But however the forms of family life have changed and the number expanded, the role of the family has remained constant and it continues to be the major institution through which children pass en route to adulthood.
Convention serves a purpose: It gives life meaning, and without it, one is in a constant existential crisis. If you don't have the imposition of family to remind you of what is at stake, something else will.
I like to have Chinese furniture in my home as a constant and painful reminder of how much has been destroyed in China. The contrast between the beauty of the past and the ugliness of the modern is nowhere sharper than in China.
It is setting goals and trying to be a business person, but at the same time not losing sight of who you are writing songs for and what your goals are as a songwriter. So believe me, if you think I've got it down I don't it is a constant struggle.
Sureness is something like a neck brace, which we clamp around our lives, hoping to somehow protect ourselves from the frightening, constant whiplash of change. Sadly, the brace doesn't always hold.
Today in America, we are trying to prepare students for a high tech world of constant change, but we are doing so by putting them through a school system designed in the early 20th Century that has not seen substantial change in 30 years.
I'm no health care expert, but you've got technology that constantly advances the ability to extend life and maybe improve lifestyle. That puts constant upward pressure on health care costs.
Being a Labour home secretary in the 21st century means fighting a constant battle against both extreme Right and Left.
There are constant cycles in history. There is loss, but it is always followed by regeneration. The tales of our elders who remember such cycles are very important to us now.
One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics.
All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities for life. Change is the one constant in human history.
You have to have great passion, because to sing operatic music requires lots of work. I study for at least two hours every day. The voice is like an instrument and requires constant exercise.
In a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals.
The sensation of never feeling good enough or pretty enough will always be there. It's a constant dialogue, and you just learn to be more powerful than that other voice. When you hear it come up, you shut it down.
When times are tough, constant conflict may be good politics but in the real world, cooperation works better. After all, nobody's right all the time, and a broken clock is right twice a day.
When times are tough and people are frustrated and angry and hurting and uncertain, the politics of constant conflict may be good, but what is good politics does not necessarily work in the real world. What works in the real world is cooperation.
The ironic thing is I took Kole from a family name - we had a vote and they had a few names, but Kole won - and getting it spelled with a 'K' is a constant correction, too. I'll never not be Warren Blosjo; it's just my stage name.
My parents, products of the Great Depression, were successful people, but lived in a state of constant fear that my sister and I, and they, would sink into the kind of economic insecurity that their generation knew so well.
Love can no more continue without a constant motion than fire can; and when once you take hope and fear away, you take from it its very life and being.
I increasingly wonder whether most humans are in a constant state of unconsciously fearing each other. Perhaps they fear how intimately different other people might be to them, and the problem is that there is no real way of finding out just how huge...
The Cuban people still live in constant fear of a brutal totalitarian regime that has demonstrated time and again its utter disregard for basic human dignity. The fight for a free Cuba has gone on for far too long.
