1.  I don’t care how poor a man is; if he has family, he’s rich.  –Dan Wilcox & thad Mumford, “Identity Crisis,” from M*A*S*H

2.  It is not flesh and blood but the heart with makes us fathers and sons.  –Johann Schiller

3.  The family is a haven in a heartless world.  –Attributed to Christopher Lasch

4.  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

5.  If you don’t believe in ghosts, you’ve never been to a family reunion.  –Ashleigh Brilliant

6.  We all grow up with the weight of history on us.  Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.  –Shirley Abbott

7.  It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.  –Collette

8.  To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order;  to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our heart right.  –Confucius

9.  Becoming responsible adults is no longer a matter of whether children hang up their pajamas or put dirty towels in the hamper, but whether they care about themselves and others – and whether they see everyday chores as related to how we treat this planet.  –Eda LeShan

10. Making the decision to have a child – it’s momentous.  It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body.  –Elizabeth Stone

11.  Don’t hold your parents up to contempt.  After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.  –Evelyn Waugh

12.  If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.  –George Bernard Shaw

13.  I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.  –Harry S. Truman

14.  A man can’t make a place for himself in the sun if he keeps taking refuge under the family tree. –Helen Keller

15.  Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others.  Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back.  –Mignon McLaughlin

16.  You don’t choose your family.  They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.  –Desmond Tutu

17.  Our most basic instinct is not for survival but for family.  Most of us would give our own life for the survival of a family member, yet we lead our daily life too often as if we take our family for granted.  –Paul Pearshall

18.  The great gift of family life is to be intimately acquainted with people you might never even introduce yourself to, had life not done it for you.  –Kendall Hailey

19.  Family is just accident. . . . They don’t mean to get on your nerves.  They don’t even mean to be your family, they just are.  –Marsha Norman.

20.  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 Rosenfield

21.  The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness.  –Nancy Mitford

22.  What greater thing is there for human souls than to feel that they are joined for life – to be with each other in silent unspeakable memories.  –George Eliot

23.  At the end of the day, a loving family should find everything forgivable.  –Mark V. Olsen & Will Sheffer

24. Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to this country and to mankind is to bring up a family.  –George Bernard Shaw

25.  The informality of family life is a blessed condition that allows us to become our best while looking our worst.  –Marge Kennedy

26.  Family faces are magic mirrors.  Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future.  –Gail Lumet buckley

27.  The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit.  No two people – no mere father and mother – as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child.  He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.  –Pearl S. Buck

28.  The family is the nucleus of civilization.  –Will and Ariel Durant

29.  To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.  –Marilyn French

30.  Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.  –Michael Levine

31.  Home is the place where boys and girls first learn how to limit their wishes, abide by rules, and consider the rights and needs of others.  –Sidonic Gruenberg

32.  The most important thning a father can do for his children is to love their mother.  –Theodore Hesburgh

33.  Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible – the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family.  –Virginia Satir

34.  You would think that those who are always talking about family values would want to create an environment of permanent relationships for people. . . . but they’re not advocating family values,  they’re advocating their own values.  –Willie Brown

35.  And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see- or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.  –Alice Walker

36.  One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade.  –Chinese proverb

37.  Women do not have to sacrifice personhood if they are mothers.  They do not have to sacrifice motherhood in order to be persons.  Liberation was meant to expand women’s opportunities, not to limit them.  The self-esteem that has been found in new pursujits can also be found in mothering.  –Elaine Heffner

38.  No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.  –Florida Scott-Maxwell

39.  If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.  –Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

40.  She was the archetypal selfless mother: living only for her children, sheltering them from the consequences of their actions – and in the end doing them irreparable harm.  –Marcia Muller

41.  Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still.  –Nancy Friday

42.  A mother is a person who, seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.  –Tenneva Jordan

43.  When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.  –Virginia Woolf

44.  Every father should remember that one day his son will follow his example instead of his advice.  –Unknown

45. A father is a person who carries pictures in his wallet where his money used to be.  –Unknown

46.  ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’ stands written among the three laws of most revered righteousness.  –Aeschylus

47.  If you think about it seriously, all the questions about the soul and the immortality of the soul and paradise and hell are at bottom only a way of seeing this very simple fact:  that every action of ours is passed on to others according to its value, of good or evil, it passes from father to son, from one generation to the next, in a perpetual movement.  –Antonio Gramsci

48.  My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.  –Clarence Budington Kellan

49.  My father taught me to work; he didn’t teach me to love it.  –Abraham Lincoln

50.  You don’t really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around – and why his parents will always wave back.  –William D. Tammeus