If they learn easily, they are penalized for being bored when they have nothing to do; if they excel in some outstanding way, they are penalized as being conspicuously better than the peer group. The culture tries to make the child with a gift into a one-sided person, to penalize him at every turn, to cause him trouble in making friends and to create conditions conducive to the development of a neurosis. Neither teachers, the parents of other children, nor the child peers will tolerate a Wunderkind.

Women are scolded both for being mothers and for not being mothers, for wanting to eat their cake and have it too, and for not wanting to eat their cake and have it too.

there are now no elders who know more than the young themselves about what the young are experiencing.

In this country, some people start being miserable about growing old while they are still young.

It is typical, in America, that a person's hometown is not the place where he is living now but is the place he left behind.

The prophet who fails to present a bearable alternative and yet preaches doom is part of the trap that he postulates.

the experience of having brothers and sisters, born of the same parents, sleeping under the same roof, eating at the same table, is an inescapable, delightful and repelling, desired and abhorred part of each child's life.