it is an indication that they will insert a new world into the existing world. Through the child, it is as though the lovers return to the world from which their love had expelled them. But this new worldliness, the possible result and the only possibly happy ending of a love affair, is, in a sense, the end of love, which must either overcome the partners anew or be transformed into another mode of belonging together.
-Hannah Arendt
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Cruel is the strife of brothers.
-Aristotle
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Rarely do members of the same family grow up under the same roof.
-Richard Bach
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He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
-Francis Bacon
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You leave home to seek your fortune and, when you get it, you go home and share it with your family.
-Anita Baker
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The babe at first feeds upon the mother's bosom, but it is always on her heart.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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There is no friendship, no love, like that of the parent for the child.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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Family jokes, though rightly cursed by strangers, are the bond that keeps most families alive.
-Stella Benson
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He followed in his father's footsteps, but his gait was somewhat erratic.
-Nicolas Bentley
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A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city: and their contentions are like the bars of a castle. Proverbs 18:19
-Bible
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You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren't dying. They're merging into big conglomerates.
-Erma Bombeck
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Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.
-Anthony Brandt
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The government is becoming the family of last resort.
-Jerry Brown
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A family is a place where minds come in contact with one another.
-Buddha
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Never did I think that I became family entertainment.
-Jimmy Buffett
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Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
-George Burns
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I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous.
-William S. Burroughs
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The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.
-G. K. Chesterton
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One of the best things about being an adult is the realization that you can share with your sister and still have plenty for yourself.
-Betsy Cohen
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The family is the most basic unit of government. As the first community to which a person is attached and the first authority under which a person learns to live, the family establishes society's most basic values.
-Charles Caleb Colton
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It is not possible for one to teach others who cannot teach his own family.
-Confucius
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The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.
-Confucius
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The parents age must be remembered, both for joy and anxiety.
-Confucius
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Of all my wife's relations I like myself the best.
-Joseph Cook
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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.
-Ted Cook
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Human beings are the only creatures on earth that allow their children to come back home.
-Bill Cosby
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Oh my son's my son till he gets him a wife, but my daughter's my daughter all her life.
-Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
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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
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Our relatives are ours by chance, but we can choose our friends.
-Jacques Delille
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Family is the most important thing in the world.
-Princess of Wales Diana
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Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families; and in families not regulated by that pervading influence which sanctifies while it enhances... in short, by the influence of Woman, in the lofty character of Wife, they may be expected with confidence, and must be borne with philosophy.
-Charles Dickens
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For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch him, as a child, play the games she was not allowed to play; she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and values -- or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her son, who came from her flesh and whose life was sustained by her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the project of raising a boy is fraught with ambivalence and leads inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a woman to be -- to be through her son, to live through her son.
-Andrea Dworkin
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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.
-Benjamin Franklin
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The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.
-James G. Frazer
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If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.
-Sigmund Freud
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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.
-Robert Frost
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How the mother is to be pitied who hath handsome daughters! Locks, bolts, bars, and lectures of morality are nothing to them: they break through them all. They have as much pleasure in cheating a father and mother, as in cheating at cards.
-John Gay
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What a man sows, that shall he and his relations reap.
-Clarissa Graves
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The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.
-Germaine Greer
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Where can a person be better than in the bosom of their family.
-Marmontel Gretry
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Families are about love overcoming emotional torture.
-Matt Groening
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Nor need we power or splendor, wide hall or lordly dome; the good, the true, the tender- these form the wealth of home.
-Sarah Josepha Hale
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Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.
-Alex Haley
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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.
-Jane Howard
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I must acknowledge an interest, or rather a dismay, in discussing this 'family memoir,' for from experience and observation I have come to regard the American Nuclear Family in the last 50 years as the enemy of individual determination, of personal autonomy--in short, as a disease.
-Richard Howard, in a review of a memoir
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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
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My family begins with me, your family ends with you.
-Iphicrates
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Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?
-Elizabeth Janeway
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The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.
-Thomas Jefferson
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The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.
-Paul Johnson
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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.
-Samuel Johnson
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You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.
-Samuel Johnson
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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.
-John Keats
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The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmother. A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt and Helpists know it. They have jumped into the void left by the disappearance of morbid old ladies from the bosom of the American family.
-Florence King
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Creating a family in this turbulent world is an act of faith, a wager that against all odds there will be a future, that love can last, that the heart can triumph against all adversities and even against the grinding wheel of time.
-Dean Koontz, From the Corner of His Eye
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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.
-Dr. Jess Lair
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A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity. He is known by his knock.
-Charles Lamb
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The family you come from isn't as important as the family you're going to have.
-Ring Lardner
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A brother is a friend given by Nature.
-Jean Baptiste Legouve
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With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping homeliness entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all sentiment is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called the Public, the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state.
-Percy Wynham Lewis
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So much of what is best in us is bound up in our love of family, that it remains the measure of our stability because it measures our sense of loyalty. All other pacts of love or fear derive from it and are modeled upon it.
-Haniel Long
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Women know what men have long forgotten. The ultimate economic and spiritual unit of any civilization is still the family.
-Clare Boothe Luce
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As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals --or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all. A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?
-Rose Macaulay
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I only have two rules for my newly born daughter: she will dress well and never have sex.
-John Malkovich
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I would rather start a family than finish one.
-Don Marquis
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The Family is the Country of the heart. There is an angel in the Family who, by the mysterious influence of grace, of sweetness, and of love, renders the fulfillment of duties less wearisome, sorrows less bitter. The only pure joys unmixed with sadness which it is given to man to taste upon earth are, thanks to this angel, the joys of the Family.
-Giuseppe Mazzini
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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.
-Phyllis Mcginley
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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.
-Margaret Mead
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Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
-H. L. Mencken
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The ultimate end of your education was to make you a good wife.
-Mary Wortley Montagu
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There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom.
-Michel de Montaigne
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There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.
-Michel de Montaigne
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A man ought to live so that everybody knows he is a Christian... and most of all, his family ought to know.
-Dwight L. Moody
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Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.
-Martin Mull
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A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
-Ogden Nash
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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.
-Reinhold Niebuhr
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The family unit plays a critical role in our society and in the training of the generation to come.
-Sandra Day O'Connor
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Families are nothing other than the idolatry of duty.
-Ann Oakley
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To the outside world we all grow old. But not to brothers and sisters. We know each other as we always were. We know each other's hearts. We share private family jokes. We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys. We live outside the touch of time.
-Clara Ortega
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A brother is a friend provided by nature.
-Legouve Pere
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The family spirit has rendered man carnivorous.
-Francis Picabia
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As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
-Pope John Paul II
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In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
-V. S. Pritchett
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One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fiber of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardily.
-Jonathan Raban
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How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
-Adrienne Rich
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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.
-Isaac Rosenfeld
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For there is no friend like a sister in calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, to fetch one if one goes astray, to lift one if one totters down, to strengthen whilst one stands.
-Christina Rossetti
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... in the working class, the process of building a family, of making a living for it, of nurturing and maintaining the individuals in it
-Lillian Breslow Rubin, Worlds of Pain, epilogue (1976) (title come from John Masefield's poem The Everlasting Mercy)
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The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.
-George Santayana
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The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
-George Santayana
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You don't raise heroes, you raise sons. And if you treat them like sons, they'll turn out to be heroes, even if it's just in your own eyes.
-Walter Schirra Sr.
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Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life.
-Charles Monroe Schulz
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The voice of parents is the voice of gods, for to their children they are heaven's lieutenants.
-William Shakespeare
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He didn't dare to, because his father had a weak heart and habitually threatened to drop dead if anybody hurt his feelings. You may have noticed that people with weak hearts are the tyrants of English married life.
-George Bernard Shaw
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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.
-George Bernard Shaw
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I would like to be remembered as a man who had a wonderful time living life, a man who had good friends, fine family - and I don't think I could ask for anything more than that, actually.
-Frank Sinatra
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A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
-Susan Sontag
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The family must be democratized in that sense in which each individual within its bond shall be sustained in seeking and in maintaining the conditions of personality. No one human being to live solely for other's service..., but all to seek the utmost perfection of individual life as a contribution to the common life; this is the democratic ideal. There seems to be no other inherited institution in which this spiritual essence of democracy can be so clearly and so well realized as it may be and today often is in the private monogamic family.
-Anna Garland Spencer, The Family and Its Members (Philadelphia:J.B.Lippincott Co., 1923)
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Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other.
-Freya Stark
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The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government.
-Gloria Steinem
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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.
-Gloria Steinem
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Family... the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.
-J. August Strindberg
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A family is a place where principles are hammered and honed on the anvil of everyday living.
-Charles Swindoll
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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.
-J. M. Synge
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In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest -- usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation -- and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside.
-J. M. Synge
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The hatred of relatives is the most violent.
-Tacitus
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He that loves not his wife and children feeds a lioness at home, and broods a nest of sorrows.
-Jeremy Taylor
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All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.
http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides3/anna_karenina3.asp
-Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (opening line), 1877
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One of the greatest gifts
That life can give to anyone
Is the very special love that families share...
As years go by,
It's good to know that there will always be
Certain people in our lives who care.
For there are countless things
That only families have in common
And memories that no one else can make...
And these precious ties that bind a family together
Are bonds that time and distance cannot break.
How fortunate we are
When we have relatives to love us,
It makes the world a happy place to be...
Few gifts in life
Will last as long
Or touch the heart as deeply
As the very special gift
Of family.
-Craig S. Tunks
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We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly.
-Mark Twain
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Adam was the luckiest man; he had no mother-in-law.
-Mark Twain
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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.
-R. Emmett Tyell
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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.
-Source Unknown
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Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
-Oscar Wilde
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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.
-Oscar Wilde
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As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.
-Oscar Wilde
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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.
-William Butler Yeats
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A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.
-Anzia Yezierska
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People who have good relationships at home are more effective in the marketplace.
-Zig Ziglar
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Books about Family
