Best Quotes About Children (Top 100)
-
Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.
Shel Silverstein
-
You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
Madeleine L'Engle
-
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Pablo Picasso
-
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Lewis Carroll
-
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
Gustave Flaubert
-
Curiouser and curiouser.
Lewis Carroll
-
All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.
Mitch Albom
-
Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.
Dr. Seuss
-
Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.
Anne Frank
-
Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
Margaret Mead
-
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Martin Luther King Jr.
-
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
-
Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up because they're looking for ideas
Paula Poundstone
-
It's the children the world almost breaks who grow up to save it.
Frank Warren
-
Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
Oscar Wilde
-
Child, child, do you not see? For each of us comes a time when we must be more than what we are.
Lloyd Alexander
-
The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
Albert Einstein
-
O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.
Leo Rosten
-
Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear.
Judy Blume
-
Children are happy because they don't have a file in their minds called "All the Things That Could Go Wrong.
Marianne Williamson
-
You might as well answer the door, my child, the truth is furiously knocking.
Lucille Clifton
-
Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
Margaret Atwood
-
[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.
Jim Henson
-
Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
-
What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.
Cynthia Ozick
-
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
Aldous Huxley
-
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
-
I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
Anna Quindlen
-
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
Socrates
-
Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.
Theodore Roosevelt
-
Accept the children the way we accept trees"with gratitude, because they are a blessing"but do not have expectations or desires. You don't expect trees to change, you love them as they are.
Isabel Allende
-
We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve telling them to sit down and shut up.
Phyllis Diller
-
Children see magic because they look for it.
Christopher Moore
-
The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence.
Denis Waitley
-
There is no sinner like a young saint.
Aphra Behn
-
The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.
Mark Twain
-
Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all alongâthe same person that I am today.
Orson Scott Card
-
The greatest sign of success for a teacher... is to be able to say, 'The children are now working as if I did not exist.'
Maria Montessori
-
Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, and that's what parents were created for.
Ogden Nash
-
Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world.
Maria Montessori
-
The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study.
Che Guevara
-
When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.
Bertrand Russell
-
When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.
Madeleine L'Engle
-
When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].
Simone de Beauvoir
-
I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.
Stanley Kubrick
-
Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.
Shel Silverstein
-
Divorce isn't such a tragedy. A tragedy's staying in an unhappy marriage, teaching your children the wrong things about love. Nobody ever died of divorce.
Jennifer Weiner
-
Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.
Douglas Adams
-
A quality education has the power to transform societies in a single generation, provide children with the protection they need from the hazards of poverty, labor exploitation and disease, and given them the knowledge, skills, and confidence to reach their full potential.
Audrey Hepburn
-
Beer is proof that God wants us to be happy
Benjamin Franklin
-
I'd give all the wealth that years have piled, the slow result of life's decay, To be once more a little child for one bright summer day.
Lewis Carroll
-
It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling...
Aldous Huxley
-
So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?
Anthony Doerr
-
Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
Richard Dawkins
-
The most sophisticated people I know - inside they are all children.
Jim Henson
-
Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me.
Fred Rogers
-
It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.
Maya Angelou
-
Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
-
Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.
Orson Scott Card
-
As long as you know men are like children, you know everything!
Coco Chanel
-
I sometimes wake in the early morning & listen to the soft breathing of my children & I think to myself, this is one thing I will never regret & I carry that quiet with me all day long.
Brian Andreas
-
God is the highest good of the reasonable creature. The enjoyment of him is our proper; and is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here. Better than fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of any, or all earthly friends. These are but shadows; but the enjoyment of God is the substance. These are but scattered beams; but God is the sun. These are but streams; but God is the fountain. These are but drops, but God is the ocean.
Jonathan Edwards
-
Fear isn't so difficult to understand. After all, weren't we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It's just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual.
Alfred Hitchcock
-
There is no such thing as fun for the whole family.
Jerry Seinfeld
-
Talent must be a fanatical mistress. She's beautiful; when you're with her, people watch you, they notice. But she bangs on your door at odd hours, and she disappears for long stretches, and she has no patience for the rest of your existence; your wife, your children, your friends. She is the most thrilling evening of your week, but some day she will leave you for good. One night, after she's been gone for years, you will see her on the arm of a younger man, and she will pretend not to recognize you.
David Benioff
-
... And these childrenthat you spit onas they try to change their worldsare immune to your consultations.They're quite awareof what they're going through...
David Bowie
-
The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.
Thomas A. Edison
-
Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as a secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
Leonard Cohen
-
Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul.
Dave Pelzer
-
The thing I want more than anything else? I want to have children. I used to feel for every child I had, I would adopt another.
Marilyn Monroe
-
When you are so full of sorrow that you can't walk, can't cry anymore, think about the green foliage that sparkles after the rain. When the daylight exhausts you, when you hope a final night will cover the world, think about the awakening of a young child.
Omar Khayyam
-
I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.
Bill Gates
-
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.
Ronald Reagan
-
Don't just teach your children to read"¦ Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.
George Carlin
-
Making the decision to have a child - it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body
Elizabeth Stone
-
All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
Kazuo Ishiguro
-
Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing up is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.
Phyllis Diller
-
A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.
Marie Curie
-
All great spirituality teaches about letting go of what you don't need and who you are not. Then, when you can get little enough and naked enough and poor enough, you'll find that the little place where you really are is ironically more than enough and is all that you need. At that place, you will have nothing to prove to anybody and nothing to protect. That place is called freedom. It's the freedom of the children of God. Such people can connect with everybody. They don't feel the need to eliminate anybody . . .
Richard Rohr
-
Books, the children of the brain.
Jonathan Swift
-
There are random moments - tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children's rooms - when I feel a wavelike rush of joy. This is my true religion: arbitrary moments of of nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead.
Elizabeth Berg
-
I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile because it's impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren't feeling twinkly yourself. A mouth-smile is different. You can fake a mouth-smile any time you want, simply by moving your lips. I've also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It's sure to be a phony.
Roald Dahl
-
If we are to create peace in our world, we must begin with our children.
Mahatma Gandhi
-
The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
-
Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid, one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.
Douglas MacArthur
-
There are lives I can imagine without children but none of them have the same laughter & noise.
Brian Andreas
-
The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.
Dorothy Parker
-
If you've never been hated by your child, you've never been a parent.
Bette Davis
-
I would give up the unessential; I would give up my money, I would give up my life for my children; but I wouldnt give myself. I can't make it more clear; it's only something I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.
Kate Chopin
-
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
Peter De Vries
-
All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.
Anne Sexton
-
Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.
Margaret Mead
-
A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children. But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
-
Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.
Mark Twain
-
Live so that when your children think of fairness, caring, and integrity, they think of you.
H. Jackson Brown Jr
-
Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.
Arthur Golden
-
Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.
Michael Ondaatje
-
Parents are not really interested in justice. They just want quiet.
Bill Cosby
-
Tell the children the truth.
Bob Marley
-
Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.
Richard Dawkins
Even More Children Quotes
-
If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.
Lenny Bruce
-
You were born a child of light’s wonderful secretâ you return to the beauty you have always been.
Aberjhani
-
I would like to make a film to tell children "it's good to be alive".
Hayao Miyazaki
-
As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make-believe continues into adulthood.
Jim Henson
-
Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.
B. F. Skinner
-
Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.
Robert Fulghum
-
A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don't have a top for it.
Jerry Seinfeld
-
A mother knows what her child's gone through, even if she didn't see it herself.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
-
Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely.
Jean Piaget
-
While women weep, as they do now, I'll fight While little children go hungry, as they do now, I'll fight While men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I'll fight While there is a drunkard left, While there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, While there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I'll fight-I'll fight to the very end!
William Booth
-
The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.
Adolf Hitler
-
Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality — for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic would save me unless I had the wit and heart and courage to use it widely.
Terri Windling
-
We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.
Golda Meir
-
Racism is still with us. But it is up to us to prepare our children for what they have to meet, and, hopefully, we shall overcome.
Rosa Parks
-
We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.
Howard Zinn
-
For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.
Charles Dickens
-
If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it
David Foster Wallace
-
Be happy for no reason, like a child. If you are happy for a reason, you’re in trouble, because that reason can be taken from you.
Deepak Chopra
-
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
Helen Keller
-
It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.
Jean Piaget
-
All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.
Marie Curie
-
Peace requires us to surrender our illusions of control. We can love and care for others but we cannot possess our children, lovers, family, or friends. We can assist them, pray for them, and wish them well, yet in the end their happiness and suffering depend on their thoughts and actions, not on our wishes.
Jack Kornfield
-
Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.
Erik Erikson
-
When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.
Nora Ephron
-
Grown men can learn from very little children for the hearts of little children are pure. Therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss.
Black Elk
-
You’re not really an adult at all. You’re just a tall child holding a beer, having a conversation you don’t understand.
Dylan Moran
-
If you want your children to improve, let them overhear the nice things you say about them to others.
Haim Ginott
-
It is not the absence of sin but the grieving over it which distinguishes the child of God from empty professors.
Arthur W. Pink
-
When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it's amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.
Greg Mortenson
-
Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.
William Makepeace Thackeray
-
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
Vladimir Nabokov
-
It has always been the perogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
Neil Gaiman
-
When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important: A stodgy parent is not fun at all! What a child wants - and DESERVES - is a parent who is SPARKY!
Roald Dahl
-
I mean, when the world comes for your children, with the knives out, it's your job to stand in the way.
Joe Hill
-
Always end the name of your child with a vowel, so that when you yell the name will carry.
Bill Cosby
-
Sometimes it is the smallest thing that saves us: the weather growing cold, a child's smile, and a cup of excellent coffee.
Jonathan Carroll
-
I want my children to understand the world, but not just because the world is fascinating and the human mind is curious. I want them to understand it so that they will be positioned to make it a better place
Howard Gardner
-
Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.
Audre Lorde
-
Children cannot be fooled by empty praise and condescending encouragement. They may have to accept artificial bolstering of their self-esteem in lieu of something better, but what I call their accruing ego identity gains real strength only from wholehearted and consistent recognition of real accomplishment, that is, achievement that has meaning in their culture.
Erik Erikson
-
You cannot write for children They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.
Maurice Sendak
-
Two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way - or always to have it.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
-
No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I'm not talking about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.
Bill Cosby
-
During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions.
Jean Piaget
-
I cannot think that we are useless or God would not have created us. There is one God looking down on us all. We are all the children of one God. The sun, the darkness, the winds are all listening to what we have to say.
Geronimo
-
For the record, suspicion can kill, and prejudice can destroy. And a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own, for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.
Rod Serling
-
Never allow anyone to rain on your parade and thus cast a pall of gloom and defeat on the entire day. Remember that no talent, no self-denial, no brains, no character, are required to set up in the fault-finding business. Nothing external can have any power over you unless you permit it. Your time is too precious to be sacrificed in wasted days combating the menial forces of hate, jealously, and envy. Guard your fragile life carefully. Only God can shape a flower, but any foolish child can pull it to pieces.
Og Mandino
-
A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes- and it will come- may overwhelm the system, be it the immune system or the belief system.
Jane Smiley
-
No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick.
Erma Bombeck
-
We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.
Jerome Bruner
-
Canada is a myth people made up to entertain children, like the Tooth Fairy. There’s no such place.
Christopher Moore
-
All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.
Erma Bombeck
-
While parents possess the original key to their offspring's experience, teachers have a spare key. They, too, can open or close the minds and hearts of children.
Haim Ginott
-
Is adult entertainment killing our children? or is killing our children entertaining our adults?
Marilyn Manson
-
Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.
Napoleon Hill
-
Sticks and stones will break our bones, but words will break our hearts.
Robert Fulghum
-
It's a long haul bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing that â bring them up â and that means bringing things up with them: Asking, telling, sounding them out, sounding off yourself â finding, through experience, your own words, your own way of putting them together. You have to learn where you stand, and make sure your kids learn [where you stand], understand why, and soon, you hope, they'll be standing there beside you, with you.
Erik Erikson
-
In a big family the first child is kind of like the first pancake. If it's not perfect, that's okay, there are a lot more coming along.
Antonin Scalia
-
Every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is, you must tell your immediate family. You must tell your relatives. You must tell your friends if indeed they are your friends. You must tell the people you work with. You must tell the people in the stores you shop in. Once they realize that we are indeed their children, that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and all. And once you do, you will feel so much better
Harvey Milk
-
Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that's the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing. Nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him if he gives too much.
Alan Paton
-
Only those who look with the eyes of children can lose themselves in the object of their wonder.
Eberhard Arnold
-
Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.
H. Jackson Brown Jr
-
A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
-
Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.
Kurt Vonnegut
-
If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it.
Erma Bombeck
-
While Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things, The fate of empires and the fall of kings; While quacks of State must each produce his plan, And even children lisp the Rights of Man; Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention, The Rights of Woman merit some attention.
Robert Burns
-
I'm a teacher. A teacher is someone who leads. There is no magic here. I do not walk on water. I do not part the sea. I just love children.
Marva Collins
-
If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won t.
William Faulkner
-
Thought breeds thought; children familiar with great thoughts take as naturally to thinking for themselves as the well-nourished body takes to growing; and we must bear in mind that growth, physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual, is the sole end of education.
Charlotte Mason
-
How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid It must be education that does it.
Alexandre Dumas
-
The home is the first and most effective place to learn the lessons of life: truth, honor, virtue, self control, the value of education, honest work, and the purpose and privilege of life. Nothing can take the place of home in rearing and teaching children, and no other success can compensate for failure in the home.
David O. McKay
-
The indwelling of Christ is a thought particularly fit for the children, because their large faith does not stumble at the mystery, their imagination leaps readily to the marvel, that the King Himself should inhabit a little child's heart.
Charlotte Mason
-
A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, so people imagine a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had. But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know.
Barbara Kingsolver
-
Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.
Rabindranath Tagore
-
Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
Tom Stoppard
-
Human beings are the only creatures on earth that allow their children to come back home.
Bill Cosby
-
The true meaning of America, you ask? It's in a Texas rodeo, in a policeman's badge, in the sound of laughing children, in a political rally, in a newspaper... In all these things, and many more, you'll find America. In all these things, you'll find freedom. And freedom is what America means to the world. And to me.
Audie Murphy
-
When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice, safe playpen. When they're finished, I climb out.
Erma Bombeck
-
For life is the best thing we have in this existence. And if we should desire to believe in something, it should be a beacon within. This beacon being the sun, sea, and sky, our children, our work, our companions and, most simply put, the embodiment of love.
Patti Smith
-
Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
Alfie Kohn
-
If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.
Norman Douglas
-
The rich get richer and the poor get - children.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
-
Someday, in the distant future, our grandchildren's grandchildren will develop a new equivalent of our classrooms. They will spend many hours in front of boxes with fires glowing within. May they have the wisdom to know the difference between light and knowledge
Plato
-
I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.
Black Elk
-
Women without children are also the best of mothers,often, with the patience,interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortuante who feels witnessed as a peron,outside relationships with parents by another adult.
Louise Erdrich
-
You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they're going.
P. J. O'Rourke
-
Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.
John Taylor Gatto
-
Educate the children and it won't be necessary to punish the men.
Pythagoras
-
I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.
Philip Larkin
-
Having children is like living in a frat house - nobody sleeps, everything's broken, and there's a lot of throwing up.
Ray Romano
-
The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.
Sam Levenson
-
I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it. That is why the children of survivors are so tragic. I see them in school. They don't know how
Elie Wiesel
-
A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.
Arthur Miller
-
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to leave the world a better place, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
-
There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children.
Nelson Mandela
-
It wasn't until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say, 'I don't know.'
W. Somerset Maugham
-
Only mothers can think of the future - because they give birth to it in their children.
Maxim Gorky
-
We've got to work to save our children and do it with full respect for the fact that if we do not, no one else is going to do it.
Dorothy Height
-
The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential... these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.
Confucius
-
I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense.
Beatrix Potter
-
Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization...I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.
Seymour Papert
-
Inside, my soul became so cold I hated everything. I even despised the sun, for I knew I would never be able to play in its warm presence. I cringed with hate whenever I heard other children laughing, as they played outside. My stomach coiled whenever I smelled food that was about to be served to somebody else, knowing it wasn't for me.
Dave Pelzer
-
Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.
Ho Chi Minh
-
There is a brilliant child locked inside every student
Marva Collins
-
Time does not really exist for mothers, with regard to their children. It does not matter greatly how old the child is-in the blink of an eye, a mother can see the child again as they were when they were born, when they learned how to walk, as they were at any age-at any time, even when the child is fully grown or a parent themselves.
Diana Gabaldon
-
I want my children to have all the things I couldn't afford. Then I want to move in with them.
Phyllis Diller
-
Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
Erma Bombeck
-
The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ...
Bruno Bettelheim
-
When I approach a child, he inspires in me two sentiments; tenderness for what he is, and respect for what he may become.
Louis Pasteur
-
Your children will see what you're all about by what you live rather than what you say.
Wayne Dyer
-
Everyone is guilty at one time or another of throwing out questions that beg to be ignored, but mothers seem to have a market on the supply. "Do you want a spanking or do you want to go to bed?" Don't you want to save some of the pizza for your brother?" Wasn't there any change?
Erma Bombeck
-
We are guilty of many errors and many faults, but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer "Tomorrow,' his name is today.
Gabriela Mistral
-
From biscuit to brides, if there is anything their children really want, parents have a problem.
Chetan Bhagat
-
Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child's spirit; for such mutilation undercuts the life principle of trust, without which every human act, may it feel ever so good and seem ever so right is prone to perversion by destructive forms of conscientiousness.
Erik Erikson
-
When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.
Peter Matthiessen
-
You don't owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don't owe it to your mother, you don't owe it to your children, you don't owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked âfemale'.
Erin McKean
-
When I grow up I want to be a little boy.
Joseph Heller
-
Cooking is at once child's play and adult joy. And cooking done with care is an act of love.
Craig Claiborne
-
The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country; their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre—what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation.
Ulysses S. Grant
-
The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself. I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust myself on the waters and the sea. Everything was romantic in my imagination. The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden.
Beatrix Potter
-
We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!
Arthur Miller
-
All failures - neurotics, psychotics, criminals, drunkards, problem children, suicides, perverts, and prostitutes - are failures because they are lacking in social interest
Alfred Adler
-
The simplest toy, one which even the youngest child can operate, is called a grandparent.
Sam Levenson
-
The Wise are silent, the Foolish speak, and children are thus led astray.
Algernon Blackwood
-
I Love children, especially when they cry for then someone takes them away.
Nancy Mitford
-
When I was a child I truly loved:Unthinking love as calm and deepAs the North Sea. But I have lived,And now I do not sleep.
John Gardner
-
Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.
Guy Debord
-
Answered prayer is the interchange of love between the Father and His child.
Andrew Murray
-
Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying.
Fran Lebowitz
-
The imagination is precious. Don't lose it. Don't lose the child in you.
Marilyn Manson
-
And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming wild things.
Maurice Sendak
-
Wrinkles are hereditary. Parents get them from their children.
Doris Day
-
Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.
Aristotle
-
Sassenach, I've been stabbed, bitten, slapped, and whipped since supper - which I didna get to finish. I dinna like to scare children an I dinna like to flog men, and I've had to do both. I've two hundred English camped three miles away, and no idea what to do about them. I'm tired, I'm hungry, and I'm sore. If you've anything like womanly sympathy about ye, I could use a bit!
Diana Gabaldon
-
Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.
Socrates
-
So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation. The first use violence, to make themselves masters of other men's persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.
Thomas Hobbes
-
I will remain what I am until I die, a hunter, and when there are no buffalo or other game I will send my children to hunt and live on prairie mice, for where an Indian is shut up in one place his body becomes weak.
Sitting Bull
-
Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.
Anna Quindlen
-
Late one afternoon when returning from town we were met by a few women and children who told us that Mexican troops from some other town had attacked our camp, killed all the warriors of the guard, captured all our ponies, secured our arms, destroyed our supplies, and killed many of our women and children.. when all were counted, I found that my aged mother, my young wife, and my three small children were among the slain.
Geronimo
-
That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shellshe becomes one of the walking dead, a monster.
Ted Hughes
-
Children know something that most people have forgotten.
Keith Haring
-
A kid in an abusive home has far fewer rights than any POW. There is no Geneva Convention for kids.
Andrew Vachss
-
One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.
Giorgio Agamben
-
Erik: Are you very tired? Christine: Oh, tonight I gave you my soul, and I am dead. Erik: Your soul is a beautiful thing, child. No emperor received so fair a gift. The angels wept to-night.
Gaston Leroux
-
Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt.
Herbert Hoover
-
Do you know that moment when you paint a landscape as a child and, when you’re maybe under seven or something, the sky is just a blue stripe across the top of the paper? And then there’s that somewhat disappointing moment when the teacher tells you that the sky actually comes down in amongst all the branches. And it’s like life changes at that moment and becomes much more complicated and a little bit more boring, as it’s rather tedious to fill in the branches…
Alan Rickman
-
My mother loved children - she would have given anything if I had been one.
Groucho Marx
-
When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
Thomas Merton
-
I didn't marry you because you were perfect. I didn't even marry you because I loved you. I married you because you gave me a promise. That promise made up for your faults. And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage. And when our children were growing up, it wasn't a house that protected them; and it wasn't our love that protected them—it was that promise.
Thornton Wilder
-
The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don’t like that statement, but few can argue with it.
Carl Sagan
-
Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance, and none can say while some fields will blossom and others lay brown beneath the August sun. Care for those around you. Look past your differences. Their dreams are no less than yours, their choices in life no more easily made. And give. Give in any way you can, of whatever you possess. To give is to love. To withhold is to wither. Care less for your harvest than how is shared, and your life will have meaning and your heart will have peace.
Kent Nerburn
-
Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open.
Laura Bush
-
Too many children in foster care are falling through cracks. Be a hero, take the time learn about adoption today.
Bruce Willis
-
No Child Left Behind' requires states and school districts to ensure that all students are learning and are reaching their highest potential. Special education students should not be left out of these accountability mechanisms.
Dianne Feinstein
-
Love is staying up all night with a sick child - or a healthy adult.
David Frost
-
The question is not whether we can afford to invest in every child; it is whether we can afford not to.
Marian Wright Edelman
-
You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better.
Maxim Gorky
-
I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell this to my children, they just about throw up.
Barbara Bush
-
The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old.
Jean Kerr
-
There are hundreds of millions of gun owners in this country, and not one of them will have an accident today. The only misuse of guns comes in environments where there are drugs, alcohol, bad parents, and undisciplined children. Period.
Ted Nugent
-
Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves have poisoned the fountain.
John Locke
-
When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.
Margery Williams
-
One of the most important accomplishments of the Caucus is raising awareness with law enforcement and communities nationwide on the issues of child safety and Internet safety.
Nick Lampson
-
It is easier for a father to have children than for children to have a real father.
Pope John XXIII
-
There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.
Anne Michaels
-
Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children.
Alex Haley
-
The child must know that he is a miracle, that since the beginning of the world there hasn't been, and until the end of the world there will not be, another child like him.
Pablo Casals
-
The best compliment to a child or a friend is the feeling you give him that he has been set free to make his own inquiries, to come to conclusions that are right for him, whether or not they coincide with your own.
Alistair Cooke
-
That problem has been going on since men and women and their children moved from the plains and into caves. How many times have you heard Howard Cunningham talking to Marian about shopping? Too many.
Henry Winkler
-
All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.
Katherine Paterson
-
You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.
Chief Seattle
-
When you put faith, hope and love together, you can raise positive kids in a negative world.
Zig Ziglar
-
When one creates phantoms for oneself, one puts vampires into the world, and one must nourish these children of a voluntary nightmare with one's blood, one's life, one's intellegence, and one's reason, without ever satisfying them.
Eliphas Levi
-
If you want children to keep their feet on the ground, put some responsibility on their shoulders.
Abigail Van Buren
-
You were loved because God loves, period. God loved you, and everyone, not because you believed in certain things, but because you were a mess, and lonely, and His or Her child. God loved you no matter how crazy you felt on the inside, no matter what a fake you were; always, even in your current condition, even before coffee. God loves you crazily, like I love you...like a slightly overweight auntie, who sees only your marvelousness and need.
Anne Lamott
-
If your children ever find out how lame you really are, they'll murder you in your sleep.
Frank Zappa
-
Never violate a woman, nor harm a child. Do not lie, cheat or steal. These things are for lesser men. Protect the weak against the evil strong. And never allow thoughts of gain to lead you into the persuit of evil.
David Gemmell
-
Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.
Joan of Arc
-
Children are natural Zen masters; their world is brand new in each and every moment.
John Bradshaw
-
Sex education may be a good idea in the schools, but I don't believe the kids should be given homework.
Bill Cosby
-
For the first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.
Michael Ondaatje
-
Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.
John Adams
-
Can teachers successfully educate children to think for themselves if teachers are not treated as professionals who think for themselves?
Diane Ravitch
-
The law of love could be best understood and learned through little children.
Mahatma Gandhi
-
Children are our most valuable natural resource.
Herbert Hoover
-
Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.
Charles R. Swindoll
-
The footsteps a child follows are most likely to be the ones his parents thought they covered up.
James Dobson
-
No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.
Emma Goldman
-
It's funny, when you're a child you think time will never go by, but when you hit about twenty, time passes like you're on the fast train to Memphis. I guess life just slips up on everybody. It sure did on me.
Fannie Flagg
-
When I have something to say that I think will be too difficult for adults, I write it in a book for children. Children are excited by new ideas; they have not yet closed the doors and windows of their imaginations. Provided the story is good... nothing is too difficult for children.
Madeleine L'Engle
-
I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
James Thurber
-
Nothing I've ever done has given me more joys and rewards than being a father to my children.
Bill Cosby
-
If children have the ability to ignore all odds and percentages, then maybe we can all learn from them. When you think about it, what other choice is there but to hope? We have two options, medically and emotionally: give up, or Fight Like Hell.
Lance Armstrong
-
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
William Wordsworth
-
Children must early learn the the beauty of generosity. They are taught to give what they prize most, that they may taste the happiness of giving.
Charles Alexander Eastman
-
Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.
Maurice Sendak
-
I find fault with my children because I like them and I want them to go places - uprightness and strength and courage and civil respect and anything that affects the probabilities of failure on the part of those that are closest to me, that concerns me - I find fault.
Branch Rickey
-
No matter how old you get, if you can keep the desire to be creative, you're keeping the man-child alive.
John Cassavetes
-
Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country-it had all been done in our name. . . . The French city . . . had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase.
James Fenton
-
Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.
Dan Quayle
-
Perhaps people, and kids especially, are spoiled today, because all the kids today have cars, it seems. When I was young you were lucky to have a bike.
James Cagney
-
We expect teachers to handle teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, and the failings of the family. Then we expect them to educate our children.
John Sculley
-
Left-wing politicians take away your liberty in the name of children and of fighting poverty, while right-wing politicians do it in the name of family values and fighting drugs. Either way, government gets bigger and you become less free.
Harry Browne
-
We never know the love of a parent till we become parents ourselves.
Henry Ward Beecher
-
Let us take our children seriously! Everything else follows from this...only the best is good enough for a child.
Zoltan Kodaly
-
Repentance is for little children.
Adolf Eichmann
-
America's future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach, and how we live.
Jane Addams
-
Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.
David Lodge
-
Russian Communism is the illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great.
Clement Attlee
-
If human beings are perceived as potentials rather than problems, as possessing strengths instead of weaknesses, as unlimited rather that dull and unresponsive, then they thrive and grow to their capabilities.
Barbara Bush
-
The poor are always rich in children, and in the dirt and ditches of this street there are groups of them from morning to night, hungry, naked and dirty. Children are the living flowers of the earth, but these had the appearance of flowers that have faded prematurely, because they grew in ground where there was no healthy nourishment.
Maxim Gorky
-
A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.
John James Audubon
-
No one and nothing can harm us, child, except what we fear and love.
Sigrid Undset
-
A life that hasn't a definite plan is likely to become driftwood.
David Sarnoff
-
Have you any idea how many children it takes to turn off one light in the kitchen Three. It takes one to say What light and two more to say I didn't turn it on.
Erma Bombeck
-
I have come to believe that in order to thrive, a child must have at least one adult in her life who shows her unconditional love, respect, and confidence.
Sonia Sotomayor
-
Children who grow up getting nutrition from plant foods rather than meats have a tremendous health advantage. They are less likely to develop weight problems, diabetes, high blood pressure and some forms of cancer
Benjamin Spock
-
There's nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitive child.
Frank A. Clark
-
It was our belief that the love of possessions is a weakness to be overcome. . . . Children must early learn the beauty of generosity. They are taught to give what they prize most, that they may taste the happiness of giving. . . . The Indians in their simplicity literally give away all that they haveâto relatives, to guests of other tribes or clans, but above all to the poor and the aged, from whom they can hope for no return.
Charles Alexander Eastman
-
There are 500 reasons I write for children.... Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about the critics.... They don't read to free themselves of guilt, to quench their thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... They don't expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only the adults have such childish illusions.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
-
I am also very proud to be a liberal. Why is that so terrible these days? The liberals were liberatorsthey fought slavery, fought for women to have the right to vote, fought against Hitler, Stalin, fought to end segregation, fought to end apartheid. Liberals put an end to child labor and they gave us the five day work week! What's to be ashamed of?
Barbra Streisand
-
You modern men, you children of reason, cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
-
Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.
John Betjeman
-
The greater a child's terror, and the earlier it is experienced, the harder it becomes to develop a strong and healthy sense of self.
Nathaniel Branden
-
Why don't they cut their own children's ears into points to make them look sharp? Why don't they cut off their noses to make them look plucky? One would be just as sensible as the other. What right have they to torment and disfigure God's creatures?
Anna Sewell
-
There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
-
I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.
Brenda Ueland
-
Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?
George W. Bush
-
The employment of children is doing more to fill prisons, insane asylums, almshouses, reformatories, slums, and gin shops than all the efforts of reformers are doing to improve society.
Mother Jones
-
A lot of parents tell their children that if they want to be an actor, that's fine, but they should do something else first, so they've got something to fall back on. It doesn't work like that, as far as I'm concerned.
Ewan McGregor
-
The soul of a child is as complicated and full of contradictions as our soul is.
Janusz Korczak
-
NEW RULE: 'Kidiots' Leave the children behind. At least until they learn something. A new study has shown that half of American high schools agree that newspapers should only be able to publish government-approved material. Almost one out of five said people should not be allowed to voice unpopular opinions..This is the first generation after September 11th, who discovered news during a 'watch what you say' administration...George W. Bush once asked, 'is our children learning.' No, they isn't. A better question would be, 'is our teacher's teaching?
Bill Maher
-
If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings.
Brian Tracy
-
Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different...I claimed myself and remade my life. Only when I knew I belonged to myself completely did I become capable of giving myself to another, of finding joy in desire, pleasure in our love, power in this body no one else owns.
Dorothy Allison
-
Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
Maya Angelou
-
I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free.
John Taylor Gatto
-
Your children can be around you all day, but if you don't spend quality time with them and you don't pay attention to them and talk to them and listen to them, it doesn't matter that they're just around you.
Brandy Norwood
-
Give me the money that has been spent in war and I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire of which kings and queens will be proud. I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth. I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to peace.
Charles Sumner
-
Whether it's making sure that families have access to quality health care and child care, or making sure that our children receive the best educational opportunities we can give them, we must remain committed to these needs because our children are our future.
Blanche Lincoln
-
I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan't make the mistakes I've made. When I look back upon the girl I was I hate myself. But I never had a chance. I'm going to bring up my daughter so that she's free and can stand on her own feet. I´m not going to bring a child into the world, and love her, and bring her up, just so that some man may want to sleep with her so much that he's willing to provide her with board and lodging for the rest of her life.
W. Somerset Maugham
-
Where parents do too much for their children, the children will not do much for themselves.
Elbert Hubbard
-
Censors never go after books unless kids already like them. I don't even think they know to go after books until they know that children are interested in reading this book, therefore there must be something in it that's wrong.
Judy Blume
-
People sometimes rationalize their greed by saying that it is all for the good of their children but this is nothing but an excuse they use to make their despicable actions appear respectable and praiseworthy.
Democritus
-
It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
Hubert H. Humphrey
-
Every child deserves a home and love. Period.
Dave Thomas
-
All you have to do to educate a child is leave him alone and teach him to read. The rest is brainwashing.
Ellen Gilchrist
-
To teach a child an instrument without first giving him preparatory training and without developing singing, reading and dictating to the highest level along with the playing is to build upon sand.
Zoltan Kodaly
-
The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.
Freeman Dyson
-
I've learned that terror doesn't happen because some group of people somewhere like Pakistan or Afghanistan simply decide to hate us. It happens because children aren't being offered a bright enough future that they have a reason to choose life over death.
Greg Mortenson
-
Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won't know what it is until I succeed in doing it.
Alberto Giacometti
-
Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.
Camille Paglia
-
A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart.
Peggy Noonan
-
Anyone who ever wondered how much they could love a child who did not spring from their own loins, know this: it is the same. The feeling of love is so profound, it's incredible and surprising.
Nia Vardalos
-
Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in there having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us; and they must be preserved free of corruption from an early age.
Paul Klee
-
I am on a drug. It's called Charlie Sheen. It's not available. If you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.
Charlie Sheen
-
We are the inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we the children of an indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos.
Colin Meloy
-
Keep the fire of your testimony of the restored gospel and your witness of our Redeemer burning so brightly that our children can warm their hands by the fire of your faith.
Boyd K. Packer
-
I was modest—they accused me of being crafty: I became secretive. I felt deeply good and evil—nobody caressed me, everybody offended me: I became rancorous. I was gloomy—other children were merry and talkative. I felt myself superior to them—but was considered inferior: I became envious. I was ready to love the whole world—none understood me: and I learned to hate.
Mikhail Lermontov
-
Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
P. J. O'Rourke
-
I believe in humanity. We are an incredible species. We're still just a child creature, we're still being nasty to each other. And all children go through those phases. We're growing up, we're moving into adolescence now. When we grow up - man, we're going to be something!
Gene Roddenberry
-
If we try to resolve terrorism with military might and nothing else, then we will be no safer than we were before 9/11. If we truly want a legacy of peace for our children, we need to understand that this is a war that will ultimately be won with books, not with bombs.
Greg Mortenson
-
Women want men, careers, money, children, friends, luxury, comfort, independence, freedom, respect, love, and a three-dollar pantyhose that won't run.
Phyllis Diller
-
Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb. Brooks to wade, water lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of education.
Luther Burbank
-
The guys who fear becoming fathers don't understand that fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man. The end product of child-raising is not the child but the parent.
Frank Pittman
-
Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.
Gaston Bachelard
-
But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute-for horses
Jane Smiley
-
Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.
Marian Wright Edelman
-
Testing is not a substitute for curriculum and instruction. Good education cannot be achieved by a strategy of testing children, shaming educators, and closing schools.
Diane Ravitch
-
How often do we stand convinced of the truth of our early memories, forgetting that they are assessments made by a child? We can replace the narratives that hold us back by inventing wiser stories, free from childish fears, and, in doing so, disperse long-held psychological stumbling blocks.
Benjamin Zander
-
Child psychologists have demonstrated that our minds are actually constructed by these thousands of tiny interactions during the first few years of life. We aren't just what we're taught. It's what we experience during those early years - a smile here, a jarring sound there - that creates the pathways and connections of the brain. We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?
Sidney Poitier
-
You can't teach children to be good. The best you can do for your child is to live a good life yourself. What a parent knows and believes, the child will lean on.
Bruno Bettelheim
-
When school children start paying union dues, that 's when I'll start representing the interests of school children.
Albert Shanker
-
The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.
Pearl S. Buck
-
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
Aldous Huxley
-
Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will.
Bono
-
Always have a book at hand, in the parlor, on the table, for the family; a book of condensed thought and striking anecdote, of sound maxims and truthful apothegms. It will impress on your own mind a thousand valuable suggestions, and teach your children a thousand lessons of truth and duty. Such a book is a casket of jewels for your housebold.
Tryon Edwards
-
Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
Charles Lamb
-
The more people have studied different methods of bringing up children the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all.
Benjamin Spock
-
If you had to have a diploma or a GED to collect unemployment, you'd see a lot more kids staying in school.
Wayne Knight
-
My view on issues is based on common sense, and my experience as a mother of four children, as a sole parent, and as a businesswoman running a fish and chip shop.
Pauline Hanson
-
Children, as persons, are entitled to the greatest respect. Children are given to us as free-flying souls, but then we clip their wings like we domesticate the wild mallard. Children should become the role-models for us, their parents, for they are coated with the spirit from which they came- out of the ether, clean, innocent, brimming with the delight of life, aware of the beauty of the simplest thing; a snail, a bud....
Gerry Spence
-
Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave, when they think that their children are naive.
Ogden Nash
-
Screaming at children over their grades, especially to the point of the child's tears, is child abuse, pure and simple. It's not funny and it's not good parenting. It is a crushing, scarring, disastrous experience for the child. It isn't the least bit funny.
Ben Stein
-
Every child born into the world is a new thought of God, an ever-fresh and radiant possibility.
Kate Douglas Wiggin
-
From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.
Alfred North Whitehead
-
There was one thing my murderer didn't understand; he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.
Alice Sebold
-
Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.
Russell Baker
-
I have been criticized throughout the course of my career for placing too much faith in the reliability of children's narratives; but I have almost always found that children are a great deal more reliable in telling us what actually goes on in public school than many of the adult experts who develop policies that shape their destinies.
Jonathan Kozol
-
Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.
Bobby Sands
-
In all your course, walk with God and follow Christ as a little, poor, helpless child, taking hold of Christ's hand, keeping your eye on the mark of the wounds on his hands and side, whence came the blood that cleanses you from sin and hiding your nakedness under the skirt of the white shining robe of his righteousness.
Jonathan Edwards
-
To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
-
A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.
Leonard Bernstein
-
True the Black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept.And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself.
Toni Morrison
-
I look in the mirror through the eyes of the child that was me.
Judy Collins
-
Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.
Fred Rogers
-
When the child was a child, it didn't know that it was a child, everything was soulful, and all souls were one.
Peter Handke
-
The future which we hold in trust for our own children will be shaped by our fairness to other people's children.
Marian Wright Edelman
-
When a small child, I thought that success spelled happiness. I was wrong, happiness is like a butterfly which appears and delights us for one brief moment, but soon flits away.
Anna Pavlova
-
The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.
Margaret Mead
-
Parents often talk about the younger generation as if they didn't have anything to do with it.
Haim Ginott
-
Motherhood has completely changed me. It's just about like the most completely humbling experience that I've ever had. I think that it puts you in your place because it really forces you to address the issues that you claim to believe in and if you can't stand up to those principles when you're raising a child, forget it.
Diane Keaton
-
Three groups spend other people's money: children, thieves, politicians. All three need supervision.
Dick Armey
-
You can't cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim
Jeannette Walls
-
We need to ensure the poorest in the planet - who will be hardest hit by the financial crisis - are not forgotten.
Kofi Annan
-
Instead of a national curriculum for education, what is really needed is an individual curriculum for every child.
Charles Handy
-
When we choose to be parents, we accept another human being as part of ourselves, and a large part of our emotional selves will stay with that person as long as we live. From that time on, there will be another person on this earth whose orbit around us will affect us as surely as the moon affects the tides, and affect us in some ways more deeply than anyone else can. Our children are extensions of ourselves.
Fred Rogers
-
Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys; look on them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death.
Sun Tzu
-
Outings are so much more fun when we can savor them through the children's eyes.
Lawana Blackwell
-
Abraham Lincoln did not shoot John Wilkes Booth. Titanic did not sink a North Atlantic iceberg. And Fox News is neither fair nor balanced. These are simple historical facts intelligible to all adults, most children, and some of your more discerning domesticated animals. But not... to Bill O
Keith Olbermann
-
Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children.
Sam Levenson
-
What feeling is so nice as a child's hand in yours? So small, so soft and warm, like a kitten huddling in the shelter of your clasp.
Marjorie Holmes
-
Raising children is an uncertain thing; success is reached only after a life of battle and worry.
Democritus
-
Treat your kid like a darling for the first five years. For the next five years, scold them. By the time they turn sixteen, treat them like a friend. Your grown up children are your best friends.
Chanakya
-
In every child who is born, no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again: and in him, too, once more, and of each of us, our terrific responsibility toward human life; toward the utmost idea of goodness, of the horror of terror, and of God.
James Agee
-
It is the responsibility of every adult... to make sure that children hear what we have learned from the lessons of life and to hear over and over that we love them and that they are not alone.
Marian Wright Edelman
-
It has been my experience that most human stories are circular rather than linear. Regardless of the path we choose, we somehow end up where we commenced - in part, I suspect, because the child who lives in us goes along for the ride.
James Lee Burke
-
Women share with men the need for personal success, even the taste for power, and no longer are we willing to satisfy those needs through the achievements of surrogates, whether husbands, children, or merely role models.
Elizabeth Dole
-
When I say I love Eastland, it sounds preposterous a man who brutalizes people. But you love him or you wouldn't be here. You're going to Mississippi to create social change and you love Eastland in your desire to create conditions which will redeem his children. Loving your enemy is manifest in putting your arms not around the man but around the social situation, to take power from those who misuse it at which point they can become human too.
Bayard Rustin
-
I have just been condemned, not to a shameful death, which can only apply to felons, but rather to finding your brother again...I seek forgiveness for all whom I know for every harm I may have unwittingly caused them...Adieu, good, gentle sister...I embrace you with all my heart as well as the poor, dear children.
Marie Antoinette
-
It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.
Joyce Maynard
-
Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head.
Carol Burnett
-
What good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best after all.
Benjamin Spock
-
I always value my large kitchen because it was better to do everything there, you wash up, you do everything, rather than messing up another room and I pop my typewriter just next to it. So I still write now but I was doing more writing when the children were younger.
Buchi Emecheta
-
Over and over again, stories in women's magazines insist that women can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child. They deny the years when she can no longer look forward to giving birth, even if she repeats the act over and over again. In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her children's mother, her husband's wife.
Betty Friedan
-
We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup. I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know — that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.
Beryl Markham
-
To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, is more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.
Marilyn French
-
To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself once in a while.
Josh Billings
-
I named all my children after flowers. There's Lillie and Rose and my son, Artificial.
Bert Williams
-
Dont give a child a fish but show him how to fish
Mao Zedong
-
Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.
Erma Bombeck
-
I had no idea that mothering my own child would be so healing to my own sadness from my childhood.
Susie Bright
-
As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children.
Anita Bryant
-
I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them.
Kathleen Norris
-
This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It's the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.
John Taylor Gatto
-
Ah, children, be afraid of going prayerless to bed, lest the Devil be your bedfellow.
Cotton Mather
-
The children almost broken by the world become the adults most likely to change it.
Frank Warren
-
My hope for my children must be that they respond to the still, small voice of God in their own hearts.
Andrew Young
-
All kids need is a little help, a little hope and somebody who believes in them.
Magic Johnson
-
The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.
Eric Hoffer
-
The important things are children, honesty, integrity and faith.
Andy Williams
-
Of all the joys that lighten suffering earth, what joy is welcomed like a new born child?
Caroline Norton
-
When Jesus Christ asked little children to come to him, he didn't say only rich children, or White children, or children with two-parent families, or children who didn't have a mental or physical handicap. He said, Let all children come unto me.
Marian Wright Edelman
-
Sometimes we have to put our foot down, ... but before we deliberately make children unhappy in order to get them to get into the car, or to do their homework or whatever, we need to weigh whether what we're doing to make it happen is worth the possible strain on our relationship with them.
Alfie Kohn
-
What are men? Children who doubt.
Derek Walcott
-
These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.
Charles Manson
-
We owe it to our children to be better stewards of the environment. The alternative? - a world without whales. It's too terrible to imagine.
Pierce Brosnan
-
We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.
Margaret Mead
-
The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.
James Fenton
-
The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.
Plato
-
Of all my father's teachings, the most enduring was the one about the true measure of a man. That true measure was how well he provided for his children, and it stuck with me as if it were etched in my brain.
Sidney Poitier
-
Dachshunds are ideal dogs for small children, as they are already stretched and pulled to such a length that the child cannot do much harm one way or the other.
Robert Benchley
-
In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education.
Earl Warren
-
There are two things parents should give their children roots and wings. Roots to give them bearing and a sense of belonging, but also wings to help free them from constraints and prejudices and give them other ways to travel (or rather, to fly).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
-
It was no great tragedy being Judy Garland's daughter. I had tremendously interesting childhood years - except they had little to do with being a child.
Liza Minnelli
-
There's really no point in having children if you're not going to be home enough to father them.
Anthony Edwards
-
Good teachers don't approach a child of this age with overzealousness or with destructive conscientiousness. They're not drill-masters in the military or floor managers in a production system. They are specialists in opening small packages. They give the string a tug but do it carefully. They don't yet know what's in the box. They don't know if it's breakable.
Jonathan Kozol
-
Each generation has been an education for us in different ways. The first child-with-bloody-nose was rushed to the emergency room. The fifth child-with-bloody-nose was told to go to the yard immediately and stop bleeding on the carpet.
Art Linkletter
-
Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.
Phyllis Diller
-
I must take issue with the term 'a mere child', for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult.
Fran Lebowitz
-
A vegetarian is a person who won't eat anything that can have children.
David Brenner
-
The welfare culture tells the man he is not a necessary part of the family; he feels dispensable, his wife knows he is dispensable, his children sense it.
George Gilder
-
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.
Ronald Reagan
-
The children who are appreciated for what they are, even if they are homely, or clumsy, or slow, will grow up with confidences in themselves - happy. They will have a spirit that will make the best of all the capacities that they have, and of all the opportunities that come their way. They will make light of any handicaps.
Benjamin Spock
-
The child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering.
Benjamin Spock
-
Where does discipline end? Where does cruelty begin? Somewhere between these, thousands of children inhabit a voiceless hell.
Francois Mauriac
-
Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.
Cyril Connolly
-
One of the virtues of being very young is that you don't let the facts get in the way of your imagination.
Sam Levenson
-
The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
-
If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?
Isak Dinesen
-
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
John Updike
-
When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul.
Jean Rhys
-
It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows
Erma Bombeck
-
In America there are two classes of travel - first class, and with children.
Robert Benchley
-
It's especially hard to admit that you made a mistake to your parents, because, of course, you know so much more than they do.
Sean Covey
-
Heroes are people who face down their fears. It is that simple. A child afraid of the dark who one day blows out the candle; a women terrified of the pain of childbirth who says, 'It is time to become a mother'. Heroism does not always live on the battlefield.
David Gemmell
-
Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: 'I'm with you kid. Let's go.'
Maya Angelou
-
People will buy anything at jumble sales,' I said. 'At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table.
Connie Willis
-
What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child?
Delmore Schwartz
-
Okay let's get this over with, no I'm not seasick, yes I've always been green, No I didn't eat grass as a child.
Gregory Maguire
-
One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child's name and how old he or she is.
Erma Bombeck
-
Consider Christmas - could Satan in his most malignant mood have devised a worse combination of graft plus bunkum than the system whereby several hundred million people get a billion or so gifts for which they have no use, and some thousands of shop clerks die of exhaustion while selling them, and every other child in the Western world is made ill from overeating - all in the name of the lowly Jesus?
Upton Sinclair
-
It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children. One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one's mind: this is a temptation one must resist. In fact, the existence of the death squads had a meaning, a message: 'We, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are; if we so wish, and we do so wish, we can destroy not only your bodies, but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours.
Primo Levi
-
Slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.
John Taylor Gatto
-
Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation.
Claude Levi-Strauss
-
Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?
Kenneth Patchen
-
Children are the anchors of a mother's life.
Sophocles
-
There are not seven wonders of the world in the eyes of a child. There are seven million.
Walt Streightiff
-
Do not teach your children never to be angry; teach them how to be angry.
Lyman Abbott
-
There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years before.
Jonathan Kozol
-
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.
George Santayana
-
What do we teach our children? . . . We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique . . . You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything.
Pablo Casals
-
...the more risks you allow children to take, the better they learn to take care of themselves. If you never let them take any risks, then I believe they become very prone to injury. Boys should be allowed to climb tall trees and walk along the tops of high walls and dive into the sea from high rocks... The same with girls. I like the type of child who takes risks. Better by far than the one who never does so.
Roald Dahl
-
To separate children from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.
Earl Warren
-
I was forced to live far beyond my years when just a child, now I have reversed the order and I intend to remain young indefinitely.
Mary Pickford
-
You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
John Ciardi
-
We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.
Lawrence Clark Powell
-
It is the childlike part of us that produces works of the imagination. When we were children time passed so slow with us that we seemed to have time for everything.
William Morris
-
A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.
Peter De Vries
-
I feel about my dogs now, and all the dogs I had prior to this, the way I feel about children"ツ杯hey are that important to me. When I have lost a dog I have gone into a mourning period that lasted for months.
Mary Tyler Moore
-
Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.
Peter Ustinov
-
Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?
Barbara Kingsolver
-
Once you look past the hype, actors are nothing more than fugitives from reality who specialize in contradiction: we are both children and hardened adultsâwide-eyed pupils and jaded working stiffs.
Bruce Campbell
-
More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.
Sonya Hartnett
-
The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.
Kate Chopin
-
In a profound sense every man has two halves to his being; he is not one person so much as two persons trying to act in unison. I believe that in the heart of each human being there is something which I can only describe as a child of darkness who is equal and complementary to the more obvious child of light.
Laurens van der Post
-
I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.
Pearl S. Buck
-
Ultimately, we are all products of the experiences we have and the decisions we make as children, and it remains a peculiar detail of human condition that something as precious as the future is entrusted to us when we possess so little foresight. Perhaps that's what makes hindsight so intriguing. When you're young the future is a blank canvas, but looking back you are always able to see the big picture.
Simon Pegg
-
Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.
Dag Hammarskjold
-
Your children will smash your understanding, knowledge and reality. You will be better off. Then they will leave. You'll miss them forever.
Tibor Kalman
-
Part of our responsibility as parents, as adults, is to set examples for children. But we have to like children in order to be really happy fulfilled adults.
Bobby McFerrin
-
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen
-
There are only two things a child will share willingly; communicable diseases and its mother's age.
Benjamin Spock
-
If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable - each segment distinct.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
-
Orphans, dead parents, lonely children at Christmas, morose spoken word recordings, everything you love about the holidays. Move the turkey over so you can fit your head in the oven.
April Winchell
-
To lose one's self in reverie, one must be either very happy, or very unhappy. Reverie is the child of extremes.
Antoine Rivarol
-
What was the good of industrial development, what was the good of all the technological innovations, toil, and population movements if, after half a century of industrial growth, the condition of the masses was still just as miserable as before, and all lawmakers could do was prohibit factory labor by children under the age of eight?
Thomas Piketty
-
Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.
Ogden Nash
-
A mother's nurturing love arouses in children, from their earliest days on earth, an awakening of the memories of love and goodness they experience in their premortal existence, Because our mothers love us, we learn, or more accurately remember, that God also loves us
M. Russell Ballard
-
It was a sunny day, I was carrying a child in a white dress to be christened. The path to the church led up a steep slope, but I held the child in my arms firmly and without faltering. Then suddenly my footing gave way ... I had enough time to put the child down before plunging into the abyss. The child is our idea. In spite of all obstacles it will prevail.
Sophie Scholl
-
Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.
Charles Stross
-
Unless the schools provide our children with a vision of human possibility that enlightens and empowers them with knowledge and taste, they will simply play their role in someone else's marketing schemes. Unless they understand deeply the sources of our democracy, they will take it for granted and fail to exercise their rights and responsibilities.
Diane Ravitch
-
There were timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made by every man, woman, and child was reversed in the universe next door.
Larry Niven
-
My children are not royal; they just happen to have the Queen for their aunt.
Princess Margaret
-
When you have children, you're obligated to live.
Anne Tyler
-
A scout troop consists of twelve little kids dressed like schmucks following a big schmuck dressed like a kid.
Jack Benny
-
Sometimes God calms the storm and sometimes He calms his child.
John H. Groberg
-
There is always some kid who may be seeing me for the first time. I owe him my best.
Joe DiMaggio
-
Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.
Eugene Ionesco
-
My quest these days is to find my long lost inner child, but I'm afraid if I do, I'll end up with food in my hair and way too in love with the cats.
Kenny Loggins
-
You know the only people who are always sure about the proper way to raise children? Those who've never had any.
Bill Cosby
-
All life on Earth is subject to the rumbles and rockings of the parent stucture which has no control over the disastrous effects of its stresses and strains on whatever thrives on its surface. The ambitions and dreams of men are irrelevant to this planetary giant which pursues its own way in its own manner. Man is its child, tenant and still, to this date, its captive.
Jack Kirby
-
I met with my lawyers. They gave me all the wrong advice. For a long time I refused to accept the child was mine. I should have met her, arranged a DNA test and accepted my responsibility.
Boris Becker
-
The burden God places on each of us is to become who we are meant to be. We are most fully ourselves when Christ most fully lives in us and through us. The mother shines brightest with her child in her arms, the father when he forgives his wandering son, and the artist when he or she is drawing attention to grace, by showing the pinprick of light overcoming the darkness in the painting, or the story, or the song. The world knows darkness. Christ came into the world to show us light. I have seen it, have been blinded by it, invaded by it. I will tell its story.
Andrew Peterson
-
Out of the sky, the birds, the parrots, the bells, silk, cloth, and drums, out of Sundays dancing, children's words and love words, out of love for the little fists of children, I will build a world, my world with round shoulders.
Aime Cesaire
-
The angel of mercy, the child of love, together had flown to the realms above.
Fanny Crosby
-
There is no doubt that the princess did become a queen—-not only on the screen. One of the most loved, one of the most skillful, one of the most intelligent, one of the most sensitive, charming actresses—-and friends, in my life—-but also in the later stages of her life, the UNICEF ambassador to the children of the world. The generosity, sensitivity, the nobility of her service to the children of the world and the mothers of the world will never be forgotten.
Gregory Peck
-
I'm not a role model... Just because I dunk a basketball doesn't mean I should raise your kids.
Charles Barkley
-
I like flowers, I also like children, but I do not chop their heads off and keep them in bowls of water around the house.
George Bernard Shaw
-
There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.
Anatole Broyard
-
A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
Ogden Nash
-
What matters is abuse, and how it is anchored in a religion that denies women their rights as humans. What matters is that atrocities against women and children are carried out in Europe. What matters is that governments and societies must stop hiding behind a hollow pretense of tolerance so that they can recognize and deal with the problem.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
-
Like a child standing in a beautiful park with his eyes shut tight, there's no need to imagine trees, flowers, deer, birds, and sky; we merely need to open our eyes and realize what is already here, who we already are - as soon as we stop pretending we're small or unholy.
Bo Lozoff
-
Recommend to your children virtue; that alone can make them happy, not gold.
Ludwig van Beethoven
-
Mothers sometimes are overly possessive, but not all children allow themselves to be possessed.
Robert Bloch
-
What I’m saying is I think life is staggering and we’re just used to it. We all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we’re givenâit’s just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral.
Donald Miller
-
The darn trouble with cleaning the house is it gets dirty the next day anyway, so skip a week if you have to. The children are the most important thing.
Barbara Bush
-
The woman who creates and sustains a home, and under whose hands children grow up to be strong and pure men and women, is a creator second only to God.
Helen Hunt Jackson
-
Being a good mother does not call for the same qualities as being a good housewife; a dedication to keeping children clean and tidy may override an interest in their separate development as individuals.
Ann Oakley
-
A lot of pop music is about stealing pocket money from children.
Ian Anderson
-
If your parents never had children, chances are... neither will you.
Dick Cavett
-
The light was leaving in the west it was blue The children's laughter sang and skipping just like the stones they threw the voices echoed across the way its getting late It was just another night with the sun set and the moon rise not so far behind to give us just enough light to lay down underneath the stars listen to papas translations of the stories across the sky we drew our own constellations
Jack Johnson
-
Do not count the days, do not count the miles. Count only the Germans you have killed. Kill the German - this is your old mother's prayer. Kill the German - this is what your children beseech you to do. Kill the German - this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.
Ilya Ehrenburg
-
The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them.
Frank A. Clark
-
Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
Sam Levenson
-
The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes skeptical, or infidels, or agnostics, or atheists.
William Jennings Bryan
-
Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
John Irving
-
I have also seen children successfully surmounting the effects of an evil inheritance. That is due to purity being an inherent attribute of the soul.
Mahatma Gandhi
-
I believe that the fight against crime starts in the home. Parents must take responsibility for their children and show them love and guidance from an early age so they learn to respect the rights of others.
Blanche Lincoln
-
The Polar Express is about faith, and the power of imagination to sustain faith. It's also about the desire to reside in a world where magic can happen, the kind of world we all believed in as children, but one that disappears as we grow older.
Chris Van Allsburg
-
Humanity, let us say, is like people packed in a automobile which is traveling downhill without lights at a terrific speed and driven by a four-year-old child. The signposts along the way are all marked "progress."
Lord Dunsany
-
The Civilized… murder their children by producing too many of them without being able to provide for their well-being. Morality or theories of false virtue stimulate them to manufacture cannon fodder, anthills of conscripts who are forced to sell themselves out of poverty. This improvident paternity is a false virtue, the selfishness of pleasure.
Charles Fourier
-
The future? Like unwritten books and unborn children, you don't talk about it.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
-
If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.
Pearl S. Buck
-
What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?
Malcolm Gladwell
-
Setting a good example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age.
William Feather
-
Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply... For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.
Alan Paton
-
Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.
Nicole Krauss
-
Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards - the things we live by and teach our children - are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.
Walt Disney
-
I'm not perfect, I do drink. I do smoke. Carson Daly can't go out and get messed up, he can't smoke in front of kids - he's the face of MTV, and he has to be good. But me? I can.
Tara Reid
-
You never know when you might come home and find Mam sitting by the fire chatting with a woman and a child, strangers. Always a woman and child. Mam finds them wandering the streets and if they ask, Could you spare a few pennies, miss? her heart breaks. She never has money so she invites them home for tea and a bit of fried bread and if it's a bad night she'll let them sleep by the fire on a pile of rags in the corner. The bread she gives them always means less for us and if we complain she says there are always people worse off and we can surely spare a little from what we have.
Frank McCourt
-
Always kiss your children goodnight, even if they're already asleep.
H. Jackson Brown Jr
-
I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Isaac Newton
-
After all I've done for you' has alienated more children from their parents than any act of parent cruelty.
Dorothy Rowe
-
I loathed school. I don't have an academic mind, and besides I was so bored by my teachers! How teachers can take a child's inventiveness and say yes, yes, in that pontifical way of theirs, and smother everything!
John Hurt
-
What if all tomorrow brings is ashes and glass, and I can't tell you child, 'this too shall pass.' If all the world were windswept, cold and gray. And in the end there's nothing left to say.
Bob Weir
-
God takes care of imbeciles, little children and artists.
Camille Pissarro
-
In all this world there is nothing so beautiful as a happy child,
L. Frank Baum
-
Few things are more delightful than grandchildren fighting over your lap.
Doug Larson
-
He's convinced most human adults do not know how to play anymore and that playing is one of the best ways to think. Franky finds children, by far, much more pleasant and intelligent than most adults, but they are easily ruined by their families, schools, and society. He says one of the ways they are ruined is by being forced to think of all the tasks that need to be done as work, not as play. It takes the joy out of living.
William Wharton
-
When you hold a child to your breast to nurse, the curve of the little head echoes exactly the curve of the breast it suckles, as though this new person truly mirrors the flesh from which it sprang.
Diana Gabaldon
-
It defies common sense that stores are fined for selling toy guns to children, but someone who isn't even allowed to board an airplane in this country can purchase as many real guns he wants with no questions asked.
Carolyn McCarthy
-
In a time of tight budgets, difficult choices have to be made. We must make sure our very limited resources are spent on priorities. I believe we should have no higher priority than investing in our children's classrooms and in their future.
Bob Riley
-
A person's got to think, otherwise that person's no better than a trained seal balancing a ball on his nose. If only that seal could think, he'd know he was making a thousand children laugh.
Bette Greene
-
Children... are our legacy. Our responsibility. They are our destiny and we are theirs. The extent to which we fail as parents, we fail as God's children.
Dirk Benedict
-
The educating of the parents is really the education of the child children tend to live what is unlived in the parents, so it is vital that parents should be aware of their inferior, their dark side, and should press on getting to know themselves.
Laurens van der Post
-
I can laugh at peasants and townies chained all their lives to a tiny corner of the earth while I roam its face and see its wonders, but when I go down, there will be no child to carry my name, no family to mourn me save my comrades, no one to remember, no one to raise a marker over my cold bit of ground.
Glen Cook
-
Cease to be a disobedient child in the school of experience, and begin to learn, with humility and patience, the lessons that are set for your ultimate perfection.
James Allen
-
I love it when women come up to me and tell me I'm a positive influence on their lives and the lives of their young daughters. That's a great feeling.
Gillian Anderson
-
What we are teaches the child far more than what we say, so we must be what we want our children to become.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
-
Her magic formula for dealing with children is ignoring all faults and accenting tiny virtues. She says, "Instead of telling Tommy day in and day out that he is the naughtiest boy in the United States of America, which could very well be true, take an aspirin and comment on his neatly tied shoes. Almost anybody would rather be known for expert shoe-tying than for kicking the cat." She always tells whiners how charming they are—bullies how brave—bad sports how good—sneaks how honest!
Betty MacDonald
-
David what your mother did to you was wrong. Verry wrong.No child deserves to be treated like that. She's sick.
Dave Pelzer
-
The relation between parents and children is essentially based on teaching.
Gilbert Highet
-
It is more beautiful to trust in God. The beautiful in this world is all from his hand, declaring the perfection of taste; he is the author of all form; he clothes the lily, he colours the rose, he distils the dewdrop, he makes the music of nature; in a word, he organized us for this life, and imposed its conditions; and they are such guaranty to me that, trustful as a little child, I leave to him the organization of my Soul, and every arrangement for the life after death. I know he loves me.
Lew Wallace
-
A child, like your stomach, doesn't need all you can afford to give it.
Frank A. Clark
-
Being constantly with children was like wearing a pair of shoes that were expensive and too small. She couldn't bear to throw them out, but they gave her blisters.
Beryl Bainbridge
-
Parents with meager means have the same aspirations for their children as other parents. Children from poor families have the same needs as other children.
Mark Sanford
-
Books should be cherished, like children, books are for the next generation, like children, like history.
Edna Ferber
-
Children need models rather than critics.
Joseph Joubert
-
Family: A social unit where the father is concerned with parking space, the children with outer space, and the mother with closet space.
Evan Esar
-
You must be ready to give up everything, not only material attachments but also human attachments - father, mother, wife, children - everything that you have. But the one thing which you have to abandon unconditionally is your self.
Bede Griffiths
-
One of the greatest challenges in collecting child support is that deadbeat dads move from job to job and state to state. it's hard to keep track of them.
Rod Blagojevich
-
If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.
Mahatma Gandhi
-
Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real." "Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit. "Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.
Margery Williams
-
The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously "the people of the book." There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street.
Malcolm Gladwell
-
Lifestyles and sex roles are passed from parents to children as inexorably as blue eyes or small feet.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
-
Children usually do not blame themselves for getting lost.
Anna Freud
-
We should never permit ourselves to do anything that we are not willing to see our children do.
Brigham Young
-
Blame is for God and small children.
Dustin Hoffman
-
It's the continuation of everyone's childhood to see these young children who grow up full of life, full of intelligence, full of a sense of wonder. And within an instant they're gone from this world. It's terrible.
Lucien Bouchard
-
I believe that an author who cannot control her characters is, like a mother who cannot control her children, not really fit to look after them.
Margery Allingham
-
Now the thing about having a baby - and I can't be the first person to have noticed this - is that thereafter you have it.
Jean Kerr
-
A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.
Katherine Anne Porter
-
The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.
Erich Fromm
-
Children are our second chance to have a great parent-child relationship.
Laura Schlessinger
-
They [Narnia] are, perhaps, the greatest classics of children’s literature of the twentieth century.
Douglas Gresham
-
Upon the shoulders of you mothers rests; in a great measure, the responsibility of correctly developing the mental and moral powers of the rising generation...I have often said it is the mother who forms the mind of the child. Take men anywhere, at sea, sinking with their ship, dying in battle, lying down in death almost under any circumstances, and the last thing they think if, the last word they say is "mother." Such is the influence of woman.
Wilford Woodruff
-
The old - like children - talk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secrets are one's own!
Eugene O'Neill
-
...those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child.
Katherine Paterson
-
If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
-
I want to have children, but my friends scare me. One of my friends told me she was in labor for 36 hours. I don't even want to do anything that feels good for 36 hours.
Rita Rudner
-
Nothing's as mean as giving a little child something useful for Christmas.
Kin Hubbard
-
Your children need your presence more than your presents.
Jesse Jackson
-
Someone accompanies every soul from the other side when it enters this place. Usually it is an ancestor with whom that child shares traits and gifts.
Joy Harjo
-
What God is to the world, parents are to their children.
Philo
-
The childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day.
John Milton
-
I had come to discover that "safe" was an illusion, a pretense that adults wrapped around their children- and sometimes themselves- to make the world seem comfortable. I had discovered that under that thin cover of let's-pretend, monsters and nightmares lay, and that not all of them came from places like the moonroads or the nightling cities. Some of the monsters were people we knew. People we thought we could trust.
Holly Lisle
-
What my children appear to be on the surface is no matter to me. I am fooled neither by gracious manners nor by bad manners. I am interested in what is truly beneath each kind of manners...I want my children to be people- each one separate- each one special- each one a pleasant and exciting variation of all the others
William Saroyan
-
The opponents of my budget propose taking $200 million out of our classrooms and instead spending it on a larger school employee pay raise. Our focus should be on making sure our children come first.
Bob Riley
-
I wish to thank my parents for making it all possible... and I wish to thank my children for making it necessary.
Victor Borge
-
In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics...For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.
Polybius
-
If you want to fight a war on drugs, sit down at your own kitchen table and talk to your own children.
Barry McCaffrey
-
A righteous father protects his children with his time and presence.
Howard W. Hunter
-
Fortunately for children, the uncertainties of the present always give way to the enchanted possibilities of the future.
Gelsey Kirkland
-
World, they have taken the small children like butterflies and thrown them, beating their wings, into the fire—
Nelly Sachs
-
Sometimes there is a wellspring or river of something beautiful and possible in the tenderest sense that comes to and from the most broken of children, and I was one of these, and whatever is was, I can't name, I can only thank. Perhaps it is the water of life that saves us, after all.
Linda Hogan
-
Congress is headed in the wrong direction with this bill which removes any and all incentives from the food industry to improve their products for children.
Bob Filner
-
We study ourselves three weeks, we love each other three months, we squabble three years, we tolerate each other thirty years, and then the children start all over again.
Hippolyte Taine
-
How could they say that they truly loved each other? They had simply grown up together, been children together, and the proximity of it, the closeness of it, had produced in them love s illusion. And yet—on the other hand—what was love if it wasn't this instinct she felt...
David Guterson
-
Tranquilizers work only if you follow the advice on the bottle - keep away from children.
Phyllis Diller
-
If your parents didn't have any children, there's a good chance that you won't have any.
Clarence Day
-
A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
-
It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.
Anne Tyler
-
Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.
Wayne Dyer
-
We worship"¦the powers that speak to our souls, if it seems they do. We do so knowing there is more to the world, and the half-world, and perhaps worlds beyond, than we can grasp. We always knew that. We can't even stop children from dying, how would we presume to understand the truth of things? Behind things? Does the presence of one power deny another? [p. 176]
Guy Gavriel Kay
-
Children will not remember you for the material things you provided but for the feeling that you cherished them.
Richard L. Evans
-
I will suggest that the great aim of our education is to bring out of the child who comes into our hands every faculty that he brings with him, and then to try to win that child to turn all his abilities, his powers, his capacities, to the helping and serving of the community which is a part.
Annie Besant
-
Getting rid of a man without hurting his masculinity is a problem. "Get out" and "I never want to see you again" might sound like a challenge. If you want to get rid of a man, I suggest saying, "I love you. . . . I want to marry you. . . . I want to have your children." Sometimes they leave skid marks.
John Wayne
-
Life is such an effort, Child. It's a war that is renewed each day, and its moments of joy are brief parentheses for which you pay a cruel price.
Oriana Fallaci
-
One out of six women are toxic with mercury. Mercury comes out of coal plants and chlorine plants. I am toxic, I deal with symptoms, children are born with, you know, autism - there is an epidemic in this country. This is like, the air that we breath.
Daphne Zuniga
-
I believe that this neglected, wounded, inner child of the past is the major source of human misery.
John Bradshaw
-
It sometimes happens that the town child is more alive to the fresh beauty of the country than a child who is country born. My brother and I were born in London...but our descent, our interest and our joy were in the north country'. Quoted in The Tale of Beatrix Potter a Biography by Margaret Lane, First Edition p 32-33
Beatrix Potter
-
Deep down, I'm a Texas girl looking for that big romance every girl dreams about. Biologically, I look forward to being a cornerstone of a family. I'll be in my glory when I have a child on my knee.
Renee Zellweger
-
The first half of our lives are ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.
Clarence Darrow
-
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
Sigmund Freud
-
It sounds corny, but I've promised my inner child that never again will I ever abandon myself for anything or anyone else again.
Wynonna Judd
-
Congress should ban advertising that preys upon children, it should stop subsidizing dead-end jobs, it should pass tougher food safety laws, it should protect American workers from serious harm, it should fight against dangerous concentrations of economic power.
Eric Schlosser
-
I have the heart of a child. I keep it in a jar on my shelf.
Robert Bloch
-
Of all the wastes of human ignorance perhaps the most extravagant and costly to human growth has been the waste of the distinctive powers of womanhood after the child-bearing age.
Anna Garlin Spencer
-
She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here—the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.
Annie Dillard
-
There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.
Otto von Bismarck
-
I will now teach my son Increase (and others of my children) the way of raising a lesson out of every verse in his reading of the Bible; and of turning it into a Prayer; and engage him (and them) unto a daily Course in reading the Bible in such a way
Cotton Mather
-
We are the trade union for pensioners and children, the trade union for the disabled and the sick... the trade union for the nation as a whole.
Edward Heath
-
It is a good thing to learn the truth one's self. To first believe with all your heart, and then not to believe, is good too. It fattens the emotions and makes them to stretch. When as a woman life and people disappoint her, she will have had practice in disappointment and it will not come so hard. In teaching your child do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.
Betty Smith
-
I was eleven when my father left, so neither of us really knew our fathers. I’d met mine of course, but then I only knew my dad as a child knows a parent, as a sort of crude outline filled in with one or two colors. I’d never seen my father scared or cry. I’d never heard him admit to any wrongdoing. I have no idea what he dreamed of. And once I’d seen a smile pinned to one cheek and darkness to the other when my mum had yelled at him. Now he was gone, and I was left with just an impressionâone of male warmth, big arms, and loud laughter.
Lloyd Jones
-
Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
-
Most children would rather preserve the fantasy of a loving connection with their fathers and mothers, at all costs, even if it costs them their self-esteem. When you're three or seven years old, it's less frightening to think of yourself as an unlovable, disappointing screwup than to recognize the fact that you're living with a monster.
Keith Ablow
-
There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.
Jean Baudrillard
-
Never raise your hand to your children - it leaves your midsection unprotected.
Robert Orben
-
If you were not a sinful, polluted, helpless, and miserable creature, this Savior would not be suited to you, and you would not be comprehended in his gracious invitations to the children of men.
Archibald Alexander
-
Reasoning with a child is fine, if you can reach the child's reason without destroying your own.
John Mason Brown
-
I shall pray to God to send charity to this hideous world, and sympathy for the weak, and love for the unhappy and unfortunate. I shall ask Him if is indeed His will that a child should suffer and its soul be damned for a little blemish on the body....And I shall pray Him, too, that the hearts of the self-righteous may be broken...
John Wyndham
-
Seems like God don't see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams - but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile.
Lorraine Hansberry
-
A child is a beam of sunlight from the Infinite and Eternal, with possibilities of virtue and vice- but as yet unstained.
Lyman Abbott
-
I was a child when the March on Washington led by Martin Luther King occurred, and I wanted to hear what was going on. I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to contribute in the best way I possibly could.
Andre Braugher
-
The stubbornness I had as a child has been transmitted into perseverance. I can let go but I don't give up. I don't beat myself up about negative things.
Phylicia Rashad
-
The things that brought me the most comfort now were too small to list. Raspberries in cream. Sparrows with cocked heads. Shadows of bare limbs making for sidewalk filigrees. Roses past their prime with their petals loose about them. The shouts of children at play in the neighborhood, Ginger Rogers on the black-and-white screen.
Elizabeth Berg
-
I crossed the room, and what you did was to feel my hair over and over again and in different ways, touch it, with the palm of your hand... felt it, strands of hair, with your fingers, touched it as if it were cloth, the way a child touches its favorite surfaces."
Edna O'Brien
-
Women's liberation is just a lot of foolishness. It's men who are discriminated against. They can't bear children. And no one is likely to do anything about that.
Golda Meir
-
One thing's sure and nothing surer. The rich get richer and the poor get- children
Ron Rash
-
To suppose such a thing possible as a society, in which men, who are able and willing to work, cannot support their families, and ought, with a great part of the women, to be compelled to lead a life of celibacy, for fear of having children to be starved; to suppose such a thing possible is monstrous.
William Cobbett
-
Many Americans are unaware that we still have a large population of working families, elderly, and children who rely on emergency food pantries, shelters, and other resources to meet their nutritional needs.
Blanche Lincoln
-
Most children threaten at times to run away from home. This is the only thing that keeps some parents going.
Phyllis Diller
-
One of the things that my parents have taught me is never listen to other people's expectations. You should live your own life and live up to your own expectations, and those are the only things I really care about it.
Tiger Woods
-
If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in
Rachel Carson
-
What one loves in childhood stays in the heart forever.
Mary Jo Putney
-
Going to school is not the same as going shopping. Parents should not be burdened with locating a suitable school for their child. They should be able to take their child to the neighborhood public school as a matter of course and expect that it has well-educated teachers and a sound educational program.
Diane Ravitch
-
Now that children don't till your fields or take you in when you're incontinent, there is no sensible reason to have them, and it's amazing that with the advent of effective contraception anyone chooses to reproduce at all.
Lionel Shriver
-
As a child, one looks for compliments. As an adult, one looks for evidence of effectiveness.
Ben Bradlee
-
I do remember, as a child, that I always imagined, when I was maybe 6 or 7, my fantasy was that everywhere I went I was being followed by an invisible film crew.
Ben Kingsley
-
All mothers think their children are oaks, but the world never lacks for cabbages.
Robertson Davies
-
My husband's personality was filled with serenity and sunlight. Not even the incurable illness which fell upon him soon after our marriage could long cloud his brow. On the very night of his death he took me in his arms, and during the many months when he lay dying in his wheel chair, he often said jokingly to me: 'Well, have you already picked out a lover?' I blushed with shame. 'Don't deceive me,' he added on one occasion, 'that would seem ugly to me, but pick out an attractive lover, or preferably several. You are a splendid woman, but still half a child, and you need toys.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
-
When an actress takes off her clothes onscreen but a nursing mother is told to leave, what message do we send about the roles of women? In some ways we're as committed to the old madonna-whore dichotomy as ever. And the madonna stays home, feeding the baby behind the blinds, a vestige of those days when for a lady to venture out was a flagrant act of public exposure.
Anna Quindlen
-
We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual.
George Will
-
There are few places outside his own play where a child can contribute to the world in which he finds himself. His world: dominated by adults who tell him what to do and when to do it -benevolent tyrants who dispense gifts to their good subjects and punishment to their bad ones, who are amused at the cleverness of children and annoyed by their stupidities.
Viola Spolin
-
I was the kid next door's imaginary friend.
Emo Philips
-
Having a child who is struggling doesn't make you a bad parent, just as being a child who is struggling doesn't make your child a bad kid.
Ann Douglas
-
Writing about the indignities of old age: the daunting stairway to the restaurant restroom, the benefits of a wheelchair in airports and its disadvantages at cocktail parties, giving the user what he described as a child's-eye view of the party and a crotch-level view of the guests. Dying is a matter of slapstick and pratfalls. The aging process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isn't ready to appear ridiculous.
John Mortimer
-
That which is wrong under one circumstance, may be, and often is, right under another. God said, 'Thou shalt not kill'; at another time He said, 'Thou shalt utterly destroy.' This is the principle on which the government of heaven is conducted"by revelation adapted to the circumstances in which the children of the kingdom are placed. Whatever God requires is right, no matter what it is, although we may not see the reason thereof till long after the events transpire.
Joseph Smith, Jr
-
But in Christianity, by contrast, the freedom of the children of God was also freedom from all important worldly interests, from all art and science, etc.
Bruno Bauer
-
There are times as a parent when you realize that your job is not to be the parent you always imagined you'd be, the parent you always wished you had. Your job is to be the parent your child needs, given the particulars of his or her own life and nature.
Ayelet Waldman
-
The mother loves her child most divinely, not when she surrounds him with comfort and anticipates his wants but when she resolutely holds him to the highest standards and is content with nothing less than his best.
Hamilton Wright Mabie
-
If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.
Marian Wright Edelman
-
All parents believe their children can do the impossible. They thought it the minute we were born, and no matter how hard we've tried to prove them wrong, they all think it about us now. And the really annoying thing is, they're probably right.
Cathy Guisewite
-
Public schools were designed as the great equalizers of our society - the place where all children could have access to educational opportunities to make something of themselves in adulthood.
Janet Napolitano
-
When we, through our educational culture, through the media, through the entertainment culture, give our children the impression that human beings cannot control their passions, we are telling them, in effect, that human beings cannot be trusted with freedom.
Alan Keyes
-
The pain comes from more than the facts of circumstance, or the deeds of others. It comes from within. From understanding what we lost. It comes from knowing how foolish we were - vain, arrogant children - when we thought ourselves happy. It comes from knowing how fragile and doomed the old ways were, just when we thought them and ourselves, secure!. The pain comes from knowing we have never been safe, and therefore will never be safe again. It comes from knowing we can never be children again.
John Jakes
-
I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure. . . . I grew up in utopia.
Kim Stanley Robinson
-
We can believe in the future and work to achieve it and preserve it, or we can whirl blindly on, behaving as if one day there will be no children to inherit our legacy. The choice is ours; the earth is in balance.
Al Gore
-
The sonatas of Mozart are unique; they are too easy for children, and too difficult for artists.
Artur Schnabel
-
Whenever I date a guy, I think, 'Is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?'
Rita Rudner
-
Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father.
Lydia M. Child
-
I ain't good-lookin', but I'm somebody's angel child.
Bessie Smith
-
If you have a great passion it seems that the logical thing is to see the fruit of it, and the fruit are children.
Roman Polanski
-
I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home.
Robert Orben
-
Psychologically I should say that a person becomes an adult at the point when he produces more than he consumes or earns more than he spends. This may be at the age of eighteen, twenty-five, or thirty-five. Some people remain unproductive and dependent children forever and therefore intellectually and emotionally immature.
Henry C. Link
-
Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky.
Fran Lebowitz
-
Every sleepy boy and girl in every bed around the world- Can hear the stars up in the sky whispering a lullaby
Mary Chapin Carpenter
-
It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so.
Ernestine Rose
-
Its a sad moment, really, when parents first become a bit frightened of their children.
Ama Ata Aidoo
-
We want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them.
Dora Russell
-
Members in the Commonwealth of God are not bound together by the specifics of their religion, for the nature of our interdependency does not require this. Rather we are bound by the shared recognition that when one person suffers, all suffer; when we violate one life, all lives are violated; when we pollute the earth, all living things are stained; when one nation threatens the security of another, it, too, becomes less secure; when we place the planet in mortal danger, we hazard the future of our own children as well as the children of our enemies.
Forrest Church
-
There is nothing more thrilling in this world, I think, than having a child that is yours, and yet is mysteriously a stranger.
Agatha Christie
-
The sun was good. The men of the llano were men of the sun. The men of the farms along the river were men of the moon. But we were all children of the white sun.
Rudolfo Anaya
-
I trust the time is coming, when the occupation of an instructor to children will be deemed the most honorable of human employment.
Angelina Grimke
-
When a child can be brought to tears, and not from fear of punishment, but from repentance he needs no chastisement. When the tears begin to flow from the grief of their conduct you can be sure there is an angel nestling in their heart.
Horace Mann
-
Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children.
Sitting Bull
-
One of the commonest ailments of the present day is the premature formation of opinion.
Kin Hubbard
-
We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
-
As a young child I had Santa and Jesus all mixed up. I could identify Coke or Pepsi with just one sip, but I could not tell you for sure why they strapped Santa to a cross. Had he missed a house? Had a good little girl somewhere in the world not received the doll he'd promised her, making the father angry?
Augusten Burroughs
-
Every child is a thought in the mind of God, and our task is to recognize this thought and help it toward completion.
Eberhard Arnold
-
Most people think video games are all about a child staring at a TV with a joystick in his hands. I don't. They should belong to the entire family. I want families to play video games together.
Shigeru Miyamoto
-
If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.
Maria Montessori
-
Children are the true connoisseurs. What’s precious to them has no price, only value.
Bel Kaufman
-
Relaxation means releasing all concern and tension and letting the natural order of life flow through one's being.
Donald Curtis
-
Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words—rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition—children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.
John Edgar Wideman
-
For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.
Theodore Roosevelt
-
Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children - but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born.
Garrett Hardin
-
And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained. And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.
Dorothy Allison
-
One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better.
Cesare Pavese
-
Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.
George Eliot
-
The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
Adrienne Rich
-
Poets are people who can still see the world through the eyes of children.
Alphonse Daudet
-
It may be a movement towards becoming like little children to admit that we are generally nothing else.
Charles Williams
-
Being an actor is an extension of telling a story and I loved story telling as a child.
Amanda Burton
-
We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death
Alexander Herzen
-
Children are the proof we've been here . . . they're where we go to when we die. They're the best thing and the most impossible thing, but there's nothing else . . . Life is a riddle and they are the answer. If there's any answer, it has to be them.
Allison Pearson
-
Though now we think of fairy tales as stories intended for very young children, this is a relatively modern idea. In the oral tradition, magical stories were enjoyed by listeners young and old alike, while literary fairy tales (including most of the tales that are best known today) were published primarily for adult readers until the 19th century.
Terri Windling
-
Marriages don't last. When I meet a guy, the first question I ask myself is: is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?
Rita Rudner
-
"¢ As society rapidly changes, individuals will have to be able to function comfortably in a world that is always in flux. Knowledge will continue to increase at a dizzying rate. This means that a content-based curriculum, with a set body of information to be imparted to students, is entirely inappropriate as a means of preparing children for their adult roles.
John Taylor Gatto
-
My music is best understood by children and animals.
Igor Stravinsky
-
A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humors and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly and forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters.
Lord Chesterfield
-
In early childhood you may lay the foundation of poverty or riches, industry or idleness, good or evil, by the habits to which you train your children. Teach them right habits then, and their future life is safe.
Lydia Sigourney
-
The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.
John Lubbock
-
Now, I think that I should have known that he was magic all along. I did know it - but I should have guessed that it would be too much to ask to grow old with and see our children grow up together. So now, he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man.
Jackie Kennedy
-
You will always be your child's favorite toy.
Vicki Lansky
-
I think it's worth trying to be a mother who delights in who her children are, in their knock-knock jokes and earnest questions. A mother who spends less time obsessing about what will happen, or what has happened, and more time reveling in what is.
Ayelet Waldman
-
Have faith to keep all the commandments of God, knowing that they are given to bless His children and bring them joy. [You] will encounter people who pick which commandments they will keep and ignore others that they choose to break. I call this the cafeteria approach to obedience. This practice of picking and choosing will not work. It will lead to misery. To prepare to meet God, one keeps all of His commandments. It takes faith to obey them, and keeping His commandments will strengthen that faith.
Russell M. Nelson
-
At various times during the last four thousand years God has asserted his rights and endeavoured to establish his own authority, his own laws, and his own government among the children of men.
Orson Pratt
-
One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about.
Michael Ende
-
I am deeply saddened by the loss of my children`s grandfather and my very dear friend. I loved big John with all my heart. ... Johnny Cash will, like Will Rogers, stand forever as a symbol of intelligence, creativity, compassion and common sense.
Rodney Crowell
-
What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble?
Benjamin Spock
-
Animation did not become the dominant form of children's television until the '60s.
Annette Funicello
-
There must be a law against forcing children to perform at an early age. Children should have a wonderful childhood. They should not be given too much responsibility.
Maria Callas
-
It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience . . .
George Gissing
-
There's a marketing scheme that tells you that pregnancy and child rearing will make you into a moron, that your kids are only happy when you're buying them stuff. It's hard being a parent, but I laugh a lot and smile a lot and really enjoy it. The ratio of laughter to sadness is higher. There's part of me that wants to broadcast that. Parenting only affirmed what I already cared about, and that's good
Dar Williams
-
Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.
Muriel Spark
-
Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children.
William Penn
-
Don't get so involved in the duties of your life and your children that you forget the pleasure. Remember why you had children.
Lois Wyse
-
I am married to Beatrice Salkeld, a painter. We have no children, except me.
Brendan Behan
-
At the end of the day, every child has learned the Lesson of Spin: Almost every wrong action can be stripped of consequences, along with the need for feelings of guilt and remorse.
Bill O'Reilly
-
Children should be led into the right paths, not by severity, but by persuasion.
Terence
-
Many people spend their entire lifetimes wishing that other people would acknowledge them. They feel this especially about their parents, spouses, children, and friends.
Richard Carlson
-
It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children.
Kingsley Amis
-
Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.
Kenneth Clark
-
The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.
Wendell Phillips
-
Christmas Eve I saw a stable, low and very bare, A little child in a manger. The oxen knew Him, had Him in their care, To men He was a stranger, The safety of the world was lying there, And the world's danger.
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
-
A book , once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book "means" thereafter, perforce, both grammatically and actually, whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it.
James Branch Cabell
-
Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
Erich Fromm
-
She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
-
Perfection is the child of time.
Joseph Hall
-
To tell the truth, I don't read children's books. I'm an adult. I just write them.
William Steig
-
My children are all doing just fine. The mountain dogs are great in this weather. The yorkies are freezing.
Catherine Crier
-
Let your children be as so many flowers, borrowed from God. If the flowers die or wither, thank God for a summer loan of them.
Samuel Rutherford
-
Adults are obsolete children.
Dr. Seuss
-
Young people should be helped, sheltered, ignored, and clubbed if necessary.
Al Capp
-
I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.
Harry S. Truman
-
Unborn children can experience pain even more so than adults as the baby has more pain receptors per square inch than at any other time in its life.
Sam Brownback
-
The last step in parental love involves the release of the beloved; the willing cutting of the cord that would otherwise keep the child in a state of emotional dependence.
Lewis Mumford
-
I was sickly as a child and gravitated to books and drawing. During my early teen years, I spent hundreds of hours at my window, sketching neighborhood children at play. I sketched and listened, and those notebooks became the fertile field of my work later on. There is not a book I have written or a picture I have drawn that does not, in some way, owe them its existence.
Maurice Sendak
-
Between a man and his wife nothing ought to rule but love. Authority is for children and servants, yet not without sweetness.
William Penn
-
I have always loved the process of making the music, reading the letters from the fans who get married to my music, have children to my music and play my music at their funerals.
Wynonna Judd
-
Full of wiles, full of guile, at all times, in all ways, are the children of Men.
Aristophanes
-
Because, in opera, I have to sing for people that are very far from me, instead of, when I sing a song, I try to imagine to sing like in an ear of a child.
Andrea Bocelli
-
Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
-
Every child senses, with all the horse sense that's in him, that any parent is angry inside when children misbehave and they dread more the anger that is rarely or never expressed openly, wondering how awful it might be.
Benjamin Spock
-
Seeing the show is like a visit to the fountain of youth for parents and the children.
Cathy Rigby
-
When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay.
Brian Aldiss
-
If government could create jobs and raise children, socialism would have worked.
George Gilder
-
If my children do not behave according to Islam, if they do not pray for instance, I will punish them.
Abu Bakar Bashir
-
I'm so happy to be able to give kids the opportunity to learn about amazing world of dance and music that I've have been lucky enough to make such a big part of my own life.
Britney Spears
-
I've known Al Gore since he was born. He has been the best little boy, he was a boring child, and he has never done anything wrong.
Cokie Roberts
-
Sleep, Silence's child, sweet father of soft rest, Prince whose approach peace to all mortals brings Indifferent host to shepherds and kings Sole comforter to minds with grief oppressed.
William Drummond
-
A mother never realizes that her children are no longer children.
James Agee
-
Before I married, I had three theories about raising children and no children. Now, I have three children and no theories.
John Wilmot
-
I felt the naivete of a child in my dancing. I cherished that feeling. I had what I call a knowledgeable naivete, and it worked for me.
Judith Jamison
-
The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
-
I believe our Heavenly Father's everlasting purpose for His children is generally achieved by the small and simple things we do for one another. At the heart of the English word "atonement' is the word "one.' If all mankind understood this, there would never be anyone with whom we would not be concerned, regardless of age, race, gender, religion, or social or economic standing. We would strive to emulate the Savior and would never be unkind, indifferent, disrespectful, or insensitive to others.
M. Russell Ballard
-
It should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity.
Michel de Montaigne
-
Children will watch anything, and when a broadcaster uses crime and violence and other shoddy devices to monopolize a child's attention, it's worse than taking candy from a baby. It is taking precious time from the process of growing up.
Newton N. Minow
-
Actors often behave like children, and so we're taken for children. I want to be grown up.
Jeremy Irons
-
Influencing people is dangerous. Their acts and thoughts become your illegitimate children. You can't get away from them and Heaven knows what they mayn't grow up into.
Elizabeth Bibesco
-
Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
Alan Bennett
-
I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
Annie Dillard
-
If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.
Susan B. Anthony
-
I've never been drawn to the feminist movement. I was brought up to believe that men had little to do with the home or children - except to bring in the money.
Beryl Bainbridge
-
As complicated as joint custody is, it allows the delicious contradiction of having children and maintaining the intimacy of life-before-kid s.
Delia Ephron
-
I'm not really a political satirist. I don't kid myself. I'm more interested in doing the mannerisms and the personality.
Rich Little
-
Parents, however old they and we may grow to be, serve among other things to shield us from a sense of our doom. As long as they are around, we can avoid the fact of our mortality; we can still be innocent children.
Jane Howard
-
Idleness among children, as among men, is the root of all evil, and leads to no other evil more certain than ill temper.
Hannah More
-
I felt instantly at home, and wanted only to dismiss Alistair, along with the rest of Justice Hall, that I might have a closer look at the shelves.I had to content myself instead with a strolling perusal, my hands locked behind my back to keep them from reaching out for Le Morte D'Arthur, Caxton 1485 or the delicious little red-and-gilt Bestiary, MS Circa 1250 or.... If I took one down, I should be lost. So I looked, like a hungry child in a sweet shop, and trailed out on my guide's heels with one longing backward glance.
Laurie R. King
-
Stay close to the young... and a little rubs off.
Alan Jay Lerner
-
I've had my moments of insanity. But there is a certain responsibility to set proper examples for your children, and that influences your choices in every aspect of your life.
Andy Garcia
-
A person without a memory is either a child or an amnesiac. A country without a memory is neither a child nor an amnesiac, but neither is it a country.
Mary Astor
-
Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.
Ernest Dimnet
-
Women are nothing but machines for producing children.
Napoleon Bonaparte
-
Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.
Francine Prose
-
All women should know how to take care of children. Most of them will have a husband some day.
Franklin P. Jones
-
Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.
Graham Swift
-
Maybe I wanted children, maybe I didn't, but I wanted the decision to be a choice, not a mandate. Last time I checked, childlessness was only supposed to be a condition of career advancement for nuns.
Peggy Orenstein
-
Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.
Clarence Darrow
-
Children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at.
John Wyndham
-
I know California isn't a real destination. You can't get there from New Jersey, not simply by following a line drawn on a map. The process of arrival is more subtle and complex. It involves acts of contrition. You must appease the gods. You must find novel forms of penance. You must tattoo your children and look at the wonder. It's about conjuring and awakening and intuitions you wish you never had.
Kate Braverman
-
People say to me, âHow do I know if a word is real?' You know, anybody who's read a children's book knows that love makes things real. If you love a word, use it. That makes it real.
Erin McKean
-
A man who gives his children habits of industry provides for them better than by giving them fortune.
Richard Whately
-
Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.
Anne Sullivan
-
We consult astrology charts like the Babylonians, try to make our children into our own image with a firm hand like the Romans, elbow others to get a breath-quickening glimpse of the queen in her ritual procession, and confess to the priests and attend church. And we wonder why, with all this power capital drawn from so many sources, we are deeply anxious about the meaning of our lives. The reason is plain enough: none of these, nor all of them taken together, represents an integrated world conception into which we fit ourselves with pure belief and trust.
Ernest Becker
-
Cosmic upheaval is not so moving as a little child pondering the death of a sparrow in the corner of a barn.
Anouk Aimee
-
Women, then, are only children of a larger growth
Lord Chesterfield
-
No race of barbarians ever existed yet offered up children for money
Samuel Gompers
-
No man can tell but he that loves his children, how many delicious accents make a man's heart dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society.
Jeremy Taylor
-
Satan wants to claim our souls and those of our children. He want our marriages and our families to fail. He wants darkness to reign. Despite thise, we needn't worry or back away from our duty to our family (present or future), our community, or others, for God will always support and bless us in our honest efforts t odo His will. He wants us to suceed more than Satan wants us to fail- and God is always more powerful.
John H. Groberg
-
Finance, like time, devours its own children.
Honore de Balzac
-
Loving a child doesn't mean giving in to all his whims; to love him is to bring out the best in him, to teach him to love what is difficult.
Nadia Boulanger
-
Children listen best with their eyes. What you do is what they hear.
Richard Carlson
-
My dear child, you must believe in God despite what the clergy tells you.
Benjamin Jowett
-
If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood. This is Love.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
-
A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them.
Horace Mann
-
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children, England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Laurence Binyon
-
The pain comes from knowing that we have never been safe, and therefore will never be safe again. It comes from knowing we can never be so ignorant again. It comes from knowing we can never be children again. Losing innocence. Remembering heaven. That was the essence of hell.
John Jakes
-
With children no longer the universally accepted reason for marriage, marriages are going to have to exist on their own merits.
Eleanor Holmes Norton
-
Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present, which seldom happens to us.
Jean de la Bruyere
-
It's the most amazing feeling to hold your child in your arms.
Chris O'Donnell
-
It's always been my feeling that God lends you your children until they're about eighteen years old. If you haven't made your points with them by then, it's too late.
Betty Ford
-
What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese computers?
Walter F. Mondale
-
Children when they ask you why your mama so funny say she is a poet she don't have no sense
Lucille Clifton
-
Basically the children who watch it just see the little characters they love, and so they're not discerning about whether it looks great or it's a great story or anything.
Don Bluth
-
Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals, are in imitation of fighting.
Jonathan Swift
-
Most of the people who will walk after me will be children, so make the beat keep time with short steps.
Hans Christian Andersen
-
Children are the world's most valuable resource and its best hope for the future
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
-
We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization.
Anthony Burgess
-
The question for the child is not Do I want to be good? but Whom do I want to be like?
Bruno Bettelheim
-
Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.
Edgard Varese
-
One of the earliest lessons I learned as a child was that if you looked away from something, it might not be there when you looked back.
John Edgar Wideman
-
Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings?
Graham Swift
-
Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they're going to catch you in next.
Franklin P. Jones
-
For only as we ourselves, as adults, actually move and have our being in the state of love, can we be appropriate models and guides for our children. What we are teaches the child far more than what we say, so we must be what we want our children to become.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
-
The way a child discovers the world constantly replicates the way science began. You start to notice what's around you, and you get very curious about how things work. How things interrelate. It's as simple as seeing a bug that intrigues you. You want to know where it goes at night; who its friends are; what it eats.
David Cronenberg
-
There is in every child a painstaking teacher so skillful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one teaches them anything.
Maria Montessori
-
Parents. . . are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfil the promise of their early years.
Anthony Powell
-
Human empathy, while not found on any chart of human anatomy, is the reason we instinctively hurt for our children... it is the reason that one human being's intensely personal tests and triumphs can be harnessed to the good of countless others.
Keith Ablow
-
For globalization to work for America, it must work for working people. We should measure the success of our economy by the breadth of our middle class, and the scope of opportunity offered to the poorest child to climb into that middle class.
John J. Sweeney
-
There's a time when you have to explain to your children why they're born, and it's a marvelous thing if you know the reason by then.
Hazel Scott
-
Whenever I donate a hunting trip for the Children's Leukemia Foundation, Ronald McDonald Cancer House, all these children's charities, I offer the anti-hunters an opportunity: if you donate more to the children's charity than the hunters donate we won't go hunting.
Ted Nugent
-
Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.
James Russell Lowell
-
I think a person has to believe in something,or search out some kind of faith;otherwise life is empty, nothing.How can you live not knowing why the cranes fly,why children are born, why there are stars in the sky...Either you know why you live,or it's all small, unnecessary bits.
Sarah Ruhl
-
Children are a house's enemy. They don't mean to be - they just can't help it. It's their enthusiasm, their energy, their naturally destructive tendencies.
Delia Ephron
-
Parents don't need government to raise their kids. That's their job. But government can help them protect their children from influences they may not want their kids exposed to.
Rod Blagojevich
-
Adults are just children who earn money.
Kenneth Branagh
-
The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.
Alice Munro
-
To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
-
In the life of children there are two very clear-cut phases, before and after puberty. Before puberty the child's personality has not yet formed and it is easier to guide its life and make it acquire specific habits of order, discipline, and work: after puberty the personality develops impetuously and all extraneous intervention becomes odious, tyrannical, insufferable. Now it so happens that parents feel the responsibility towards their children precisely during this second period, when it is too late: then of course the stick and violence enter the scene and yield very few results indeed. Why not instead take an interest in the child during the first period?
Antonio Gramsci
-
How parents interact with each child as he or she enters the family circle determines in great part that child's final destiny.
Kevin Leman
-
Not that I have any little kids running around I need to keep away from the guns. I had any kids I'd get rid of the guns. Nothing more dangerous to the life of a child than a house full of firearms. Nothing more dangerous except maybe a parent.
Charlie Huston
-
When I was at school my jography told me th' earth was shaped like a orange an' I found out before I was ten that th' whole orange doesn't belong to nobody. No one owns more than his bit of a quarter an' there's times it seems there's not enow quarters to go around. But don't you-none o' you- think as you own th' whole orange or you'll find out you're mistaken, an' you won't find it without hard knocks. What children learns from children, is that there's no sense grabbin' at th' whole orange-peel an' all. If you do you'll likely not get even th' pips, an' them's too bitter to eat.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
-
I look at my books the way parents look at their children. The fact that one becomes more successful than the others doesn't make me love the less successful one any less.
Alex Haley
-
If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weed.
Luther Burbank
-
My parents were very pleased that I was in the army. The fact that I hated it somehow pleased them even more.
Barry Humphries
-
Do not feed children on maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature.
Luther Burbank
-
No wonder people are so horrible when they start life as children.
Kingsley Amis
-
A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.
Josephine Tey
-
A child's kiss is magic. Why else would they be so stingy with them?
Harvey Fierstein
-
Politicians make good company for a while just as children do - their self-enjoyment is contagious. But they soon exhaust their favourite subjects -themselves.
Garry Wills
-
All children have creative power.
Brenda Ueland
-
Men are but children of a larger growth, Our appetites as apt to change as theirs, And full as craving too, and full as vain.
John Dryden
-
Children remind us to treasure the smallest of gifts, even in the most difficult times.
Allen Klein
-
And that's it; that's why I want to teach; that's the one and only compensation: to make a permanent difference in the life of a child.
Bel Kaufman
-
There are times not to flirt. When you're sick. When you're with children. When you're on the witness stand.
Joyce Jillson
-
Children are curious and are risk takers. They have lots of courage. They venture out into a world that is immense and dangerous. A child initially trusts life and the processes of life.
John Bradshaw
-
We need to make a distinction between misled Iraqis, those who believe that they are carrying weapons to liberate Iraq from what they call occupation, and criminal gangs that came from outside and wants to wage a deadly war on the Iraqi people, killing women and children in mosques and churches.
Jalal Talabani
-
Sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritance.
Ruth E Renkel
-
No one who has ever brought up a child can doubt for a moment that love is literally the life-giving fluid of human existence
Smiley Blanton
-
I was always the child who wore her emotions on her sleeve.
Marcia Gay Harden
-
Children should neither be seen or heard from - ever again.
W. C. Fields
-
We know smoking tobacco is not good for kids, but a lot of other things aren't good. Drinking's not good. Some would say milk's not good.
Bob Dole
-
I don't totally believe that all of the politicians see a problem with the gap between the scores of black children and other groups. I believe that many politicians think this has been the way it has always been, so what's the problem?
Barry Williams
-
My wife and children seem to like me quite a bit, and as long as that is true, I'm really OK.
Brian Williams
-
I think when you are the parents of a gifted athlete, the best thing in the world you can do is to encourage them, in my opinion. My dad didn't push me and I didn't push my children in athletics.
Bob Lilly
-
I can't imagine that my children would have fewer rights, and less access to the safest, best health care.
Cecile Richards
-
The worst problems for children stem from parental conflict, before, during, and after divorce or within marriage.
Stephanie Coontz
-
In mid-career, I was at one and the same time the rabbi of a major congregation, writing books, and teaching at Columbia. I didn't spend enough time with my children. Now, when I get an all-important call, I sometimes say that I'm having lunch with my granddaughter. And I do not apologize
Arthur Hertzberg
-
My father was predisposed to drunken rages. I would hide under the bed. My sister and I were talking just the other day about the terror a drunken man in a rage can create in a child.
Antonio Villaraigosa
-
If I had my way no one should be taught to read until after he had passed his hundredth year. In that way, and in that way only can we protect our youth from the dreadful influence of such novels as 'Three Cycles, Not To Mention The Rug,' which dreadful book I have found within the past month in the hands of at least twenty children in the neighborhood, not one of whom was past sixty.
John Kendrick Bangs
-
Viewing the child solely as an immature person is a way of escaping comforting him.
Clark Moustakas
-
If a man has important work, and enough leisure and income to enable him to do it properly, he is in possession of as much happiness as is good for any of the children of Adam.
R. H. Tawney
-
If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.
George Bernard Shaw
-
Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
Beverly Cleary
-
Child abuse casts a shadow the length of a lifetime.
Herbert Ward
-
It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.
John Adams
-
My father had always said there are four things a child needs: plenty of love, nourishing food, regular sleep, and lots of soap and water. After that, what he needs most is some intelligent neglect.
Ivy Baker Priest
-
I won't go into detail but this animated one, the story line is very cool and the kids seem to love it.
Blair Underwood
-
I make decisions for my life, not the other way around. Besides, when you have a kid, you must weigh everything against time with your child.
Debra Winger
-
It's terrifying, that unconditional love you have for a child. I still wonder if she really came from me, from my womb. It's a miracle. I don't understand it. I live it very intensely.
Anne Parillaud
-
I pray that no child of mine would ever descend into such a place as a library. They are indeed most dangerous places and unfortunate is she or he who is lured into such a hellhole of enjoyment, stimulus, facts, passion and fun.
Willy Russell
-
A child is a person who can't understand why someone would give away a perfectly good kitten.
Doug Larson
-
It's not that I don't love the song. My songs are like my children: some you want around and some you want to send off to college as soon as possible.
Bobby McFerrin
-
When my career first began, I didn't have children - so there's a whole lot of difference in the way I choose roles now. Not just films for my children, but how long I'm going to be away, and is Dad going to be home while I'm gone. That sort-of factor plays a part.
Amy Irving
-
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
George Bernard Shaw
-
A small child from a developing country has the advantage, from a very early age, of having access to toys which structure his mind, which constitute a sure advantage over the little African child who has never even held a modern toy.
Abdoulaye Wade
-
Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven.
Henry Ward Beecher
-
The finest inheritance you can give to a child is to allow it to make its own way, completely on its own feet.
Isadora Duncan
-
Children, taught either years beneath their intelligence or miles wide of relevance to it, or both: their intelligence becomes hopelessly bewildered, drawn off its centers, bored, or atrophied.
James Agee
-
I verily believe that a man's way with women is in inverse ratio to his prowess among men. The weakling and the saphead have often great ability to charm the fair sex, while the fighting man who can face a thousand real dangers unafraid, sits hiding in the shadows like some frightened child.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
-
Hungry children are distracted children. We want to make sure nothing gets in the way of our children performing well academically, including hunger.
Arne Duncan
-
Most of us become parents long before we have stopped being children.
Mignon McLaughlin
-
If I have another child, I doubt I'll get married again. I don't think men particularly want to be with me.
Anna Nicole Smith
-
Why did children seem to be so often spontaneous, joy-filled and concentrated while adults seemed controlled, anxiety-filled and diffused? It was the Goddam sense of having a self.
Luke Rhinehart
-
Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.
Chinese Proverbs
-
The absent are like children, helpless to defend themselves.
Charles Reade
-
For all their strength, men were sometimes like little children.
Lawana Blackwell
-
You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.
Franklin P. Jones
-
This is the reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth and are more certain that they are their own.
Aristotle
-
Christmas is for children. But it is for grownups too. Even if it is a headache, a chore, and nightmare, it is a period of necessary defrosting of chill and hide bound hearts.
Lenora Mattingly Weber
-
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
Sigmund Freud
-
I know it's good when I see a smaller film get recognized because it means more publicity for them. When you start producing and directing the movies become a little more like your children.
Campbell Scott
-
Could it be that the atomic isolation of the husband and wife nucleus with an orbiting child or two is in fact a culturally imposed aberration for our species? As ill-suited to our evolved tendencies as corsets, chastity belts, and suits of armor? ...a distorted and distorting family structure inappropriate for our species?
Christopher Ryan
-
I feel like it's me singing back to myself as a younger person and saying have confidence in being a bit different. I really felt I didn't fit in. My dad was from the Caribbean, my mum was English, we lived in quite a white area but we were quite poor, but also quite brainy, and I was a really, really skinny child so I felt a bit awkward about all these things.
Corinne Bailey Rae
-
Scientists are the easiest to fool. ... They think in straight, predictable, directable, and therefore misdirectable, lines. The only world they know is the one where everything has a logical explanation and things are what they appear to be. Children and conjurors-they terrify me. Scientists are no problem; against them I feel quite confident.
James P. Hogan
-
The president appoints the judges. Your lives and your children's lives can change by all of these appellate court judges who will be appointed who will reinterpret laws, and things can change.
Johnnie Cochran
-
Neither of my parents would ever stand in the way of any of their children speaking their minds.
Ron Reagan
-
It was an accident, although I've been involved in some kind of theatrical function or other since I was a child - in school, music, athletics. To me, acting is the most logical way for people's neuroses to manifest themselves, in this great need we all have to express ourselves. To my way of thinking, an actor's course is set even before he's out of the cradle.
James Dean
-
Children have more need of models than of critics.
Carolyn Coats
-
Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.
Bill Cosby
-
Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love.
Sigmund Freud
-
The best inheritance a parent can give to his children is a few minutes of their time each day.
M. Grundler
-
Never underestimate a parent's ability to mortify his child.
Peter Gallagher
-
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
-
All innocent mechanisms are muddied up with experience. Children become less and less translucent. Layers of guile and suspicion grow. It's the law of paternal disenchantments.
Sarah Hall
-
The essence of our effort to see that every child has a chance must be to assure each an equal opportunity, not to become equal, but to become different - to realize whatever unique potential of body, mind and spirit he or she possesses
John Fischer
-
A child is fed with milk and praise.
Mary Lamb
-
When I got a telly we had no aerial, but I discovered that if I or one of the children stood by it you could get a picture. So I had to make a statue that could stand by the telly.
Beryl Bainbridge
-
Too many people grow up. That's the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up. They forget. They don't remember what it's like to be 12 years old. They patronize, they treat children as inferiors. Well I won't do that.
Walt Disney
-
No matter how old we become, we can still call them 'Holy Mother' and 'Father' and put a child-like trust in them.
Desmond Morris
-
Children are the most desirable opponents at scrabble as they are both easy to beat and fun to cheat.
Fran Lebowitz
-
Because Jesus Christ has prepared Himself from the foundations of the world we can trust Him as one uniquely qualified through the fullness of His love for His Father and us. His love, meekness, condescension, knowledge, power, commitment to agency, and obedience combine to bring this elusive peace to all of God’s children. Our peace was purchased by the shedding of the innocent blood of God’s purest Son. Our trust in His capacity to bring us this peace can be complete because that has been part of His work and His glory from the beginning.
David Wright
-
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James Arthur Baldwin
-
You must work, we must all work, to make the world worthy of its children.
Pablo Casals
-
Flowers that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their coloring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children - honored as the jewelry of God only by them - when suddenly the voice of Christianity, counter-signing the voice of infancy, raised them to a grandeur transcending the Hebrew throne, although founded by God himself, and pronounced Solomon in all his glory not to be arrayed like one of these.
Thomas de Quincey
-
In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection; otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books.
Michel de Montaigne
-
No one seriously disputes that today a woman in Afghanistan is less likely to die giving birth to a child, that the child is more likely to reach the age of five years old, and having reached the age of five that child is far more likely to have a chance to go to school.
Graeme Smith
-
The greatest gift you and your partner can give your children is the example of an intimate, healthy, and loving relationship.
Barbara de Angelis
-
It takes a heap o' children to make a home that's true,And home can be a palace grand, or just a plain, old shoe;But if it has a mother dear, and a good old dad or two,Why, that's the sort of good old home for good old me and you.
Louis Untermeyer
-
There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.
Victor Hugo
-
You know you've made it when you've been moulded in miniature plastic. But you know what children do with Barbie dolls - it's a bit scary, actually.
Cate Blanchett
-
The reason teaching has to go on is that children are not born human; they are made so.
Jacques Barzun
-
A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
Victor Hugo
-
Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it out and then practice deception themselves.
Elias Canetti
-
I will appoint men and women to the Federal judiciary who share my view of unborn children as constitutionally protected and who will unhesitatingly vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. If nominated by my party, I will select my running mate from among a list of men and women fully committed to protection of the unborn.
Gary Bauer
-
When a woman is twenty, a child deforms her; when she is thirty, he preserves her; and when forty, he makes her young again.
Leon Blum
-
With children use force; with men reason; such is the natural order of things. The wise man requires no law.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
-
The most amazing thing about little children ... was their fantastic adaptability.
Kristin Hunter
-
Like most people, I gave little thought during my life to the scourge of child pornography. But, I now know we are fighting a losing battle. The predators are sophisticated in the use of computers and talented in the manipulation of children.
Kurt Eichenwald
-
Of all nature's gifts to the human race, what is sweeter to a man than his children?
Marcus Tullius Cicero
-
If nature had arranged that husbands and wives should have children alternatively, there would never be more than three in a family.
Laurence Housman
-
I don't think children are any more resilent than anyone else. They're just people with little bodies.
Kirstie Alley
-
All children should be welcomed into the world and protected by the law. As President, I would immediately repeal President Clinton's five executive orders that promote abortion. I support a human life bill that defines unborn children as persons under the 14th Amendment. I will vigorously defend the pro-life plank in the Republican platform.
Gary Bauer
-
Another good thing about being poor is that when you are seventy your children will not have you declared legally insane in order to gain control of your estate.
Woody Allen
-
A little girl without a doll is almost as unfortunate and quite as impossible as a woman without children
Victor Hugo
-
When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.
Mark Twain
-
Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.
Victor Hugo
-
I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: 'Checkout Time is 18 years.'
Erma Bombeck
-
A child's a plaything for an hour.
Mary Lamb
-
Women are the fulfilled sex. Through our children we are able to produce our own immortality, so we lack that divine restlessness which sends men charging off in pursuit of fortune or fame or an imagined Utopia. That is why we number so few geniuses among us. The wholesome oyster wears no pearl, the healthy whale no ambergris, and as long as we can keep on adding to the race, we harbor a sort of health within ourselves.
Phyllis McGinley
-
Do not feed children on a maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature. Let their souls drink in all that is pure and sweet. Rear them, if possible, amid pleasant surroundings ... Let nature teach them the lessons of good and proper living, combined with an abundance of well-balanced nourishment. Those children will grow to be the best men and women. Put the best in them by contact with the best outside. They will absorb it as a plant absorbs the sunshine and the dew.
Luther Burbank
-
Graduation day is tough for adults. They go to the ceremony as parents. They come home as contemporaries. After twenty-two years of child-raising, they are unemployed
Erma Bombeck
-
Don't bother discussing sex with small children. They rarely have anything to add.
Fran Lebowitz
-
Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
William Makepeace Thackeray
-
Yesterday in Egypt, archaeologists discovered the burial site for the 50 children of Ramses II...Fifty children! What I want to know is, who decided to name a condom after this guy?
Conan O'Brien
-
Debts are nowadays like children begot with pleasure, but brought forth in pain
Moliere
-
It is the duty of children to wait on elders, and not the elders on children
African Proverb
-
God listens for nothing so tenderly, as when His children help each other by their testimonies to His goodness and the way in which He has brought them deliverance.
Horace Bushnell
-
Secretary of State Colin Powell himself eloquently pointed out the many ways to get at the root of this problem-economic, diplomatic, legal and political, as well as military. A rush to launch precipitous military counterattacks runs too great a risk that more innocent men, women, children will be killed. I could not vote for a resolution that I believe could lead to such an outcome.
Barbara Lee