This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife." - Pope Paul VI, born Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini NULL
"God did not create a human family made up of segregated, dissociated, mutually independent members. No; he would have them all united by the bond of total love of Him and consequent self-dedication to assisting each other to maintain that bond intact." - Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Marìa Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli NULL
"Our birth rate is now half that in 1965... When I am chancellor, family values will be enshrined in our taxation system. " - Angela Merkel, fully Angela Dorothea Merkel, née Kasner
"People often ask me how it feels to have been imprisoned in my home… How could I stand the separation from family and friends? It is ironic, I say, that in an authoritarian state it is only the prisoner of conscience who is genuinely free. Yes, we have given up our right to a normal life. But we have stayed true to that most precious part of our humanity — our conscience." - Daw Aung San Suu Kyi
"It may be considered indiscreet to open the doors of someone else’s house and rummage around in other people’s family histories. Since so many of us still have the tendency to idealize our parents, my undertaking may even be regarded as improper. And yet it is something that I think must be done, for the amazing knowledge that comes to light from behind those previously locked doors contributes substantially toward helping people rescue themselves from their dangerous sleep and all its grave consequences." - Alice Miller, née Rostovski
"As we learn more about the kind of intensive child care that gives our kids the best start, parents worry that their kids' care doesn't measure up. Our tax policies do not reflect the cost of raising children, which is why we should expand the child tax credit for the first year of a child's life to help parents stay home and give lower-income parents who receive government support for child care the option to sue the subsidies to cover the costs of staying home and caring for their own children. I want to see the Family and Medical Leave Act expanded so that all families who need it can use it without losing their jobs. It is past time for our national politics to do more than just talk about family values. We need to value families by helping them raise resilient, productive children." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"Children are not rugged individualists. They depend on the adults they know and on thousands more who make decisions every day that affect their well-being. All of us, whether we acknowledge it or not, are responsible for deciding whether our children are raised in a nation that doesn't just espouse family values but values families and children." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"If you can presume that a child is competent to make a decision, you still want that child to have parental guidance whenever possible. But realistically, we know that in many cases that is not possible. I believe in parental notification. I think there are exceptions. There are situations in which the family is so dysfunctional that notification is not appropriate. In general, I think families should be part of helping their children through this." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"In recent years, long-established expectations about doing business have given way under the pressures of the modern economy. Too many companies are driven more by the need to ensure that investors get good quarterly returns. Too often, this means that they view most employees as costs, not investments, and that they expend less concern on job training, employee profit sharing, family-friendly policies, shared decision-making, or even fair pay raises. Even workers' jobs may be sacrificed as executive seek short-term profits by moving production to countries where wages are lower and environmental and other regulations less stringent. Instead of We're all in this together, the message from the top is frequently, you're on your own. The growing inequality of incomes has serious implications for children. America's turbo-charged economy has produced cheaper and better goods and greater efficiency, but it also has created serious social dislocations that undermine family and community values." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"New research in childhood development establishes that a child's environment affects everything from IW to future behavior patterns. These studies confirm the importance of breast-feeding infants, of setting aside time for family meals, and of empowering parents to shield their children from predatory marketing and the violent and sexually explicit media that contribute to aggressive behavior, early sexual experimentation, obesity, and depression. The case for quality early childhood education and programs like Head Start is stronger than ever, and we should expand them. According to a study conducted by Federal Reserve economist Rob Grunewald and conducted by Nobel laureate economist James Heckman, high-quality preschool programs are among the most cost-effective public investments we make, lowering dependency and raising lifetime earnings." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"Parenthood has the power to redefine every aspect of life - marriage, work, relationships with family and friends. Those helpless bundles of power and promise that come into our world show us our true selves- who we are, who we are not, who we wish we could be. " - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"The African proverb It takes a village to raise a child summed up for me the commonplace conclusion that, like it or not, we are living in an interdependent world where what our children hear, see, feel, and learn will affect how they grow up and who they turn out to be. The five years since 9/11 have reinforced one of my main points: How children are raised anywhere can impact our lives and our children's futures. In this book and my autobiography, Living History, I wrote about my own mother's difficult childhood. Abandoned by her teenage parents, mistreated by her grandparents, she was forced to go work as a mother's helper when she was thirteen. Caring for another family's younger children while attending high school may sound harsh, but the experience of living in a strong, loving family gave my mother the tools she would need later when caring for her own home and children." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"The Cairo Document, drafted at the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, reaffirms that in no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning. And it recognizes the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing, and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so. Women and men should have the right to make this most intimate of all decisions free of discrimination or coercion." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"The Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees unpaid leave to employees in firms with more than 50 workers. Many parents, however, cannot afford to forgo pay for even a few weeks, and very few employers in America offer paid maternity leave." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"This decision, which is one of the most fundamental, difficult, and soul-searching decisions a woman and a family can make, is also one in which the government should have no role. I believe we can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many women. Often, it's a failure of our system of education, and preventive services. It's often a result of family dynamics. This decision is a profound and complicated one; a difficult one, often the most difficult that a woman will ever make. The fact is that the best way to reduce the number of abortions is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in the first place." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"To me it's a failure every time we keep a child in foster care for that child's entire life. You know, there should be a decision made to either re-unite a child by helping a family get back on its feet and take care of its children or we should remove the child and try to find a good loving home with the foster care system but much more importantly, trying to find a permanent home." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"You cannot have maternal health without reproductive health. And reproductive health includes contraception and family planning and access to legal, safe abortion." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"The wellspring of reality is the family of weightless generalized principles." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
"Rejoice with your family in the beautiful land of life!" - Albert Einstein
"When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents." - R. D. Laing, fully Ronald David Laing
"All fossil anthropoids found hitherto have been known only from mandibular or maxillary fragments, so far as crania are concerned, and so the general appearance of the types they represented had been unknown; consequently, a condition of affairs where virtually the whole face and lower jaw, replete with teeth, together with the major portion of the brain pattern, have been preserved, constitutes a specimen of unusual value in fossil anthropoid discovery. Here, as in Homo rhodesiensis, Southern Africa has provided documents of higher primate evolution that are amongst the most complete extant. Apart from this evidential completeness, the specimen is of importance because it exhibits an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man ... Whether our present fossil is to be correlated with the discoveries made in India is not yet apparent; that question can only be solved by a careful comparison of the permanent molar teeth from both localities. It is obvious, meanwhile, that it represents a fossil group distinctly advanced beyond living anthropoids in those two dominantly human characters of facial and dental recession on one hand, and improved quality of the brain on the other. Unlike Pithecanthropus, it does not represent an ape-like man, a caricature of precocious hominid failure, but a creature well advanced beyond modern anthropoids in just those characters, facial and cerebral, which are to be anticipated in an extinct link between man and his simian ancestor. At the same time, it is equally evident that a creature with anthropoid brain capacity and lacking the distinctive, localised temporal expansions which appear to be concomitant with and necessary to articulate man, is no true man. It is therefore logically regarded as a man-like ape. I propose tentatively, then, that a new family of Homo-simidæ be created for the reception of the group of individuals which it represents, and that the first known species of the group be designated Australopithecus africanus, in commemoration, first, of the extreme southern and unexpected horizon of its discovery, and secondly, of the continent in which so many new and important discoveries connected with the early history of man have recently been made, thus vindicating the Darwinian claim that Africa would prove to be the cradle of mankind. " - Raymond Dart, fully Raymond Arthur Dart
"Perhaps the great renewal of the world will consist of this, that man and woman, freed of all confused feelings and desires, shall no longer seek each other as opposites, but simply as members of a family and neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to simply, earnestly, patiently, and jointly bear the heavy responsibility of sexuality that has been entrusted to them." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
"Every time I went to a family gathering, I was the boy who made it. I was a Professor at Harvard and everybody stood around in awe and listened to my every word, and all I felt was that horror that I knew inside that I didn't know. Of course, it was all such beautiful, gentle horror, because there was so much reward involved." - Ram Dass, aka Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert
"A wife endowed with spiritual wisdom is a real partner in life. She greatly helps her husband to follow the religious path. After the birth of one or two children they live like brother and sister. Both of them are devotees of God. His servant and His handmaid. Their family is a spiritual family. They are always happy with God and His devotees. They know that God alone is their own, from everlasting to everlasting. They are like the Pandava brothers; they do not forget God in happiness or in sorrow." - Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
"Oh, ancient god, whatever your name, whispered Ahmed. Help this lost son of a good father, this evil boy who meant no harm but slept in school, ran errands slowly, did not pray from his heart, ignored his mother, and did not hold his family in great esteem. For all this I know I must suffer. But here in the midst of silence, at the desert's heart, where even the wind knows not my name? Must I die so young? Am I to be forgotten without having been?" - Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
"Rarely do members of the same family grow up under the same roof." - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
"The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof." - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
"If family religion were duly attended to and properly discharged, I think the preaching of the Word would not be the common instrument of conversion." - Richard Baxter
"Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator" - Richard Powers
"He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit." - Richard Wright, fully Richard Nathaniel Wright
"I have the greatest affection for them [negroes] but I know they're not going to make it for 500 years. They aren't. You know it, too. The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they're dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don't live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
"We're going to [put] more of these little Negro bastards on the welfare rolls at $2,400 a family " - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
"I can't quite define my aversion to asking questions of strangers. From snatches of family battles which I have heard drifting up from railway stations and street corners, I gather that there are a great many men who share my dislike for it, as well as an equal number of women who ... believe it to be the solution to most of this world's problems." - Robert Benchley, fully Robert Charles Benchley
"The naturalistic literature of this country has reached such a state that no family of characters is considered true to life which does not include at least two hypochondriacs, one sadist, and one old man who spills food down the front of his vest." - Robert Benchley, fully Robert Charles Benchley
"You might think that after thousands of years of coming up too soon and getting frozen, the crocus family would have had a little sense knocked into it." - Robert Benchley, fully Robert Charles Benchley
"One's family is the most important thing in life. I look at it this way: One of these days I'll be over in a hospital somewhere with four walls around me. And the only people who'll be with me will be my family." - Robert Byrd, fully Robert Carlyle Byrd
"My creed: To love justice, to long for the right, to love mercy, to pity the suffering, to assist the weak, to forget wrongs and remember benefits, to love the truth, to be sincere, to utter honest words, to love liberty, to wage relentless war against slavery in all its forms, to love family and friend, to make a happy home, to love the beautiful in art, in nature, to cultivate the mind, to be familiar with the mighty thoughts that genius has expressed, the noble deeds of all the world; to cultivate courage and cheerfulness, to make others happy, to fill life with the splendor of generous acts, the warmth of loving words; to discard error, to destroy prejudice, to receive new truths with gladness, to cultivate hope, to see the calm beyond the storm, the dawn beyond the night, to do the best that can be done and then be resigned. This is the religion of reason, the creed of science. This satisfies the brain and the heart." - Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
"There is in every human heart some not completely barren part, where seeds of truth and love might grow, and flowers of generous virtue flow; to plant, to watch, to water there, this be our duty, be our care." - John Bowring, fully Sir John Bowring
"As government expands, liberty contracts." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
"I've always believed that a lot of the trouble in the world would disappear if we were talking to each other instead of about each other." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
"The federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
"Love starts when we push aside our ego and make room for someone else." - Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner
"In America nothing dies easier than tradition." - Russell Baker. fully Russell Wayne Baker
"Every age has its temptations, its weaknesses, its dangers. Ours is in the line of the snobbish and the sordid." - Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes
"There is no possible source of evil except good." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
"Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." - Saint Paul, aka The Apostle Paul, Paul the Apostle or Saul of Tarsus NULL
"What is so bitter and vehement as the torment of love? I mean, those who have become conscious that they have sinned against love suffer greater torment from this than from any fear of punishment. For the sorrow caused in the heart by sin against love is more poignant than any torment." - Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL
"I implore God to give you His Spirit, to perfect your vocation and to pour out His blessings on all the Company, so that it may fulfill His holy will in this world with such fidelity that it may one day deserve to enjoy His glory in the next." - Saint Vincent de Paul