You are asking me to sell members of my family.

-Annenberg,Walter H
  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?

-Astell, Mary
  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.

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

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

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

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

-Cather,Willa Sibert
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.

-Child,Julia McWilliams
  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.

-Church, Richard
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.

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

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

-Doyle, SirArthur Conan
  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.

-Ellwood, David T
  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 dadöa finding of limited use to backlash publicists.

-Faludi, Susan
  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.

-Frame,Janet Paterson also known as Jean PatersonFrame
  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.

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

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

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

Property like incest holds the family together.

-Innis, Harold Adams
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.

-Johnson, Lyndon B(aines) also called LBJ
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 itöwheneverawhitemandoesthattoa black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.

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

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

-Lewis,John L(lewellyn)
  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.

-Marx, Karl Heinrich
  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.

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