The position of children as a group, in a commercial society, is not wholly advantageous. A commercial society urges its citizens to be responsible for things, but not for people. It is the unquestioned assumption of a mercantile culture that things need and deserve attention, but that people can take care of themselves.

it is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.

Not being one to calculate or look ahead, I had not stopped to think, when boys started paying attention to me, that the cup might be dashed from my lips, though experience should have taught me that dashing cups from lips was the way Victorian parents got most of their exercise.

A person may be totally unimaginative and have the social vision of a mole, and we still call him a decent man.

The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality

Working with children is the easiest part of educating for democracy, because children are still undefeated and have no stake in being prejudiced.

The stress laid on upward social mobility in the United States has tended to obscure the fact that there can be more than one kind of mobility and more than one direction in which it can go. There can be ethical mobility as well as financial, and it can go down as well as up.