„The family unit is the institution for the systematic production of mental illness.“

„There's a lot of mental illness in my family. So, if you catch schizophrenia, get four boxes of Mike and Ikes, a Bible, and a cage. Wait it out.“

—  Maria Bamford American actress and comedian 1970

Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome (2009)

„Liberals have shifted government into a position of being neutral between right and wrong. By concentrating power in government institutions, liberals chisel at the three pillars of society: the family unit, work ethic and faith. That's not good for America.“

—  James G. Watt United States Secretary of the Interior 1938

U.S. News and World Report (11 November 1985)
1980s

„The worst decay in the two-parent black family unit seems to have occurred not during slavery or as a result of slavery, but much later and for different reasons. Nor is there any evidence that as a consequence of slavery, blacks condoned illegitimacy as acceptable within the community. For the decline and fragility of the contemporary black family, the institution of slavery bears only a minor responsibility.“

—  Dinesh D'Souza Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author 1961

Source: Books, The End of Racism (1995), Ch. 3: An American Dilemma

„That portion of the earth's surface which is owned and inhabited by the people of the United States is well adapted to be the home of one national family, and it is not well adapted for two or more. Its vast extent and its variety of climate and productions are of advantage in this age for“

—  Abraham Lincoln 16th President of the United States 1809 - 1865

1860s, Second State of the Union address (1862)
Context: That portion of the earth's surface which is owned and inhabited by the people of the United States is well adapted to be the home of one national family, and it is not well adapted for two or more. Its vast extent and its variety of climate and productions are of advantage in this age for one people, whatever they might have been in former ages. Steam, telegraphs, and intelligence have brought these to be an advantageous combination for one united people.

„The family unit is man's noblest device for being bored.“

—  Mignon McLaughlin American journalist 1913 - 1983

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

„And me having kids, with my family history? My mom: mentally ill, shot and killed her last husband. My father: six ex-wives, four heart attacks. Both of my parents think alcohol is a food group.“

—  Christopher Titus actor, writer, podcaster 1964

The Fifth-Annual End-of-the-World Tour (2007)

„While politicians, clergy, creators of advertisements, and other worthies assert stoutly that the family is the foundation of society, the nuclear family, as an institution, is currently in grave trouble.“

—  Jane Jacobs, book Dark Age Ahead

Source: Dark Age Ahead (2004), Chapter Two, Families Rigged To Fail, p. 29

„The family unit is the incubator for human character; the state is the incubator for human dependency.“

—  Robert LeFevre American libertarian businessman 1911 - 1986

“The Family”, Pine Tree Press (Nov. 1963) p. 16.

„I passed an entire night in mental turmoil. Ultimately, I decided to take the plunge without even informing my family.“

—  Gulzarilal Nanda Prime Minister of India 1898 - 1998

India Today in: "Gulzarilal Nanda: Profile in austerity".
When he joined the Freedom Movement in 1921 after he met Mahatma Gandhi.

„When I consider the dead and their families, I cannot repress my mental agony.“

—  Hirohito Emperor of Japan from 1926 until 1989 1901 - 1989

Draft of undelivered speech (1948); published in the magazine Bungeishunju as quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald (11 June 2003) http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/10/1055220599574.html.

„The most important problem for freedom in a social context is thus family and marriage. When the woman marries, she is in fact enslaved. It is impossible to imagine another institution that enslaves like marriage. The most profound slaveries are established by the institution of marriage, slaveries that become more entrenched within the family.“

—  Abdullah Öcalan Founder of the PKK 1949

The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan (2017), Liberating Life: Women's Revolution

„Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can’t go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling, that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family’s mental health.“

—  Susanna Kaysen, book Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted (1994)

„[We may view the] economic organization as a system of prize relations. Seen in the large, free enterprise is an organization of production and distribution in which individuals or family units get their real income, their "living," by selling productive power for money to "business units" or "enterprises", and buying with the money income thus obtained the direct goods and services which they consume. This view, it will be remembered, ignores for the sake of simplicity the fact that an appreciable fraction of the productive power in use at any time is not really employed in satisfying current wants but to make provision for increased want-satisfaction in the future; it treats society as it would be, or would tend to become, with progress absent, or in a “static” state.“

—  Frank Knight American economist 1885 - 1972

Source: The Economic Organization, 1933., p.59-60; on the circular-flow of income and the circular-flow diagram.

„The prospect of a generation of American children being raised by women in homes without fathers is challenging for religious institutions whose central conception of deity is father, whose central conception of church is family, whose only conception of family is heterosexual.“

—  Richard Rodríguez American journalist and essayist 1944

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

„Her rank was higher than his, so high that no one in her family worked productively.“

—  Poul Anderson, book The Enemy Stars

Source: The Enemy Stars (1959), Chapter 1 (p. 4)

„Then what you find out is, what humans then do is, they create institutions - that's where institutionalism has a tie with Post Keynesianism - they create institutions which limit outcomes, which permit you to control outcomes as long as the society agrees to live by the rules of the game, which are the rules of the institutions. Now, if society rejects those rules, then society breaks down. What are the rules of the game? Well, money is a rule of the economic game. There are lots of human economic arrangements which don't use money. The family unit solves its economic problems, of what and how to produce within the family, without the use of money and without the use of markets. All the 24 hours of the day are either employed or leisure. There's no involuntary unemployment in the family. So you can solve the problem, but it's a different economy. We are talking about a money-using economy, and money is a human institution. You have to ask yourself, why was it created? Why is it so strange? You see, in Lerner, in neoclassical economics, money is a commodity. It's peanuts, with a very high elasticity of production. If people want more money, that creates just as many jobs as if people want goods. Then you have to say to yourself - and this was the question that Milton Friedman asked me in the debate - he says, 'That's nonsense; Davidson says money is not producible. Why are there historical cases where Indians used beads as money? Aren't beads easily producible?“

—  Paul Davidson Post Keynesian economist 1930

But not in the Indian economy. They didn't know how to produce them.
quoted in Conversations with Post Keynesians (1995) by J. E. King

„Families, authority, communities, and social ranks are the empirical-sociological concretization of the abstract philosophical-praxeological categories and concepts of property, production, exchange, and contract. Property and property relations do not exist apart from families and kinship relations.“

—  Hans-Hermann Hoppe, book Democracy: The God That Failed

Source: Democracy: The God That Failed (2001), P.203

„A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.“

—  Ogden Nash American poet 1902 - 1971

„we are not here just because we have nowhere else; we need nowhere else, because we have the Institute, and those who are in it are our family.“

—  Cassandra Clare, book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel