quotations about children
Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest. That’s not the way my people rear their children. They let them experience the world as it is.
CHINUA ACHEBE
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Philadelphia Inquirer, Apr. 2, 2008
Children are natural mimics. They act like their parents in spite of every attempt to teach them good manners.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
Nobody's born rotten. You just don't have bad kids. It's not true. There is no such thing. But we can make them bad.
JEAN LIEDLOFF
interview, Touch the Future, fall 1998
Few are fit to train monkeys, yet not one of us but thinks himself competent to bring up children.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
[Children are] like talking animals. Their consciousness is so different from ours that they constitute a different species. They don't have to be particularly interesting children; just the fact that they are children is sufficient. They don't know what anything is, so they have to make it up. No matter how dull they are, they still have to figure things out for themselves.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
The Paris Review, summer 1993
If children had teachers for judgment and eloquence just as they have for languages, if their memory was exercised less than their energy or their natural genius, if instead of deadening their vivacity of mind we tried to elevate the free scope and impulse of their souls, what might not result from a fine disposition? As it is, we forget that courage, or love of truth and glory are the virtues that matter most in youth; and our one endeavour is to subdue our children's spirits, in order to teach them that dependence and suppleness are the first laws of success in life.
LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES
Reflections and Maxims
The family is both the fundamental unit of society as well as the root of culture. It ... is a perpetual source of encouragement, advocacy, assurance, and emotional refueling that empowers a child to venture with confidence into the greater world and to become all that he can be.
MARIANNE E. NEIFERT
Dr. Mom's Parenting Guide
Having a baby dragged me, kicking and screaming, from the world of self-absorption.
PAUL REISER
Good Housekeeping, 1997
A child is an uncut diamond.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Motherhood is an early retirement position. Your children do grow up.
COLLEEN PARRO
PBS interview
It's the children the world almost breaks who grow up to save it.
FRANK WARREN
attributed, The Little Red Book of Hope
She not only loves her children, she respects them. They have wills, tastes, thoughts, judgments of their own, and this is as she wishes it to be. She distinguishes clearly between counsel and command: command must be obeyed; counsel may be disregarded without rebuke and without loss of favor.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
Self-esteem is the real magic wand that can form a child’s future. A child’s self-esteem affects every area of her existence, from friends she chooses, to how well she does academically in school, to what kind of job she gets, to even the person she chooses to marry.
STEPHANIE MARTSON
The Magic of Encouragement
How will I be remembered by my children? This is the true measure of a man.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
It is no small thing, when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.
CHARLES DICKENS
Master Humphrey's Clock
Your children are not little mirrors reflecting back the good or bad job you've done.
HARRIET LERNER
Twitter post, May 17, 2014
That energy which makes a child hard to manage is the energy which afterward makes him a manager of life.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love's own product. The child, this in-between, to which the lovers now are related and which they hold in common, is representative of the world in that it also separates them; it is an indication that they will insert a new world into the existing world. Through the child, it is as though the lovers return to the world from which their love had expelled them. But this new worldliness, the possible result and the only possibly happy ending of a love affair, is, in a sense, the end of love, which must either overcome the partners anew or be transformed into another mode of belonging together.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Human Condition
A childless man is like a loose engine in a ship. A man must be bolted and screwed to the community before he can work well for its advancement; and there are no such screws and bolts as children.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
I believe the children are the future... Unless we stop them now!
HOMER SIMPSON
"The Wandering Juvie", The Simpsons