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Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.
--
"The Limits of Mother Love", in The New York Times Book Review, March 31, 1985

 

Margaret Drabble

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Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other re- sources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who, growing up in the society, learn to cope, as children born to untouchables in India acquire the skills and attitudes necessary for survival in the miserable roles they are destined to fill.

 

Jeane Kirkpatrick

 

The average age at which a man marries is thirty years; the average age at which his passions, his most violent desires for genesial delight are developed, is twenty years.  Now during the ten fairest years of his life, during the green season in which his beauty, his youth and his wit make him more dangerous to husbands than at any other epoch of his life, his finds himself without any means of satisfying legitimately that irresistible craving for love which burns in his whole nature.  During this time, representing the sixth part of human life, we are obliged to admit that the sixth part or less of our total male population and the sixth part which is the most vigorous is placed in a position which is perpetually exhausting for them, and dangerous for society.
“Why don’t they get married?” cries a religious woman.
?But what father of good sense would wish his son to be married at twenty years of age?
?Is not the danger of these precocious unions apparent at all?  It would seem as if marriage was a state very much at variance with natural habitude, seeing that it requires a special ripeness of judgment in those who conform to it.  All the world knows what Rousseau said:  “There must always be a period of libertinage in life either in one state or another.  It is an evil leaven which sooner or later ferments.”
?Now what mother of a family is there who would expose her daughter to the risk of this fermentation when it has not yet taken place?

 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

 

There will be many choices before you, some of which you’ll welcome and celebrate, and then there will be some over which you will anguish. Some choices will choose you. How you face these choices, these turns in the road, with what kind of attitude, more than the choices themselves, is what will define the context of your life.

 

Dana Reeve

 

Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.

 

Harry Emerson Fosdick

 

Nothing threatens a father’s involvement in the family more than his obligation to be the family’s financial womb, creating The Father’s ‘Catch-22’ : loving the family by being away from the family. It is the irony of traditional fatherhood: being a father by not being a father.

 

Warren Farrell