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"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." - John 8:32
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Author:  Nicholas Stix
Bio: Nicholas Stix
Date:  June 18, 2017
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Topic category:  Other/General

Father’s Day Meditations and Quotations
When it comes to fatherhood, everyone's an expert!

[Postscript: When I asked my 17-year-old chief of research what the most important rule in fatherhood is, he offered, "Don't drop the baby."

Another positive rule also occurred to me that I'd offered to my older sister a few months ago, who also only has one kid: You gotta have backup children.]  

Fatherhood is one of those things where it seems everyone is an expert, especially, as my mom likes to say, people who never had kids.

It breaks philosophy because for every rule one might formulate, there are exceptions that, whether one or 1,000, make the rule seem foolish or invalid.

One can still come up with unobjectionable maxims—love your children—but they are vacuous.

How to be a good father can’t be taught directly, though there are countless flesh-and-blood lessons on how not to be a father:

• Don’t have children with crazy, wicked, or evil women
• Don’t leave your children physically unprotected (that rule includes, Don’t desert your children)
• Don’t let your children go hungry or thirsty
• Use balance in disciplining your children
• Don’t have children if you have no means of supporting them; and
• If you are not father material, make sure not to have children.

If there are any positive rules about fatherhood, they are:

• Have children with females who are maternally oriented; and paradoxically,
• Trust your gut; and above all,
• Be lucky, for as old ballplayers like Keith Hernandez like to say, “It’s better to be lucky than good.”

Quotes on Fatherhood

The first is via Brainy Quote. The next six, are courtesy of Quotery.

Fatherhood is great because you can ruin someone from scratch.
Jon Stewart

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.”
Harmon Killebrew

Guns don’t kill people, dads with daughters do.
Anonymous

One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.
George Herbert

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.
Sigmund Freud

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

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
Mark Twain

Father and Son

Many years ago... many, many years ago, I brought up a boy, and I said to him, “Son, if you ever become a writer, try to write a good part for your old man sometime.” Well, by cracky, that's what he did!

Walter Huston’s speech, upon winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1949, for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was adapted and directed by his son, John.

Nicholas Stix
Nicholas Stix, Uncensored

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Biography - Nicholas Stix

Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.


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