Grandmother pointed out my brother Perry, my sister Sarah, and my sister Eliza, who stood in the group. I had never seen my brother nor my sisters before; and, though I had sometimes heard of them, and felt a curious interest in them, I really did not understand what they were to me, or I to them. We were brothers and sisters, but what of that? Why should they be attached to me, or I to them? Brothers and sisters were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brother and sisters, and knew they must mean something; but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning. Frederick Douglass
England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kowtowed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control – that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase. George Orwell, England Your England III
The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately. George Orwell, 1984
Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream. George W Bush
You’re working hard to put food on your family. George W Bush
We stand for institutions like marriage and family which are the foundations of our society. George W Bush
Saddam to child: Nothing is more important than family. Remember that. Saddam’s Tribe, Channel 4 2007
They want the average family in debt because at some point they are going to own the average family. Andrew Materi, Inconvenient Death of the Working Class
If Mr Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family. Quentin Crisp
Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family – in another city. George Burns
Rodrigo’s mistress: You are going to ensnare the whole of Europe with your progeny.
Rodrigo: What are families for? The Borgias: The Borgias in Love s1e5, Showtime 2011
We should thank God for all the blessings he has visited upon this our family. The Borgias s1e9: Nobody
We family. We are one. And we will only triumph as one. The Borgias s2e1: The Borgia Bull
I will not have this family torn apart. The Borgias s2e3: The Beautiful Deception, Rodrigo to Cesare
This change from big families down to two-child families is one of the most important things that have happened in the world. Professor Hans Rosling, Don’t Panic – The Truth About Population, BBC 2013
When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. Albert Camus
Hello, pretty boy. East of Eden 1955 starring James Dean & Julie Harris & Raymond Massey & Burl Ives & Richard Davalos & Jo van Fleet & Albert Dekker & Lois Smith & Timothy Carey & Harold Gordon & Barbara Baxley & Lonny Chapman et al, director Elia Kazan, woman on porch to Dean
If I could only do something, some little thing before I die, some little thing for progress or people maybe ... It might make up for all the years I’ve been lying fallow. ibid. Will
You have no repentance. You’re bad. Through and through bad. ibid. father to son
It’s awful not to be loved. It’s the worst thing in the world. ibid. Abra
Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents. Edmund Leach, BBC Reith Lecture 1967
Family! ... the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children. August Strindberg, The Son of a Servant, 1886
I would like to say though I am eternally grateful to the way she runs the home, looks after the children, looks after me – the home comes first really I think I’m right in saying. But I think for someone who is so busy all the time and so much in the public eye all the time to do all these things is a very difficult and a jolly neat trick. John le Mesurier to Hatty Jakes, Hatty’s This is Your Life
We Are Family.
I got all my sisters with me
We are family
Get up everybody and sing. Sister Sledge, 1979 song
My family has been an evolutionary mistake, Rab. Rab C Nesbitt: Heat, BBC 1999
I gave up being psychotic to spend more time with my family. Rab C Nesbitt s10e1: Broke, BBC 2011
I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion. Thomas Hardy, Heredity, 1917
I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance – that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die. Thomas Hardy, Heredity
The family – that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape. Dodie Smith, Dear Octopus, 1938
A little more than kin and less than kind. William Shakespeare, Hamlet I ii 65, Hamlet
No amount of law enforcement can solve a problem that goes back to the family. J Edgar Hoover
The worst families are those in which the members never really speak their minds to one another; they maintain an atmosphere of unreality, and everyone always lives in an atmosphere of suppressed ill-feeling. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution
The family is the basic unit of civilisation. Bill Cooper
Am I bovvered? Am I bovvered though. But I’m not bovvered though. Not bovvered though. Yeah, but am I bovvered? Are you talking about my family? Are you disrespecting my family? Are you disrespecting my family though? Are you ignoring my family? Are you ignoring my family though? But do I care? The Catherine Tate Show series I, Lauren to teacher
Are you disrespecting my family? Are you disrespecting my family though? You’re disrespecting my family. Are you calling my mum a prostitute? Are you calling my dad an alcoholic? But I ain’t even bovvered though. I ain’t bovvered though. The Catherine Tate Show s2e2, Lauren in cafeteria
In the early ’60s R D Laing set up a psychiatric practice in Harley Street in London. He offered radical new treatments for schizophrenia and quickly became a media celebrity. But his research into the causes of schizophrenia convinced him that a much wider range of human problems were caused by the pressure-cooker of family life. Laing decided to investigate how power and control were exercised within the world of normal families. And to do this he would use the techniques of Game Theory. Adam Curtis, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom: Fuck You Buddy, BBC 2007
Laing produced matrices which showed how just as in the Cold War, couples use their everyday actions as strategies to control and manipulate each other. His conclusion was stark. That what was normally seen as acts of kindness and love were in reality weapons used selfishly to exert power and control. From this research, Laing argued that the modern family, far from being a nurturing caring institution, was in reality a dark arena where people played continuous selfish games with each other. ibid.
Laing was radicalised by his findings. He believed that the struggle for power and control that he had uncovered in the family was inextricably linked to the struggle for power and control in the world. In a violent and corrupt society the family had become a machine for controlling people. Laing believed that this was an objective reality revealed by his scientific methods, above all by Game Theory. But these very methods contained within them bleak, paranoid assumptions about what human beings were really like, assumptions borne out of the hostilities of the Cold War. ibid.