"For rarely are sons similar to their fathers: most are worse, and a few are better than their fathers."
~Homer

"It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was."
~Anne Sexton

"I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week."
~Mario Cuomo, former governor of N.Y.

"Jarrell was not so much a father... as an affectionate encyclopedia."
~Mary Jarrell

"It's only when you grow up, and step back from him, or leave him for your own career and your own home—it's only then that you can measure his greatness and fully appreciate it. Pride reinforces love."
~Margaret Truman

"When a child, my dreams rode on your wishes, I was your son, high on your horse, My mind a top whipped by the lashes Of your rhetoric, windy of course."
~Sir Stephen Spender

"You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's."
~Robert Frost

"I just owe almost everything to my father [and] it's passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election."
~Margaret Thatcher

"People see Archie Bunker everywhere. Particularly girls; poor girls, rich girls, all kinds of girls are always coming up to me and telling me that Archie is just like their dad."
~Carroll O'Connor

"A king, realizing his incompetence, can either delegate or abdicate his duties. A father can do neither. If only sons could see the paradox, they would understand the dilemma."
~Marlene Dietrich

"My father died many years ago, and yet when something special happens to me, I talk to him secretly not really knowing whether he hears, but it makes me feel better to half believe it."
~Natasha Josefowitz