"Remember my dad? He worked at the Wash his whole life. He was the #1 tongue scrubber. Every year for 25 years. To me, working at the Wash, was the coolest job in the ocean. But then I learned something I will never forget. My dad was the greatest."
A father, dad, or daddy is the male parent of a child. Besides the paternal bonds of a father to his child or children, fathers may have a parental, legal, and social relationship with their child or children that carries with it certain rights and obligations.
"I have discovered very little in life that I am adept at doing. I cannot fix your car, repair your roof, or even drive a nail straight. However, I have given everything I have to being a father, and I happily stand back to see the results."
"The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one – particularly if he plays golf."
"We have to face the consequences of the fact that the family has long since ceased to have any higher meaning, or been cemented by living forces that go beyond the merely individual. The organic and, to a certain degree, "heroic" character that its unity presented in the past has been lost in the modern world, just as the institutions residual veneer of "sacrality" bestowed by religious marriage has disappeared, or nearly so. In reality, in the great majority of cases the modern family is presented as a petit bourgeois institution determined almost exclusively by conformist, utilitarian, primitive, or at best sentimental factors. Above all, its essential fulcrum has disappeared, which was constituted by the primarily spiritual authority of its head, the father: that is shown by the etymological meaning of the word pater as "lord," or "sovereign." […] How could the family continue to have a firm, binding center, if its natural head, the father, is so often estranged from it today—even physically, when the practical mechanism of material life takes him away from it? What authority can the father have, especially in the so-called upper classes, if he is reduced to a money-making machine, a busy professional, and the like?"
"If we could all pick our fathers there might be ten men on earth who would have families."
"Sequiturque patrem non passibus aequis."
"Nam jam non domus accipiet te læta, neque uxor Optuma, nec dulces occurrent oscula nati Præripere, et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent."