Popular quotes about Children! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 8
Here's the progression. Feminism won; you can have it all; of course you want children; mothers are better at raising children than fathers; of course your children come first; of course you come last; today's children need constant attention, cultivation, and adoration, or they'll become failures and hate you forever; you don't want to fail at that; it's easier for mothers to abandon their work and their dreams than for fathers; you don't want it all anymore (which is good because you can't have it all); who cares about equality, you're too tired; and whoops--here we are in 1954.
Susan J. DouglasWinthrop and his shipmates and their children and their children's children just wrote their own books and pretty much kept their noses in them up until the day God created the Red Sox.
Sarah VowellChildren are our crop, our fields, our earth. They are birds let loose into darkness. They are errors renewed. Still, they are the only source from which may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own. Somehow they will do one thing, take one step further, they will see the summit. We believe in it, the radiance that streams from the future, from days we will not see. Children must live, must triumph. Children must die; that is an idea we cannot accept.
James SalterThe real questions for parents should be: "Are you engaged? Are you paying attention?" If so, plan to make lots of mistakes and bad decisions. Imperfect parenting moments turn into gifts as our children watch us try to figure out what went wrong and how we can do better next time. The mandate is not to be perfect and raise happy children. Perfection doesn't exist, and I've found what makes children happy doesn't always prepare them to be courageous, engaged adults.
Brenรฉ BrownThe economic benefits of investing in children have been extensively documented. Investing fully in children today will ensure the well-being and productivity of future generations for decades to come. By contrast, the physical, emotional and intellectual impairment that poverty inflicts on children canmean a lifetime of suffering and want - and a legacy of poverty for the next generation.
Carol BellamyIt is one of the paradoxes of parenting, and often a painful paradox, that even as our children need us for love and trust, they also need us for honest differing. It's not only over limits and rules...[but also] about what we represent in the way of culture, traditions, and values. We owe it to our children to let them know what we believe, and if they differ with us, we owe it to them to be honest adversaries, for it is through this honest confrontation that children can grow into adults who have a firm sense of their place in the sequence of the generations.
Fred RogersIt's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.
Joyce MaynardApparently almost anyone can do a better job of educating children than our so-called 'educators' in the public schools. Children who are home-schooled by their parents also score higher on tests than children educated in the public schools. ... Successful education shows what is possible, whether in charter schools, private schools, military schools or home-schooling. The challenge is to provide more escape hatches from failing public schools, not only to help those students who escape, but also to force these institutions to get their act together before losing more students and jobs.
Thomas SowellSociety does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children - but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born.
Garrett HardinPlease don't kill the child. I want the child. Please give me the child. I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted, and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child, and be loved by the child. From our children's home in Calcutta alone, we have saved over 3,000 children from abortions. These children have brought such love and joy to their adopting parents, and have grown up so full of love and joy!
Mother TeresaContrary to popular opinion, the most important characteristic of a godly mother is not her relationship with her children. It is her love for her husband. The love between husband and wife is the real key to a thriving family. A healthy home environment cannot be built exclusively on the parents' love for their children. The properly situated family has marriage at the center; families shouldn't revolve around the children.
John F. MacArthurDon't be too dismissive of children. While it's true that few children are artists, all artists are children.
Ned RoremI feel that our planet is in peril and that creating a sustainable planet for my children and my children's children is the most important thing I can do in this lifetime.
Kyra SedgwickThe doctors advised me not to have even one. My health was still not good, and they said that pregnancy might be fatal. If they hadn't said that to me, maybe I wouldn't have got married. But that diagnosis provoked me, it infuriated me. I answered, 'Why do you think I'm getting married if not to have children? I don't want to hear that I can't have children; I want you to tell me what I have to do in order to have children!'
Indira GandhiThere appears to be a disturbing trend in this nation to try to force single moms to choose between their children and their careers. If they take their careers seriously, they are labeled as bad mothers. If they spend time with their children, they are labeled as people who can't be serious about careers outside the home. This is a sexist double standard. No such guilt trip is imposed on men, who are generally not forced to choose between their children and their jobs.
Gloria AllredAll the children in the world, when they go to school, have the right to study in their mother tongue. But we go to school and run into literary Arabic as children. It sounds like a foreign language. The words for "house" or "table" or "lamp" are not the same as the words we use at home, and most of the other words are alien to children at school. Classical Arabic is one of the prisons of the Arab world.
Hassan BlasimAmerica is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.
Letty Cottin PogrebinAnd when it comes to developing the high standards we need, it's time to stop working against our teachers and start working with them. Teachers don't go in to education to get rich. They don't go in to education because they don't believe in their children. They want their children to succeed, but we've got to give them the tools. Invest in early childhood education. Invest in our teachers and our children will succeed.
Barack ObamaWhen we raise our children, we relive our childhood. Forgotten memories, painful and pleasurable, rise to the surface.... So each of us thinks, almost daily, of how our own childhood compares with our children's, and of what our children's future will hold.
Richard LouvOf all the dear sights in the world, nothing is so beautiful as children when they are giving something. Any small thing they give. Children give the world to you. They open the world to you as if it were a book you'd never been able to read. But when a gift must be found, it is always some absurd little thing, passed on crooked. . . an angel looking like a clown. Children have so little that they can give, because they never know they have given you everything.
Margaret Lee RunbeckThe truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.
Roberto BolanoSo much of America's tragic and costly failure to care for all its children stems from our tendency to distinguish between our own children and other people's children--as if justice were divisible.
Marian Wright EdelmanInternational adoption does not begin to solve the problems of the world's orphaned children. It's truly not the answer. At the same time, it solves a problem for a few. I think it can be a brilliant solution to the problem of adults wanting a child in their lives or wanting more children in their lives and the problem of children who want parents in their lives.
Melissa Fay GreeneThe President [Barack Obama] became quite emotional about transgender student rights, threatening to pull Department of Education funds from school districts that do not comply with federal regulations. Black children are suspended from school three times more than white children are, and there is no evidence that black children are three times as unruly.
Julianne MalveauxThe most important difference between these early American families and our own is that early families constituted economic unitsin which all members, from young children on up, played important productive roles within the household. The prosperity of the whole family depended on how well husband, wife, and children could manage and cultivate the land. Children were essential to this family enterprise from age six or so until their twenties, when they left home.
Kenneth KenistonThe primary purpose of the Legislature in establishing "Arbor Day," was to develop and stimulate in the children of the Commonwealth a love and reverence for Nature as revealed in trees and shrubs and flowers. In the language of the statute, "to encourage the planting, protection and preservation of trees and shrubs" was believed to be the most effectual way in which to lead our children to love Nature and reverence Nature's God, and to see the uses to which these natural objects may be put in making our school grounds more healthful and at-tractive.
Andrew S. DraperOnly when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.
Billy GrahamChildren... are our legacy. Our responsibility. They are our destiny and we are theirs. The extent to which we fail as parents, we fail as Gods children.
Dirk BenedictDo you think you love your children better than He who made them? Is not your love what it is because He put it into your heart first? Have you not often been cross with them? Sometimes unjust to them? Whence came the returning love that rose from unknown depths in your being, and swept away the anger and the injustice? You did not create that love. Probably you were not good enough to send for it by prayer. But it came. God sent it. He makes you love your children.
George MacDonaldMy friends, ask gladness from God. Be glad as children, as birds in the sky. And let man's sin not disturb you in your efforts, do not feat that it will dampen your endeavor and keep it from being fulfilled, do not say, Sin is strong, impiety is strong, the bad environment is strong, and we are lonely and powerless, the bad environment will dampen us and keep our good endeavor from being fulfilled. Flee from such despondency, my children! There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for the sins of men.
Fyodor DostoevskyAll of us aspire to give our children something more, leave a country to our children that is a better one, a stronger one, with better jobs and growth and opportunity.
Byron DorganLike children, the elders are a burden. But unlike children, they offer no hope or promise. They are a weight and an encumbrance and a mirror of our own mortality. It takes a person of great heart to see past this fact and to see the wisdom the elders have to offer, and so serve them out of gratitude for the life they have passed on to us.
Kent NerburnAttempts by some teachers to adjust school curricula to incorporate programs that children watch on television suggest a new means of 'leading' children by running after them as quickly as possible.
Joel MeyerowitzPerhaps our greatest concern is with families. The family is falling apart all over the world. The old ties that bound together father and mother and children are breaking everywhere. We must face this in our own midst. There are too many broken homes among our own. The love that led to marriage somehow evaporates, and hatred fills its place. Hearts are broken, children weep.
Gordon B. HinckleyMost people don't know me, that is why they write such things in which most is not true. I cry very very often because it hurts and I worry about the children, all my children all over the world, I live for them.
Michael JacksonI think the number of books published by Mr. Disney has nothing to do with whether or not he is bringing literature to children. That judgment has got to be based on quality rather than quantity. It's the same old problem that continually plagues American culture. I would rather have children playing their own games out of doors in the sunlight than getting the misrepresentation of literature as given by Walt Disney.
Frances Clarke SayersMovies will continue one way or another. Maybe on video. Even on video games. You have to look at it, if you have children, or if you are linked to children, because it's new for them. This has not disappeared; the look of a child who is discovering the world, whatever it is.
Jean-Luc GodardMy dad was an actor, and my older sister is an actress, and so I very much remember thinking, "Well, of course I'll do that as well." But I never imagined myself as an actor who would be in films. I always only thought of myself being in a play or a musical and maybe the odd episode of [U.K. '80s TV drama] Casualty. My backup plan was to do something with children, to start a nursery school or work with underprivileged kids. And I still dream of maybe doing that in some way. I've always got children in my house, always.
Kate WinsletAs children we hoard and gloat over words. Words give ownership: we name our world and we claim it...Children trust the power of words.
Julia CameronThere are some forty thousand children in California, according to the red brief, that live with same-sex parents, and they want their parents to have full recognition and full status. The voice of those children is important in this case, don't you think?
Anthony KennedyIf advertising has invaded the judgment of children, it has also forced its way into the family, an insolent usurper of parental function, degrading parents to mere intermediaries between their children and the market. This indeed is a social revoluation in our time!
Jules HenryMy perfect Sunday is waking up at 10 - which, you know, those days are over for me - but waking up at 10, breakfast with children, hanging out with well-behaved children.
June Diane RaphaelThere's such a grace and understanding in the female persona when women have really come into their own. Part of that is to have children, and to be caring for those children, and not only in the care for them, but also in the nurturing and raising of them, they have to pass on their souls and their intelligence. And all those things can't be taught. It's something that, that in the essence of a woman, the essence of a mother, a mother knows!
Giancarlo EspositoI keep writing childrenโs books, I keep making childrenโs books, because I still have them inside of me.
Oliver JeffersThank you,โ Simon said. โItโs a joke, Isabelle. Heโs the Count. He likes counting. You know. โWhat did the Count eat today, children? One chocolate chip cookie, two chocolate chip cookies, three chocolate chip cookies . . .โโ There was a rush of cold air as the door of the restaurant opened, letting in another customer. Isabelle shivered and reached for her black silk scarf. โItโs not realistic.โ โWhat would you prefer? โWhat did the Count eat today, children? One helpless villager, two helpless villagers, three helpless villagers . . .
Cassandra ClareI am the father of a 9 year-old son whose descent into the world of autism began at the age of 7 months old after receiving numerous vaccinations in a single day; the same story that is told by thousands of other parents of children throughout the country whose healthy, normally developing children have become autistic after vaccinations.
Rick RollensAll we know is that the school achievement, IQ test score, and emotional and social development of working mothers' children are every bit as good as that of children whose mothers do not work.
Sandra ScarrBut deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying, "I choose not to," or "it all sounds a bit vile, tbh." We call these women "selfish" The inference of the word "childless" is negative: one of lack, and loss. We think of nonmothers as rangy lone wolves - rattling around, as dangerous as teenage boys or men. We make women feel that their narrative has ground to a halt in their thirities if they don't "finish things" properly and have children.
Caitlin Moran