Liza Minnelli Quotes

We lived a lovely, middle-class, suburban life in Philadelphia. And I really thought that the TV programs of the '50s, like 'Father Knows Best' and 'The Adventures Of Ozzie And Harriet' Nelson were documentaries filmed with hidden cameras in our neighborhood.

Why, on my mother's birthday, am I thinking about 'Father Knows Best?' At our house, mother knew best at least as often as father did, but then the title of the old sitcom, a homogenized portrait of American family life, was meant to be slightly sardonic.

We've all grown up with 'Ozzie and Harriet,' 'Father Knows Best,' 'Eight Is Enough.' White families have always represented the universal family.

My wife and I definitely do not want to be like the maamiyars and maamanars in teleserials.

Family dinner in the Norman Rockwell mode had taken hold by the 1950s: Mom cooked, Dad carved, son cleared, daughter did the dishes.

Thousands of years and many civilizations have defined a marriage as the union between one man and one woman. With few exceptions, those civilizations that did not follow that perished.

I'm not white-picket-fence perfect.

Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I can only remember knowing one child, ever, whose parents got a divorce, and hardly any whose mother 'worked' at anything besides raising her children.

I'm considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family - father, mother, children - is fundamental to our civilisation.

Marriage is obsolete and a trap.

These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.

I think it's important to show a husband and a wife together, in a room, raising children, because you don't see that anymore.

I have to choose my words carefully because I don't want to sound like one of those who goes on about how things were better in my day.

To some, the '50s were a decade marked by the banal, the predictable.

My parents were like June and Ward Cleaver; there was nothing dysfunctional about them.

I'm one of nine sisters. My parents were dairy farmers in Wisconsin. My father didn't believe in girls doing farm work. Girls did housework, and he hired young men to do farm work. I would have preferred to be outside.

I feel that heterosexual marriage is the more excellent way, and it surely is approved holy by the Holy Bible, and it holds so many more possibilities: the possibilities of having children of both the mother and father, the male and the female.

When I read 'Dream of Red Mansions,' I was really struck by the fact that it was built differently from a lot of genre works. Specifically, a lot of the events that should have taken centre-stage - wars, social upheavals - were seen entirely through the eyes of the women of a Chinese household.

We all just kinda did everything we thought we were supposed to do and girls dated the guys they were supposed to and did things with the guys they were supposed to.

Some people would like the world to go back to the 1950s.

I think the thought of a traditional family home is awesome. Traditional roles are becoming a thing of the past, but I think there is something really charming about them.

When I was growing up, there was a character on TV; there was a character stereotype: it was personified by Mel on 'The Dick Van Dyke Show.'

'Mad Men' is celebrating a time that no longer exists.

The traditional family has an intrinsic as well as an instrumental value, and that is the real reason so many conservatives defend it.

Men always like what the ladies like.