They believed that every man should know how to read and how to write, and should find out all that his capacity allowed him to comprehend. That is the glory of the Puritan fathers.
The one phrase you can use is that success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan.
Anyone who reads my work will see that there are often difficult relationships between fathers and sons.
Two hundred years ago, our Founding Fathers gave us a democracy. It was based upon the simple, yet noble, idea that government derives its validity from the consent of the governed.
We’re a much more touchy-feely, hands-on generation than our fathers but juggling work, family and social life and trying to be romantic and keep yourself fit is really hard. I want to be the perfect dad but you can’t be the perfect dad unless you compromise elsewhere.
I was a good surfer because we grew up a block from the water, and my father took us to the ocean the way other fathers take their kids to the park.
Now our founding fathers had the wisdom to know that social acceptance and popularity were fleeing, and that this country’s principles needed to be rooted in strengths greater than the passions and the emotions of the times.
I think the founding fathers believed religion shouldn’t interact directly with government.
Our Founding Fathers who created this republic did not believe in democracy. When did we come to worship this idol?
Mothers and fathers do really crazy things with the best of intentions.
Blacks as a group will never be equal while they have this situation going on, where the vast majority of children do not have fathers in the home married to their mother, involved in their lives, investing in them, investing in the next generation.
I do believe that it was through divine providence that the Founding Fathers drafted a document that created a government that didn’t trust each other – hence the separation of powers. And then, to close the deal, the Bill of Rights was added to continue to protect individual rights and freedoms.
My old man was a musician – that’s what he did for a living. And like most fathers, occasionally he’d let me visit where he worked. So I started going to his recording studio, and I really dug it.
We already have two branches of federal government that factor political considerations into their decision-making, and our Founding Fathers determined long ago that we don’t need a third.
We now use the word ‘nature’ very much as our fathers used the word ‘God.’
Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.
I had a wonderful father, and I couldn’t bear that television virtually ignored black fathers.
Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.
I think, in all fields, there’s this motherhood pay penalty where, the second you become a mother – and this is true whether you give birth or adopt – you’re perceived to not be as committed to your job. Whereas men are perceived as breadwinners who now need more money and promotions because they’re fathers.
Barrow, where I live, is a traditional town that still has some heavy industry, but the jobs are more sedentary than in our fathers’ day.
Some men don’t want to be responsible fathers. It’s easier to say ‘Let’s just turn the kids over to the state.’ Women end up bearing the entire load, raising kids alone without a husband to share the parenting.
The Founding Fathers’ instructions were clear: The right to free speech includes bad speech; it means tolerance of ideas that many find obnoxious.
Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.
Are we a people who put politics over integrity? Or are we a country of voters and leaders, men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, colleagues, humans who care about treating each other with basic dignity?
To all those mothers and fathers who are struggling with teen-agers, I say, just be patient: even though it looks like you can’t do anything right for a number of years, parents become popular again when kids reach 20.
In Mexico, this idea that fathers go away is really deeply accepted because, for so long, so many men have had to leave to work in the United States.
Our fathers knew that the flag was never intended to protect any man who wanted to assail it.
There are lots of comic bosses and fathers in sitcoms, but the comic landlord remains rare.
Our Founding Fathers would be proud of all that America has achieved, and will continue to achieve, in the coming years.
One day, I found my dad’s dressing-gown in an old suitcase, and it transported me back to when I was five and thought he was a god or a superhero who could do anything. After that, I wrote my first positive book about fathers, about my dad.
By forbidding Jews to destroy their hair, the Bible warns them away from seeking the siren song of eternal youth. By encouraging Jews to grow beards, it reminds them that they will not be young forever, that they must prepare the ground for those who come after, just as their fathers did for them.
I’m torn about late parenting. I believe people should spend their twenties living and having fun and not having any regrets later. I also think people in their thirties generally make better parents but so many of my friends are having trouble – myself included – as fathers get older.
Divorce is something I think that children feel particularly hard and what’s sad about a lot of divorces, and certainly about my divorce, is that absent fathers who really want to play a part in their children’s lives but don’t live there, they have a pretty tough time.
It was such a struggle for me to make it off welfare. I was getting $630 a month for myself and my children with no support from their fathers. The rent was $600 a month, and if you got a job, they took it out of your welfare.
America, to me, is this enormous contrast between the heady idealism of founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson, who said, ‘All men are created equal,’ and the reality that he was himself a slave owner.
We grew up as kids watching those movies and we were exposed to themes of civil rights, unfairness, bigotry and fathers struggling against the kind of mob of the town, so you remember how you felt as a kid being taken seriously, that you are part of the human drama.
I’ve said it before – and I’ll say it again: it always seems to me that we come to know our same-sex parents through the bodily and the involuntary; through a kind of fossicking of our own physical strata. As we come to resemble our fathers, so we re-encounter the individual who reared us.
In my experience, it’s all wonderful with girls until about 16. Around that time, boys kind of calm down and start focusing their testosterone. Girls get a little challenging, especially for fathers.
So the news that divorced fathers are to be denied a legal right to a relationship with their children, in the long overdue review of family law published this week, fills me with horror and despair.
We have found fathers and grandfathers of children with autism are more likely to be engineers.
Research shows that children do better in school and are less likely to drop out when fathers are involved. Engaged parents can strengthen communities, mentor and tutor students, and demonstrate through their actions how much they value their children’s education.
Now you know my credo: Free-market capitalism is the best path to prosperity. And let me add to that from our Founding Fathers: Our Creator endowed us with the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In other words, freedom.
Franklin was the best known of the Founding Fathers. His death could not go without some sort of official notice. The House of Representatives, after listening to a brief tribute by James Madison, voted to wear badges of mourning for two months and then got on with business.
At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.
The Founding Fathers would be sorry to see that America had become so divided and factionalized.
There’s some jerks. There’s some big egos. There are a few that think they’re one of the Founding Fathers… in both parties.
I would say that one of the things that encouraged me so much when I became elected to the leadership was the letters I received from fathers of daughters, saying that, ‘My daughter can now do many more things because of what you did.’
Some people think it’s a reality that black fathers don’t take care of their children, but that’s not true.
Success has many fathers and failure is an orphan.
I think our Founding Fathers, they would disagree, but they weren’t disagreeable. They didn’t hate each other; they didn’t want to kill each other off.
I think the founding fathers, in their genius, created a system of three co-equal branches of government and a built-in system of checks and balances.
If I ran for president, the first thing I’d do is legalize everyone who’s been here paying taxes, working, paying taxes. Mothers and fathers of kids born in the U.S. should get a green card.
I think people have had the understanding for many years that whatever happens with the separation of parents, that the kids automatically go to the mother. The fathers don’t know their rights.
