For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.

We are still barely conscious of how harmful it is to treat children in a degrading manner. Treating them with respect and recognizing the consequences of their being humiliated are by no means intellectual matters; otherwise, their importance would long since have been generally recognized.

Problems cannot be solved with words, but only through experience.

People who, as children, were intellectually far beyond their parents and therefore admired by them, but who also therefore had to solve their own problems alone. These people, who give us a feeling of their intellectual strength and will power, also seem to demand that we, too, ought to fight off any feeling of weakness with intellectual means. In their presence one feels one cannot be recognized as a person with problems just as they and their problems were unrecognized by their parents, for whom he always had to be strong.

Discipline is ... life-inhibiting, is at the very least curtailment of vital activity insofar as the latter cannot develop as it wishes but is confined within specific limits and subjected to specific rules.

The father receives his power from God (and from his own father). The teacher finds the soil already prepared for obedience, and the political leader has only to harvest what has been sown.

For some years now, there has been proof that the devastating effects of the traumatization of children take their inevitable tollon society--a fact that we are still forbidden to recognize. This knowledge concerns every single one of us, and--if disseminated widely enough--should lead to fundamental changes in society; above all, to a halt in the blind escalation of violence.