My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, “You’re tearing up the grass.” “We’re not raising grass,” my dad would reply, “we’re raising boys.”

—Harmon Killebrew

What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.

—Mother Theresa

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

—Ariel and Will Durant

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.

 —Bertrand Russell

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

—Alex Haley

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

—Colette

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

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

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

—George Burns

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

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

Family life is full of major and minor crises — the ups and downs of health, success, and failure in career, marriage, and divorce — and all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all of these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality. It’s difficult to imagine anything more nourishing to the soul.

—Thomas Moore