Father’s Day takes place on the third Sunday of June every year in the United States. Father’s Day is a time to recognize the value of fatherhood and everything that males do for their family and children. (Even though the correct spelling is “Fathers’ Day,” I will use Father’s Day in this article since that particular spelling is more commonplace.) Being a father is not easy, and often they are overlooked in the importance to the family since mother’s are apt to get most of the credit.The very first Father’s Day celebration is thought to have taken place on the 5th of July in 1908 and was held in the state of West Virginia, even though Father’s Day was not officially sanctioned by the U.S. government until 1972! One of the main inspirations for the creation of Father’s Day was the tragic death of 361 males in a mine that exploded in December of 1907. Many of the men killed in the explosion were Italian immigrants with wives and children.

Make sure to do something extra special for your father this Father’s Day to show him how much you care. Below are a few quotes dedicated to fathers everywhere.

“I talk and talk and talk, and I haven’t taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week.”

-Mario Cuomo

“Dad, your guiding hand on my shoulder will remain with me forever.”

–Unkown Author

“My father died many years ago, and yet when something special happens to me, I talk to him secretly not really knowing whether he hears, but it makes me feel better to half believe it.”

-Josefowitz

“It is a wise father that knows his own child.”

–William Shakespeare

“Small boys become big men through the influence of big men who care about small boys.”

-Unknown author

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

– Charles Wadsworth

“Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later…

that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called ‘Being a Father’ so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life.”

-Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities

“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, Old Times on the Mississippi

“That is the thankless position of the father in the family – the provider for all, and the enemy of all.”

–J. August Strindberg

“Father I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little hatchet.”

–George Washington

“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

“Henry James once defined life as that predicament which precedes death, and certainly nobody owes you a debt of honor or gratitude for getting him into that predicament. But a child does owe his father a debt, if Dad, having gotten him into this peck of trouble, takes off his coat and buckles down to the job of showing his son how best to crash through it.”

–Clarence Budington Kelland

“A man’s desire for a son is usually nothing but the wish to duplicate himself in order that such a remarkable pattern may not be lost to the world.”

-Helen Rowland

“I don’t care how poor a man is; if he has family, he’s rich.”

– Colonel Potter, from the television show M*A*S*H.

“If the new American father feels bewildered and even defeated, let him take comfort from the fact that whatever he does in any fathering situation has a fifty percent chance of being right.”

– Bill Cosby

by Jason Earls