Thoughts and reflections on family and relatives by various authors from different eras to understand and meditate on the fundamental cell of our societies.
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
If I had been born into a very wealthy family, I would have written long novels, but accustomed to having to economize, I have developed a certain mastery of simple, short writing, so I can leave the ramblings and elaborate nonsense to those better than me.
Carl William Brown
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
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
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
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
If the only alternatives for our young people are the stadium, discos, TV, church, video games, social media, family, school, and the painful world of work, then perhaps we can better understand why some of them feel the desire to escape, even at the cost of ruining their lives forever.
Carl William Brown
Focus on your marriage. Because that’s the nucleus of the home, whatever you do to restore its health and strength will naturally restore what’s broken among the other relationships. If you have no children yet, this will make a comfortable nest for them to begin life well. If you have children, the changes you make in your marriage will affect the rest of the household more quickly and dramatically than you think.
Charles R. Swindoll
The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.
Erma Bombeck
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
Marx was convinced that in the final phase of the bourgeoisie, the growing mass proletarianization would destroy the family, but he couldn’t say exactly what would replace it. These days, it’s easier to formulate hypotheses on this subject, and we suggest one: prostitutes.
Carl William Brown
All my family, my blood, is mixed up now. They don’t even all know each other. I just hope they don’t never hate or fight each other, not knowin who they are. Cause all these people livin are brothers and sisters and cousins. All these beautiful different colors! We!… We the human Family. God says so! FAMILY!
J. California Cooper
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
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
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
A young Italian girl, even a good-looking one, would rather be slaughtered by two Nigerians than be with her family, at school, at the oratory, at church, at work, in the community – well, that says a lot about the rotten state of our society!
Carl William Brown
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
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
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 E. King
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
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.
Wyndham Lewis
By profession, I am a soldier and take pride in that fact. But I am prouder – infinitely prouder – to be a father. A soldier destroys in order to build; the father only builds, never destroys. The one has the potentiality of death; the other embodies creation and life. While the hordes of death are mighty, the battalions of life are mightier still. It is my hope that my son, when I am gone, will remember me not from the battlefield but in the home repeating with him our simple daily prayer, “Our Father Who Art in Heaven.”
Douglas Macarthur
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
But if we live in a global world, in a planetary village, and if we’ve all long been brothers and sisters and ours is one big family, then why are there still borders and illegal immigrants?
Carl William Brown
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
Who knows why Italy, the cradle and homeland of the Vatican, Catholicism, the Holy Family, and the Pope’s sermons on the mystical value of procreation, has long had a zero fertility rate?
Carl William Brown
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
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
In one family, all goes by two and two. If a member of it has any interest, he or she will confide it to some one other; but the rest know nothing. In another family, all feel what touches one; nothing is kept dark from the father and mother, brothers and sisters–all share. This family habit is by far the better, it strengthens the tie between the members, and makes the home one home.
Charles Buxton
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 whore is nothing more than a sordid image of a society that exploits parents and sells its sons to its daughters. A sublime embodiment of poverty, incompetence, and stupidity, she is one of those professionals who, despite not knowing how to do anything, earn a lot. This figure is the symbol of the incestuous ignorance of a world that rapes its victims, charging them handsomely, and despises them with respectability, at least until they too begin to reek of that excremental well-being, which is the most fetishistic characteristic of an increasingly masochistic reality. Mediocre beings who, as Shakespeare said, know how to deceive many men only to end up miserably thanks to the self-interested attentions of a single petty individual.
Carl William Brown
In retrospect, it was only a matter of time before the Family Dinner passed into history and fast foods took over. I knew its days were numbered the day our youngest propped my mouth open with a fork and yelled into it, “I want a cheeseburger and two fries and get it right this time.” I just didn’t serve meals with show business pizzazz.
Erma Bombeck
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
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
Imitation both unconscious and conscious is par excellence the educational method of the family. It is plain that a considerable part of the adaptation of living beings to their environment, i.e., of beings that are born plastic, is passed on from generation to generation through imitation. Were this not so, much if not all of the road traversed by one generation would have to be travelled by the next generation from the very beginning and without short-cuts. Consequently there would be little chance for the novel adaptation, the propitious individual variation, that constitutes progress.
Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons
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
Whoever is acquainted with the cruel injustice and unjust subordination frequently manifested in the family, whoever sees matters of lasting and supreme importance relative to the beginning and continuance of the family determined by momentary fancy or unreasoning passion, cannot but desire the construction of a social fabric in which reason may rule with perfect justice.
Charles Franklin Thwing
There are certain functions that the family performs. In the first place the family provides society with an orderly means of reproduction, while at the same time the norms of marriage control the potentially disruptive forces of sexuality. Second, the family provides physical and economic support for the child during the early years of dependence. The child receives its primary socialization in the family, learning the essential ideas and values required for adult life.
Adrian Wilson
Thus in modern times the family drifted on to the high seas, and the world of metaphor such a voyage suggests started to fix itself in the vocabulary of social analysis. Had the winds always blown so strongly as now? people would ask. Had the currents always been so powerful, the family so little able to navigate a separate course?
Edward Shorter
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
The number one need in all people is the need for acceptance, the need to experience a sense of belonging to something and someone. The need for acceptance is more powerful in your family than anywhere else…. If that need is not met by your family, trust me, your kids will go elsewhere to seek it in order to find approval and acceptance.
Phil Mcgraw
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 fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.
Jonathan Raban
Every family had its own peculiar cult, to which no stranger was ever admitted, and which alone could appease and satisfy the gods of that family. The cult was handed down from father to son, from generation to generation, and could not be lost without condemning the whole series of ancestors to eternal misery.
Helen Dendy Bosanquet
The family indeed is dead, if what we mean by it is the modern family system in which units comprised of male breadwinner and female homemaker, married couples, and their offspring dominate the land. But its ghost, the ideology of the family, survives to haunt the consciousness of all those who refuse to confront it. It is time to perform a social autopsy on the corpse of the modern family system so that we may try to lay its troublesome spirit to rest.
Judith Stacey
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
Governments and politicians use the family as an indicator of the health and strength of social life. Politicians fear that any weakening of family life will in some way sap the vitality of national life…. The family is also important to businessmen. It is one of the major purchasing groups of our consumer society.
Adrian Wilson
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
If we could know as intimately as we know our more immediate parents the long line of ancestors through whom the family spirit has passed on its way to us, we should probably become fatalists in face of the apparently overwhelming evidence that there is nothing in us that has not come to us from, or at least through, the Family. Family portrait galleries are a striking confirmation of the persistence of characteristics which ultimately govern the fortunes of successive generations.
Helen Dendy Bosanquet
I wanted to go to a place where you were important and people listened to what you had to say. Mothering hadn’t done that … and yet … wouldn’t it be ironic if my turf yielded the most important commodity being grown today? A family? A crop of children, seeded by two people, nourished by love, watered by tears, and in eighteen or twenty years harvested into worthwhile human beings to go through the process again.
Erma Bombeck
We all hold on to some image of the family we want, based one way or another on the family we had. Lots of people are thrilled about the families they came from, others couldn’t get away fast enough. Most people fall into that vast middle ground: great affection mixed with a few ideas for improvement. A couple of things they wish could have perhaps been done differently.
Paul Reiser
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