The role of the father has changed throughout the years, but similar beliefs stand firm through time. Find out what some famous people before us had to say about fathers and fatherhood and see if it is how you feel today.
"None of you can ever be proud enough of being the child of such a Father who has not his equal in this world-so great, so good, so faultless. Try, all of you, to follow in his footsteps and don't be discouraged, for to be really in everything like him none of you, I am sure, will ever be. Try, therefore, to be like him in some points, and you will have acquired a great deal."
- Victoria, Queen of England
"It is a wise father that knows his own child."
- William Shakespeare
"Fatherhood is pretending the present you love the most is soap-on-a-rope."
- Bill Cosby
"It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was."
- Anne Sexton
"One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters."
- English Proverb
"A man's desire for a son is usually nothing but the wish to duplicate himself in order that such a remarkable patter may not be lost to the world."
- Helen Rowland
"Father's, like mothers, are not born. Men grow into fathers -- and fathering is a very important stage in their development.
- David M. Gottesman
"A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father."
- Gabriel García Márquez
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection."
- Sigmund Freud
"I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example."
- Mario Cuomo
"If the new American father feels bewildered and even defeated, let him take comfort from the fact that whatever he does in any fathering situation has a fifty percent chance of being right."
- Bill Cosby
"Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father!"
- Lydia M. Child
