"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."

"It is much easier to become a father than to be one."

"My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me."

"A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again."

"By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong."

"When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry."

"By profession I am a soldier and take pride in that fact. But I am prouder – infinitely prouder – to be a father. A soldier destroys in order to build; the father only builds, never destroys. The one has the potentiality of death; the other embodies creation and life. And while the hordes of death are mighty, the battalions of life are mightier still. It is my hope that my son, when I am gone, will remember me not from the battle field but in the home repeating with him our simple daily prayer, 'Our Father who art in Heaven.'"

"My father was frightened of his mother. I was frightened of my father and I am damned well going to see to it that my children are frightened of me."

"It is easier for a father to have children than for children to have a real father."

"My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, "You're tearing up the grass." "We're not raising grass," Dad would reply. "We're raising boys.""

"Noble fathers have noble children."

"I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week."

"One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters. "

"I felt something impossible for me to explain in words. Then, when they took her away, it hit me. I got scared all over again and began to feel giddy. Then it came to me... I was a father."

"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection."