Children quotes
25.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside children — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"We need kids to remind us of how incredible this world is. People are increasingly losing their childhoods too soon, and that's a danger. There's a prophesy somewhere that at a certain point in history, children will be gray. It's weird to think about, but it's possible."
"Probably right at the end of JAG, I would love to have a child or two. I ultimately want to have two kids."
"It is hard to create a first-person narrator that can be a child and yet is able to take in enough information for the narrative to be legible to the reader."
"Morality has in the past made progress when we broadened the category of things we weren't permitted to harm (animals, 'infidels'); saw through some delusions and rationalisations about what harms are good for people themselves (prison punishment, hysterectomies for unhappy 1950s wives); and readjusted our for-the-good of others criteria so as to demand only reasonable sacrifices (ceasing to use children as handy chimney sweeps)."
"Because I was a shy and awkward child, I used humour to deflect attention. It was a controlling mechanism. Because I could use it to control my image."
"Although I was a shy child, I was also a bit flamboyant."
"Oddly, since by now I've written quite a lot on early modern philosophers, I didn't care for the history of philosophy, which I thought dull and obscure, until I got a minor job writing articles for a children's encyclopedia in the history of science and began to make connections between science and philosophy."
"Epicurus was in favour of friendly sex but not of grand passions or marriage and children, viewing them as sources of trouble and vexation."
"The symbolism - and the substantive significance - of planting a tree has universal power in every culture and every society on Earth, and it is a way for individual men, women and children to participate in creating solutions for the environmental crisis."
"Third world nations are producing too many children too fast...it is time to ignore the controversy over family planning and cut out-of-control population growth."
"I've kind of fallen out of love with politics. ...Whatever experience and talents I've gained over the years -- I think it may well be that the highest and best use of that is to try to bring enough awareness of the solutions to the climate crisis and enough of a sense of urgency that we come together across party lines on behalf of our children."
"Any child born into the hugely consumptionist way of life so common in the industrial world will have an impact that is, on average, many times more destructive than that of a child born in the developing world."
"Speaking from my own religious tradition in this Christmas season, 2,000 years ago a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child in a manger because the inn was full."
"Pretty soon I'll start worrying about [my fame] because [my children] carry my name and they have that exposure. The whole thing is, they never asked for it, that kingdom."
"At this point in my career, I don't have to deal with audition rejections. So I get my rejection from other things. My children can make me feel rejected. They can humble you pretty quick."
"I was the fifth child in a family of six, five boys and one girl. Bless that poor girl. We were very poor; it was the 30s. We survived off of the food and the little work that my father could get working on the roads or whatever the WPA provided. We were always in line to get food. The survival of our family really depended on the survival of the other black families in that community. We had that village aspect about us, that African sense about us. We always shared what we had with each other. We were able to make it because there was really a total family, a village."
"There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, to look back to when we were children."
"I was an only child for 16 years. I didn't realize it at the time, but that experience definitely turned me into a people pleaser. I always tried to do what was expected of me, and I constantly sought reassurance from the adults around me that I was doing a good job."
"It is well-known that those who have charge of young infants, that it is difficult to feel sure when certain movements about their mouths are really expressive; that is when they really smile. Hence I carefully watched my own infants. One of them at the age of forty-five days, and being in a happy frame of mind, smiled... I observed the same thing on the following day: but on the third day the child was not quite well and there was no trace of a smile, and this renders it probable that the previous smiles were real."
"My hair stands on end at the cost and charges of these boys. Why was I ever a father! Why was my father ever a father!"
