America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.

If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.

The family endures because it offers the truth of mortality and immortality within the same group. The family endures because, better than the commune, kibbutz, or classroom, it seems to individualize and socialize its children, to make us feel at the same time unique and yet joined to all humanity, accepted as is and yet challenged to grow, loved unconditionally and yet propelled by greater expectations. Only in the family can so many extremes be reconciled and synthesized. Only in the family do we have a lifetime in which to do it.

If the family were a boat, it would be a canoe that makes no progress unless everyone paddles.

When the president of the United States flicks the switch to light up the Christmas tree on the White House lawn, that house ceases to be an American symbol; it becomes a Christian symbol.

If the Richter scale could measure human calamities, the loss of a child would register a ten.