quotations about children
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
Having a child is surely the most beautifully irrational act that two people in love can commit.
BILL COSBY
Fatherhood
How will I be remembered by my children? This is the true measure of a man.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
Thus parents, by humouring and cockering them when little, corrupt the principles of nature in their children, and wonder afterwards to taste the bitter waters, when they themselves have poison'd the fountain.
JOHN LOCKE
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
I wasn't really that informed about the two-year-old. Oh, I'd read about them, and occasionally I'd see documentaries on the Discovery Channel showing two-year-olds in the wild, where they belong.
RAY ROMANO
Everything and a Kite
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
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
Parents of young children should realize that few people, and maybe no one, will find their children as enchanting as they do.
BARBARA WALTERS
How to Talk with Practically Anybody About Practically Anything
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
Motherhood is an early retirement position. Your children do grow up.
COLLEEN PARRO
PBS interview
I believe the children are the future... Unless we stop them now!
HOMER SIMPSON
"The Wandering Juvie", The Simpsons
Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
Half the human race are taken out of the world as children. I think that proves God's great fondness for children as children.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
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
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
Our children are the only possessions we can take to heaven.
CROFT M. PENTZ
The Complete Book of Zingers
Most children feel immortal--they have no sense that they're ever going to die. For a child, even growing up is something that's barely comprehensible.
JOHN SAUL
Shadows
There are children playing in the street 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
attributed, Pearls of Wisdom
Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides