Family × Identity

Family and Identity

Browse 25 quotations catalogued under family with "identity" in the text or topic label.

25 quotes

This collection contains 25 quotations filed under Family with "identity" in the quote text or topic label. These keyword matches offer a starting point for exploring Family and Identity; they do not by themselves establish a shared argument or a historical connection between the authors.

The authors represented include Milan Kundera, Marshall McLuhan, Alex Salmond, Ellen Willis, and others. Read each quotation in its own context rather than assuming that these authors share a position.

One matching quotation reads: "The eye... the point where a person's identity is concentrated." The full quotation appears below.

Another matching quotation reads: "The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity." Compare the wording and surrounding context to decide how each passage relates to your question.

Use the quotation links to explore individual entries and the author links to visit their profiles on QuoteLineage. For broader reading beyond these keyword matches, explore all Family quotes or the concept page for Identity.

25 Quotes on Family and Identity

"The eye... the point where a person's identity is concentrated."

— Milan Kundera

"The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity."

— Marshall McLuhan

"I believe that here we are in full agreement on the tremendous role that faith schools can play in Scottish society. And they do so by endowing our children with a strong moral foundation. A positive and distinctive identity. A keen sense of personal responsibility and the common good. A strong commitment to charity - the true meaning of which is helping others."

— Alex Salmond

"In its original literal sense, "moral relativism" is simply moral complexity. That is, anyone who agrees that stealing a loaf of bread to feed one's children is not the moral equivalent of, say, shoplifting a dress for the fun of it, is a relativist of sorts. But in recent years, conservatives bent on reinstating an essentially religious vocabulary of absolute good and evil as the only legitimate framework for discussing social values have redefined "relative" as "arbitrary." That conflation has been reinforced by social theorists and advocates of identity politics who argue that there is no universal morality, only the value systems of particular cultures and power structures. From this perspective, the psychoanalytic – and by extension the psychotherapeutic – worldview is not relativist at all. Its values are honesty, self-knowledge, assumption of responsibility for the whole of what one does, freedom from inherited codes of family, church, tribe in favor of a universal humanism: in other words, the values of the Enlightenment, as revised and expanded by Freud's critique of scientific rationalism for ignoring the power of unconscious desire."

— Ellen Willis

"Philosophy is antipoetic. Philosophize about mankind and you brush aside individual uniqueness, which a poet cannot do without self-damage. Unless, for a start, he has a strong personal rhythm to vary his metrics, he is nothing. Poets mistrust philosophy. They know that once the heads are counted, each owner of a head loses his personal identity and becomes a number in some government scheme: if not as a slave or serf, at least as a party to the device of majority voting, which smothers personal views."

— Robert Graves

"Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology... They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff... When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions."

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

"As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent to me, her identity stronger. She was there, in the full vigour of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me, speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well."

— Willa Cather

"My family has never suggested to me that my identity or value to them depended on my station in life. I knew that they did not consider me any more or less valuable because I held some political office. They valued me as a husband and father, whether or not I won an election. Nor did they regard holding office on Capitol Hill or in the Missouri statehouse as the epitome of success. Quite the contrary, my family had endured numerous personal sacrifices because of my public positions."

— John Ashcroft

"It is essential that we stress the importance of to our children - to ensure that they grow up with a full appreciation of their rich heritage and what it means to be Scottish - confident and secure in their national identity and their place in the world."

— Alex Salmond

"The soft seduction of consumer global capitalism reduce the nations of the West to a rootless mass of Americanised consumers, without identity, without pride and without a future. Children identify with the grotesque and vulgar instead of noble heroes and beautiful princesses in castles. Teenagers ape the antics of degenerate pop-stars whose example leads hundreds of thousands into the living death of drug addiction, not to mention the tragedy of the image conscious girls who feel compelled to starve themselves to get "the look" and of course the spiralling number of abortions. Adults perform meaningless jobs, in conditions of mind-destroying boredom, to earn enough money to buy the latest needlessly created want to be pushed on television as the thing without which their neighbours will regard them as worthless failures. Old folk die unnoticed and lie rotting for weeks, even months, in barred and bolted flats in inhuman tower blocks, unofficial prisons which become tombs for those who no longer have any economic value. Do not be fooled by the glossy packaging of the consumer society. Where state socialism was a creed of terror and stagnation, capitalism is one of apathy and death."

— Nick Griffin

"A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity."

— Robert Louis Stevenson

"The Church has long recognised Scotland as a filia specialis, or 'special daughter'. And in turn Scotland has much to be grateful for. It is no exaggeration to say that the nation of Scotland owes its identity and its survival to the recognition and support of the Catholic Church."

— Alex Salmond

"Children ensnared me the moment I connected fatherhood with loss, but I am not sure I would have noticed that if I hadn't been immersed in this research. Encountering so much strange love, I fell into its bewitching patterns and saw how splendor can illuminate even the most abject vulnerabilities. I had witnessed and learned the terrifying joy of unbearable responsibility, recognized how it conquers everything else. Sometimes, I had thought the heroic parents in this book were fools, enslaving themselves to a life's journey with their alien children, trying to breed identity out of misery. I was startled to learn that my research had built me a plank, and that I was ready to join them on their ship."

— Andrew Solomon

"When you open a door for others to have an opinion on your relationship, it can be dangerous. Find what you need, not what everyone else wants for you. Women have been taught that in order to have a place in the world, an identity, they must marry and have children. If that's the life you truly want, great. But for many women, marriage is only about needing the world to know that someone desires them enough to say, "Here's a contract to prove that I love you and will commit to you for the rest of my life." For these women, no contract equals no validation — and, thus, no reason for existing."

— Salma Hayek

"'The country will absorb you and you will cease to be Victor Crabbe. You will less and less find it possible to do the work for which you were sent here. You will lose function and identity. You will be swallowed up and become another kind of eccentric. You may become a Muslim. You may forget your English, or at least lose your English accent. You may end in a kampong, no longer a foreigner, an old brownish man with many wives and children, one of the elders whom the young will be encouraged to consult on matters of the heart. You will be ruined.'"

— Anthony Burgess

"Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible."

— Judith Butler

"If my experiences define me, then that’s who I am. Or if I’ve chosen the wrong thing, if I’ve gone down this path that I shouldn’t have gone down—if my experiences define me, then that’s who I am. But I can be defined by something more, by my origin, by the fact that I’ve been made on purpose by a God who loves me, and am defined by my end, which is that I am made to live with that God forever and that I’ve been created on purpose. If I’m a Christian, I’ve been recreated as a son or daughter of God himself, and so even if my experience or even my story has a lot of brokenness in it—and I think a lot of ours do—and even if my experience or my story has a lot of pain or attraction to whatever, it doesn’t matter. My identity is not that. And I can rise above that. I can live it. It’s part of my story, but that’s not the end of my story."

— Mike Schmitz

"The intimate fusion of races is the identity of our nation, its personality."

— Jules_Michelet

"At Oxford, the young Haldane was frequently asked whether he was related to the "famous John Scott Haldane", his father, and he would answer "That depends on whether you consider identity to be a relationship."

— J. B. S. Haldane

"‘Equating the Muslim personal law, in its present local state, to the Quran and Hadith, describing it as a wholly revealed or inspired law, and declaring that not an iota of the existing principles can be changed, only exposes the ignorance of Islamic values, Islamic religion and Islamic jurisprudence. Attempting to distort facts about the recent reform of personal law in the Muslim countries cannot do any good. Throwing mud on those who have progressive tendencies and talk of reform of the Muslim personal law, or making contemptuous remarks about their sincerity and wisdom, cannot help either. Instead of trying to conceal the realities, the Muslims must face them. If after having been practised in India in an uncontrolled way for tens of centuries, the Muslim personal law is found being misused and misapplied and consequently lagging behind the social progress in the country, there is nothing in it to be ashamed of. Instead of being stubborn or obstinate about it, the situation has to be duly appreciated, and made good... It is no sensible argument that any reform of the Muslim personal law would amount to interference in religious freedom and affect the cultural identity of Muslims. If the Muslim personal law is codified and reformed—men are restrained from pronouncing a divorce arbitrarily, women’s rights in family life are enlarged, and orphaned grandchildren of a deceased Muslim are allowed to share the latter’s heritage along with other heirs—how is the religious freedom or cultural identity of Muslims going to be affected?... It is irrelevant for cultural identity whether a Muslim can torture his first wife by contracting a bigamous marriage against her wishes and without necessity, or a wife can tease her husband throughout his life by exploiting his inability to pay dower. These and the other drawbacks in the existing personal law cannot be considered essential ingredients of the Muslim culture...’"

— Tahir Mahmood

"Rimbaud gave up poetry when it failed to change the world. Orwell at the end must have had his doubts about language, too, or he wouldn't have dreamed up Newspeak. Neither is remembered for his hard work at identity-making. Instead, the poet's name is worn by freaks, geeks and videodrones as if it were a logo on a T-shirt or a jet-propelled sneaker, and the novelist is propped up on a horse like the dead El Cid to frighten the Moorish hordes. They have both been turned into the standard-issue celebrity flacks of this empty, buzzing time, selling something other than themselves, unattached to honor, glory, kingship, sainthood or genius. They join a talk-show parade of the power-mad, the filthy rich and the serial killers, the softboiled fifteen-minute Warhol eggs, the rock musicians addled on cobra venom, the war criminals whose mothers never loved them and the starlets babbling on about their substance abuse, their child molestations, their anorexia and their liposuction. "I have never belonged to this race," said Rimbaud."

— John Leonard (critic)

"There is a price to be paid even for fellow-traveling with a racial identity as politicized and demanding as today's black identity. This identity wants to take over a greater proportion of the self than other racial identities do. It wants to have its collective truth—its defining ideas of grievance and protest—become personal truth.... These are the identity pressures that Barack Obama lives within. He is vulnerable to them because he has hungered for a transparent black identity much of his life. He needs to 'be black.' And this hunger—no matter how understandable it may be—means that he is not in a position to reject the political liberalism inherent in his racial identity. For Obama liberalism is blackness."

— Shelby Steele

"My father acted at all times and in all aspects of his life from his identity as an artist. He had no other. He cooked with the extravagant generosity and adventurousness of an artist. He parented as an artist -- his children should not wear 'pretty' colors, but rather 'gutsy' colors.. .While he could be generous, spontaneous, playful and hospitable, the sense of 'I am' was all about 'I am an artist.' There was little room to identify himself in terms of other people. And so he felt lonesome."

— David Smith

"My indulgent mum, a single mum of an only son, would let me skip games, pandering to my teary complaints as a former fat child herself. This, I suppose, is where a father figure would come in handy, a loving, authoritative strong male to affectionately shove you into adversity. As it was, notes were written and physical activity strenuously avoided, until I discovered that some exercise had an orgasm at the end of it. This syndrome of “fatherless” boys is a much-cited problem that military organizations effectively resolve: Personal identity put aside, a male ideal upon which to focus is provided and pursued."

— Russell Brand

"I want those names to be their destiny, for my daughter to be honest and my son to be expansive. I try to be like a forest, revitalizing and constantly growing. … being called Forest helped me find my identity."

— Forest Whitaker

Key thinkers on this theme

Milan Kundera· Literature Marshall McLuhan· Philosophy Alex Salmond· Politics Ellen Willis· Literature Robert Graves· Literature

Related ideas in Family

All Family quotes Explore the idea of Identity