Short Views

After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits become. Marcel Proust

All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own fashion. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

On Tuesday, March 31, he and I dined at General Paoli's. A question was started, whether the state of marriage was natural to man. Johnson. "Sir, it is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together." The General said, that in a state of nature a man and woman uniting together would form a strong and constant affection, by the mutual pleasure each would receive; and that the same causes of dissension would not arise between them, as occur between husband and wife In a civilized state. Johnson. "Sir, they would have dissensions enough, though of another kind. One would choose to go a hunting in this wood, the other in that; one would choose to go a fishing in this lake, the other in that; or, perhaps, one would choose to go a hunting, when the other would choose to go a fishing; and so they would part. Besides, Sir, a savage man and a savage woman meet by chance; and when the man sees another woman that pleases him better, he will leave the first." James Boswell

Marriage is the best of human statuses and the worst, and it will continue to be. And that is why, though its future in some form or other is as assured as anything can be, this future is as equivocal as its past. The demands that men and women make on marriage will never be fully met; they cannot be. Jessie Bernard

A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind; and Mr. Locke very judiciously observes, that "if the mind be curbed and humbled too much in children, if their spirits be abased and broken much by too strict an hand over them, they lose all their vigour and industry." This strict hand may in some degree account for the weakness of women; for girls, from various causes, are more kept down by their parents, in every sense of the word, than boys. The duty expected from them is, like all the duties arbitrarily imposed on women, more from a sense of propriety, more out of respect for decorum, than reason; and thus taught slavishly to submit to their parents, they are prepared for the slavery of marriage. I may be told that a number of women are not slaves in the marriage state. True, but they then become tyrants; for it is not rational freedom, but a lawless kind of power resembling the authority exercised by the favourites of absolute monarchs, which they obtain by debasing means. Mary Wollstonecraft

Twenty years from now humanity will be in the midst of one of its most painful and difficult social changes. This century will be the last in which families of more than two children can be tolerated; everyone knows this, and the only argument is over the means of achieving the goal. But there is another aspect of the matter which is seldom given much serious consideration.

The two-child family is not large enough to generate the interactions that develop a good personality; this is why single children are often monsters. Probably the optimum number of siblings is four or five—twice the permissible quota. This means that, somehow, several families must be psychologically fused together for the health of the child, and of society. Working out ways of doing this will raise the blood pressure of a whole generation of lawyers and moralists. Arthur C. Clarke

Nobody who has not been in the interior of a family can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be. Jane Austen, Emma

& LEARN & THINK