American Family Quotes

#1. When people see Barack Obama, they don't necessarily see an African-American president. They see someone who is a child of immigrants. They see someone whose family has worked hard and struggled. And they see many similarities between themselves and Barack Obama.

Grace Meng

#2. The American people know what's necessary to get this economy moving again. It's fiscal discipline in Washington, D.C. and across-the-board tax relief for working families, small businesses and family farms.

Mike Pence

#3. The American family is failing in its job of turning out stable human beings ... It is failing because Americans do not dare to cultivate in themselves those characteristics which would make family life creative and rewarding. To do so, would ruin them financially.

Margaret Halsey

#4. But let me perfectly clear, because I know you'll hear the same old claims that rolling back these tax breaks means a massive tax increase on the American people: if your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.

Barack Obama

#5. At a time when the American family is threatened as never before, redefining it away from the union of one man and one woman only promises to weaken it as a child-rearing, values-conveying institution.

Marco Rubio

#6. I can't think of a more mediocre human talent than George Bush. He obviously is a product of family advantage, and he's the worst American President of all time.

Randall Robinson

#7. Why, on my mother's birthday, am I thinking about 'Father Knows Best?' At our house, mother knew best at least as often as father did, but then the title of the old sitcom, a homogenized portrait of American family life, was meant to be slightly sardonic.

Tom Shales

#8. Here we go again. Pandering to the .3 percent of the American population that consider themselves transgender. Now I get to explain this to my 8-year-old, if I just wanted to watch a nice family show with some nice music.

Gretchen Carlson

#9. I wanted to show that an African-American artist could make it in this country on a national level in the graphic arts. I want to be a strong role model for my family and for other African Americans.

Jerry Pinkney

#10. It is that fundamental belief, it is that fundamental belief, I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

Barack Obama

#11. An average American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain.

Thomas A. Edison

#12. I don't think there is such a definition of a perfect family, but I do think that our marriages are in crisis. Our families are in crisis. And I think the African-American family is at one of the worst stages it's been at in a very long time in this country. Fatherlessness is rampant.

Leah Ward Sears

#13. Rainbow Cloud strode forward like a hunting cat with the same strength of height and broad shoulders, the same rolling gait as First Light's father. They were indeed the same man, split in two at birth, so the family might be rewarded by twice the skill in hunting each brother possessed.

P.J. Parker

#14. The American Dream has always focused on building a better life for yourself and your family, striving for success, and even fleeing from religious prosecution.

Marc Veasey

#15. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt has been described as founder of the Bull Moose Party, the man who led his troops up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War, a big game hunter, family man, civic servant and a host of other things.

Zig Ziglar

#16. You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren't dying. They're merging into big conglomerates.

Erma Bombeck

#17. If we allow our American mindset of consumption to spill into our understanding of what a Christian is, we are in danger of living irrespective of world family.

Holly Sprink

#18. Except for naval and air exercises, our military should be stationed on American soil, where service men and women can lead normal lives in close proximity to family and friends.

Camille Paglia

#19. Welfare has destroyed the African-American family by telling young black women that husbands and fathers are unnecessary and obsolete. ... We have incentivized fornication rather than marriage, and it's no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of people who rut like rabbits.

Bryan Fischer

#20. It is an honor to open in New York City and to have the opportunity to serve and share our family's version of American Chinese food and hospitality. New York City deeply influenced my passion for food and service, and it feels good to be back.

Andrew Cherng

#21. I think that the American people are curious about who a candidate is, what their background is, who their family is, what their faith experience has been, their education, their work experience. All of those are factors that voters look at because they want to take a measure of the individual.

Michele Bachmann

#22. I am an eighth Chinese, and I come from a large Chinese-American family in Los Angeles.

Lisa See

#23. Never Let anyone tell you that you can't; show them that you can.

Gloria Mallette

#24. The other Clans will soon arrive. The greatest times of our family are before us. And so are the darkest.

P.J. Parker

#25. [The Bytyqi Brothers were] American citizens and we have been seeking answers to why no one's been held accountable for these atrocities. [Family members] expect our government to do everything we can.

Ben Cardin

#26. If you're the oldest in a large family, you tend to do everything yourself, particularly if you are the first American. You begin a habit or pattern that makes it easy to reject other help.

Pete Hamill

#27. Now we have black and white elected officials working together. Today, we have gone beyond just passing laws. Now we have to create a sense that we are one community, one family. Really, we are the American family.

John Lewis

#28. I've always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they're relations, they have a place in the American family. They're the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They're the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.

E.L. Doctorow

#29. No matter how American I become, I'm considered part of the Chinese community by my own family.

Anchee Min

#30. Our family's fortune is growing faster than ever. We're a part of a small number of American families that own most of the country's wealth. But having so much in the hands of so few can't be good for America.

Jamie Johnson

#31. We're going to keep trying to strengthen the American family. To make them more like The Waltons and less like The Simpsons.

George H. W. Bush

#32. The death tax punishes the American dream - making it virtually impossible for the average American family to build wealth across generations.

Kit Bond

#33. With 'Arrested Development,' we tried showing the deep disdain that connects a family. We wanted to hold up a mirror to American society. And, just as predicted, America looked away.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#34. That is the heart and soul of the American dream, homeownership, the idea of being able to buy a house and start to build your family.

Wendell Pierce

#35. I didn't watch a lot of American television growing up. I just liked to read a lot and watch movies - movies, movies, and more movies. My family used to make fun of me because I'd like every movie I saw.

Joss Whedon

#36. Nothing in our daily life offers more of the comfort of continuity, the generational connection of belonging to a vast and complicated American family, the powerful sense of home, the freedom from time's constraints, and the great gift of accumulated memory than does our National Pastime.

Ken Burns

#37. Nobody wants to have in their CV in the upper echelons of the American economic family that they nationalised major banks.

Paul Keating

#38. I am proudly a liberal. I am also patriotic, reasonable, pro-American, and stand for family values.

Roger Ebert

#39. It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuine: First and most important, my family; also my friends, my staff, my Cabinet, Monica Lewinsky and her family, and the American people. I have asked all for their forgiveness.

William J. Clinton

#40. My family moved - first to Washington, D.C., and then, in the spring of 1975, to Lebanon, where my father worked as a diplomat at the American embassy. My parents were enthusiastic about the move, so my older brother and I felt like we were off to some place kind of cool.

Greg Kinnear

#41. The traditional American family has always been the foundation for success in America.

Bill O'Reilly

#42. When I began to think about the head of the family, the storyteller, the rise of television which became the new storyteller, the break-up of the American family as an idea and then Avalon came.

Barry Levinson

#43. When I was a kid I got so much help from the Church. When I was a kid, our family was so poor they couldn't afford me to go to school, so there was an American family that send the money to the church to support my school fees.

John Woo

#44. We need to end permanently the tax that punishes American values of savings and investment and of building small businesses and family farms and ranches.

Kit Bond

#45. like many families, everyone wandered around like children in a funhouse - they could hardly see one another around the corners, and what they could see was completely distorted.

James Hannaham

#46. My family was all born in Sicily and I'm Italian-American. They're the real thing. They're authentic Italians, and honestly they're the most open-minded, nicest people in the world and nothing can really offend them. That's the way I think true Sicilians are.

Vinny Guadagnino

#47. We're African-American and we work together as a family, so people assume we're like the Jacksons. But I didn't have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.

Beyonce Knowles

#48. Yes, it is long past time we get serious about tackling the nation's ever-growing deficits. But the average American family drawn into serious debt cannot just threaten to stiff its creditors. It must cut its spending in the future, but also take responsibility for the debt incurred in the past.

Peter Welch

#49. It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family.

Christopher Lasch

#50. You know this old style of American family series? Well, I sit there and cry.

Graham Kennedy

#51. Capitalism has improved the standard of living of the wage earners to an unprecedented extent. The average American family enjoys today amenities of which, only a hundred years ago, not even the richest nabobs dreamed.

Ludwig Von Mises

#52. American consumers benefit from disparity & exploitation. I benefit from disparity & exploitation & so does my family. there is no way to be a consumer in this country without causing pain" --casey gray - author of Discount - & my New HERO

Casey Gray

#53. By definition, though, we are family. And in difficult times-- times like these-- despite our differences, we stand together as family.

Stephen King

#54. No doubt, the White House thinks the American people know Obama's story. But since the Inauguration, we've seen only the president's present: his perfect family, his Ivy League elegance, his effortless mastery of complex issues. We never see him sweat. And we forget that he ever had to struggle.

Dee Dee Myers

#55. I grew up with the Blind Boys' music. My family owns a music store in Claremont, California, called The Claremont Folk Music Center. I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.

Ben Harper

#56. My mother is a first generation American. Her father worked in the Roebling Steel Mill in Trenton, New Jersey.And yet my mother became the first person in her family to get a college degree.

Samuel Alito

#57. My Norwegian family says, 'You're the most grounded American we've ever met.'

Celeste Holm

#58. My own family basically did what the American justice system does: I was given more lenient treatment than the black kids.

Trevor Noah

#59. 'Job Killer.' Those are the two words you are most likely to hear uttered by most American CEOs when confronted with proposals to enact family-friendly work policies.

Madeleine M. Kunin

#60. My granddad was an evangelist, and my grandma, she was as tough as nails. She watched 'American Bandstand' every day when she was in her 80s, 90s. She loved rock music. I never had anyone in my family that was anti-rock n' roll.

Alice Cooper

#61. As I was growing up, you know, I'm a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother's family had fled the czars of Russia before that.

Eugene Jarecki

#62. Every American should have a say in the memorials we choose to build in our nation. Family members have a special responsibility.

Susan Eisenhower

#63. Von Pein's family was a little known, but highly influential entity within American banking circles. Banking Royalty, some called it. His grandfather had been one of the chief orchestrators of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which effectively took ownership of the bank from the American people.

James Morcan

#64. The President also talked at length about how well the American economy is doing. Apparently, he got his information on this topic from his millionaire supporters. For the average working family, these are trying economic times.

Jose Serrano

#65. I love America, and I love to say that my family is American.

James Spithill

#66. My family are from Liverpool, so I have some twang there - I have a Midlands accent, and I was raised about an hour north of London, so my voice is a mess. Although, to American ears, it sounds like the crisp language of a queen's butler.

John Oliver

#67. We live in a complicated society, Bromley - one that is changing and which does indeed need to change. But do you not think any change must begin within our own family gathering?

P.J. Parker

#68. I went to a Catholic University and there's something about being a Catholic-American. You know, St. Patrick's Day is, I'm Irish-Catholic. There's alcoholism in my family. It's like I've got to be Catholic, right?

Jim Gaffigan

#69. So much of great American drama has been about a certain kind of dysfunctional family, and maybe my interests are in the kind of strange dysfunction that exists even among deeply functional families.

Stephen Karam

#70. In its effect on family relationships, in its facilitation of parental withdrawal from an active role in the socialization of their children, and in its replacement of family rituals and special events, television has played an important role in the disintegration of the American family.

Marie Winn

#71. There's just so much love that goes into home cooking, and I think it will really help the American family overall. I'm hoping to maybe get a cookbook out one day because I've got some great family recipes.

Ming-Na Wen

#72. Every job is important because each one represents an American's livelihood and ability to raise a family. Yet spending our time building walls around America will do nothing to help us compete for the millions of new jobs being created.

Carly Fiorina

#73. My last girlfriend was Greek," said the Iceman. "The shit her family ate. You would not believe. Like rice wrapped in leaves. Shit like that.

Neil Gaiman

#74. So many American plays are about family. When you're in the first part of your life, you write about family a lot. I find with my absurdist plays that I was actually writing about my family, but so disguised I didn't realize it myself.

Christopher Durang

#75. And the American people are the greatest people in the world. What makes America the greatest nation in the world is the heart of the American people: hardworking, innovative, risk-taking, God- loving, family-oriented American people.

Mitt Romney

#76. In deference to American traditions, my family put our oven to rare use at Thanksgiving during my childhood, with odd roast-turkey experiments involving sticky-rice stuffing or newfangled basting techniques that we read about in magazines.

Jennifer Lee

#77. My Native American heritage was not embraced by our family, and we grew up African-American, so I didn't have a lot of access or history to that line of my family.

Tamara Tunie

#78. Instead of plotting the demise of the traditional family, as some politicians and religious leaders would have you believe, gay people mow their lawns and watch 'American Idol' and video their children's concerts and have the same hopes and dreams that their straight counterparts do.

Jodi Picoult

#79. According to the Institute for International Economics, trade barriers cost American consumers $80 billion a year or more than $1,200 per family.

Walter E. Williams

#80. To my way of thinking, the American family started to decline when parents began to communicate with their children.

Erma Bombeck

#81. The Hispanic community understands the American Dream and have not forgotten what they were promised - that in the U.S., a free market system, allows us all to succeed economically, achieve stability and security for your family and leave your children better off than yourselves.

Marco Rubio

#82. When I cook for my family on Christmas, I make feijoada, a South American dish of roasted and smoked meats like ham, pork, beef, lamb, and bacon - all served with black beans and rice. It's festive but different.

Maya Angelou

#83. I now have two different audiences. There's the one that has been watching my action films for 20 years, and the American family audience. American jokes, less fighting.

Jackie Chan

#84. I'm the only one in my family with an American accent.

Lola Kirke

#85. I think what we took away from first hearing about the punk stuff in England and then the early American punk stuff was a sense of self-definition and also sort of playing music for music's sake and being part of a family for family's sake.

Ian MacKaye

#86. My family has schoolteachers and librarians, and I think people who teach are probably some of our greatest American heroes. Certainly, underpaid and unsung.

Nick Offerman

#87. The breakdown of the American family's having a disastrous impact on our economy.

Marco Rubio

#88. I advise you to be suspicious of any black American whose family does not claim a blood connection to Native Americans. That's a clear sign of a racial infiltrator who has not done enough research.

Baratunde R. Thurston

#89. As a society, we've evolved, and we've recognized that the American family structure has undergone enormous changes. Divorce is all around us, and who among us doesn't know someone who is divorced or has been impacted by divorce. It's not as scandalous as it was.

Laura Wasser

#90. I've always regarded it as a test of character to dislike the Kennedys. I don't really respect anyone who falls for Camelot.

Christopher Hitchens

#91. We must develop a federal program of public works, retraining, and jobs for all - so that none, white or black, will have cause to feel threatened
... There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum and livable income for every American family.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#92. I want people to hear what I think about these foundational American values of personal responsibility, resilience, family and faith, there are things that people can learn from somebody who leads a state like Ohio which is, frankly, a microcosm of the country.

John Kasich

#93. The failure of the family court system in America is a national scandal. Sadly, the mainstream media, whether out of ignorance or fear, refuses to cover it. That media silence means that every day, these American human rights abuses continue to occur.

Garland Waller

#94. Any writer who presents an American home today where the television is not the head of the family is living in a fantasy world.

Kurt Vonnegut

#95. The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched.

Henry Louis Gates

#96. My father is a Japanese-American and my mother is a Caucasian. So obviously, New Year's Day is big for our family, you know, oshogatsu. We had obon festivals every year. All those things.

Scott Fujita

#97. it ain't as hard as picking cotton

Wynton Marsalis

#98. I'm not a chef. I haven't created any new technique in the kitchen. I'm not a rocket scientist. I think I'm good at writing accessible, fun, and affordable meals for the average American family. That's what I think I'm good at.

Rachael Ray

#99. I don't think American family sitcoms are mean. I guess I really love 'Arrested Development.' I guess they are quite mean in that, but that is also a very silly, surreal, absurd show as well, and it has got a heart as well.

Simon Bird

#100. Public service and respect for ideas is a recurrent theme in both the American and Australian sides of my family.

Bill Drayton