family quotes

  • You are asking me to sell members of my family.

    -Walter H Annenberg
      In the NewYork Times,12 Mar. Rejecting a billion-dollar Japanese offer for his art collection.

  • If absolute sovereignty be not necessary in a State, how comes it to be so in a family?

    - Mary Astell
      Some Reflections upon MarriageOccasion'd by the Duke and Duchess of Mazarine's Case which is also consider'd, preface (1706 edn).

  •    There isno more fruitful source of familydiscontent than a housewife's badly-cooked dinners and untidy ways.

    - Isabella Mary ne  e Mayson Beeton
    The Book of Household Management, preface.

  • They were a tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses, weren't they?

    - Sir (Henry) Max(imilian) Beerbohm
    Attributed.

  • Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their familybut to a solitaryand an exile his friends are everything.

    -Willa Sibert Cather
    Shadows On The Rock, bk.3, ch.5.

  •    The view of history that we get through the kitchen window is a more gentle view, not of war and politics, but of familyand communityand sharing.

    -Julia McWilliams Child
      On studying cookbooks dating back to the1400s in the Library of Congress. In Memory and Imagination, PBS  TV, 15  Aug. Chinese poet and civil servant about whom very little is known. He  wrote  a  series  of  three  poems  on  his  separation  from  his wife, the result of a posting to Beijing.

  • We have to accept the verbal portraits, as indeed we have to accept paintings and sculptures, as well as photographs, of the immortals whose influence on our lives is often greater than that of our own family members.

    - Richard Church
    In praise of biography. Quoted in Christian Science Monitor, 30  Apr1963.

  • It will be a beautiful family talk, mean and worried and full of sorrow and spite and excitement. I cannot be asked to miss it in my weak state. I should only fret.

    - Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett
      A Family and a Fortune, ch.10.

  • A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the doctrine of reincarnation.

    - SirArthur Conan Doyle
      The Hound of the Baskervilles, ch.13.

  • The chief source of economic insecurity in America used to be growing old; now it's being born into or raised in a single-parent family.

    - David T Ellwood
      In the Washington Post, 22 Feb.

  • Social scientists could supply plenty of research to show that one member of the family, at least, is happier and more well adjusted when mum stays home and looks after the children. But that person is dada finding of limited use to backlash publicists.

    - Susan Faludi
      Backlash (UK edn), ch.2,'Man Shortages and Barren Wombs'.

  • I was born†with ready-made parents and a sister and brother who had already begun their store of experience, inaccessible to me except through their language and the record, always slightly different, of our mother and father, and as each member of the family wasborn, each,ina sensewithmemories onloan, began to supply the individual furnishings of each Was-land, each Is-land, and the hopes and dreams of the Future.

    -Janet Paterson also known as Jean PatersonFrame Frame
      To the Is-land, ch.1,'In the Second Place'.

  • I was ever of the opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single and only talked of population.

    - Oliver Goldsmith
      The Vicar of  Wakefield, ch.1.

  • Our Ford†had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life.

    - Aldous Leonard Huxley
      Brave New World, ch.3.

  • Property like incest holds the family together.

    - Harold Adams Innis
    Quoted in William Christian (ed)  The Idea File of Harold  Adams Innis (1980).

  • I want every family in America to have a carpet on the floor and a picture on the wall. After bread, you've got to have a picture on the wall.

    - Lyndon B(aines) also called LBJ Johnson
    On visiting Pittsburgh's Polish^Czech area. Quoted in  Alistair Cooke The Americans (1980).

  • Asyougrowolder, you'll seewhitemen cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget itwheneverawhitemandoesthattoa black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.

    - (Nelle) Harper Lee
       Atticus Finch. To Kill  A Mockingbird, pt.2, ch.23.

  • All forms of government fall when it comes up to the question of breadbread for the family, something to eat.Bread to a manwith a family comes firstbefore his union, before his citizenship, before his church affiliation. Bread!

    -John L(lewellyn) Lewis
      In the Saturday Evening Post,12 Oct.

  •    Assume a particular state of development in the productive facilities of man and you will get a particular form of commerce and consumption. Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce and consumption and you will have a corresponding social constitution, a corresponding organisation of the family, of orders or of classes, in a word, a corresponding civil society. Assume a particular civil societyand you will get particular political conditions which are only the official expression of civil society.

    - Karl Heinrich Marx
      Letter to P  V Annenkov, 26 Dec.

  • Patriarchy's chief institution is the family. It is both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole.

    - Kate (Katherine) ne  e Murray Millett
      Sexual Politics, ch.2,'Theory of Sexual Politics'.

  • In so far as the familyas an institution turns women into darling littleslaves andmenintotheirchief providers and unweaned dependents, the problem of a satisfactory marriage remains incapable of purely private solution.

    - C(harles) Wright Mills
      The Sociological Imagination, ch.1.

  •    If these sketches should prove the means of deterring onefamily fromsinking their property, andshipwrecking all their hopes, by going to reside in the backwoods of Canada, I shall consider myself amply repaid for revealing the secrets of the prison-house, and feel that I have not toiled and suffered in the wilderness in vain.

    - Susanna ne  e Strickland Moodie
      Roughing It in the Bush; or,  A Life in Canada, vol.2, ch.14, 'Adieu to the Woods'.

  • England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much- quoted passage, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons.

    - George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
    The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, pt.3,'Shopkeeper at War'.

  • A family with the wrong members in controlthat, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

    - George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
    The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, pt.3,'The English Revolution'.

  • Yiddish is a household tongue, and God, like other members of the family, is sweetly informal in it.

    - Cynthia Ozick
      Metaphor and Memory.

  • One thing this family does not need to do is make itself resented by thousands more people.

    - David Rockefeller
    Explaining his reluctance to join the management of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Quoted in Peter Collier and David Horowitz The Rockefellers (1976).

  • It's a family jokethat when Iwas a tinychild Iturned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefullyasked,'Momma, do we believe in winter?'

    - Philip Milton Roth
      Portnoy's Complaint,'The Most Unforgettable Character I've Ever Met'.

  • In our lore, the Jewish family was an inviolate haven against every formof menace, frompersonal isolationto gentile hostility. Regardless of internal friction and strife, it was assumed to be an indissoluble consolidation† Family indivisibility, the first commandment.

    - Philip Milton Roth
      The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography,'Dear Zuckerman'.

  • The censorious said that she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.

    -Saki pseudonym of  Hector Hugh Munro
    The Chronicles of Clovis,'TheJesting of Arlington Stringham'.

  • You see, family life is all the life she knows: she's like a bird bornina cage, that would dieif you let it looseinthe woods.

    - George Bernard Shaw
      Bill Collins about his wife. Getting Married.

  •    To begin with, I was born with an unreasonably large stock of relations, who have increased and multiplied ever since. My aunts and uncles were legion, and my cousins as the sands of the sea without number. Consequently, even a low death-rate meant, in the course of mere natural decay, a tolerably steady supply of funerals for a by no means affectionate but exceedingly clannish family to go to. Add to this that the town we lived in, being divided in religious opinion, buried its dead in two great cemeteries, each of which was held by the opposite faction to be the ante- chamber of perdition, and by its own patrons to be the gate of paradise.

    - George Bernard Shaw
    'Music in London'.

  • It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to makethantobuy.Thetaylordoesnot attempttomakehis ownshoe†All ofthemfind itfor their interestto employ their whole industry in a way in which they have some advantage over their neighbours and to purchase with a part of its produce†whatever else they have occasion for† What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom† Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of claret and burgundy in Scotland?

    - Adam Smith
      An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of theWealth of Nations, bk.4, ch.2.

  • The familythat dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape.

    - Dodie Smith
      Dear Octopus.

  • I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men [the princes,William and Harry] so that their souls are not simply immersed by dutyand tradition, but can sing openlyas you planned.

    - Charles, Earl Spencer
      Oration at the funeral of his sister, Diana, Princess of Wales, 6 Sep.

  • What is the character of a family to an hypothesis? my father would reply.

    - Laurence Sterne
    ^67  Tristram Shandy, bk.1, ch.21.

  • 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.

  • A Child will make two Dishes at an Entertainment for Friends; and when the Family dines alone, the fore or hind Quarter will makea reasonable Dish; and seasoned with a little Pepper or Salt, will be very good Boiled on the fourth Day, especially in Winter.

    -Jonathan Swift
      A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country.

  • As a rule, you see, I'm not lugged into Family Rows.On the occasions when Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across the primeval swamps†the clan has a tendency to ignore me. It's one of the advantages Iget from being a bachelorand, according to my nearest and dearest, practically a half-witted bachelor at that.

    -Plum
      The InimitableJeeves, ch.16.

  • Women leave the Royal Family in only one modewith their heads cleaved from the shoulders.

    - Sarah, Duchess of York
      My Story.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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