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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"The one point on which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the existing law is the saddling of the right to a child with the obligation to become the servant of a man."
"If parents would only realize how they bore their children."
"Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent."
"Let wife and child perish, and lay bricks for your last crust, rather than part with an iota of your [copy]rights."
"My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever; it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt."
"I aint such a mug as to put up my children to all I know myself."
"But a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it does not matter which as far as one's knowledge of her is concerned: the broomstick is there and the sun is there; and whether the child is beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning."
"Hollywood keeps before its child audiences a string of glorified young heroes, everyone of whom is an unhesitating and violent Anarchist. His one answer to everything that annoys him or disparages his country or his parents or his young lady or his personal code of manly conduct is to give the offender a "sock" in the jaw.... My observation leads me to believe that it is not the virtuous people who are good at socking jaws."
"If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot: because they have never seen one anywhere else."
"I love little children too but I don't cut off their heads and stick them in vases."
"I must have been an insufferable child; all children are."
"A book is like a child: it is easier to bring it into the world than to control it when it is launched there."
"The practical question, then, is what to do with the children. Tolerate them at home we will not. Let them run loose in the streets we dare not until our streets become safe places for children, which, to our utter shame, they are not at present, though they can hardly be worse than some homes and some schools."
"What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults."
"That is the injustice of a woman's lot. A woman has to bring up her children; and that means to restrain them, to deny them things they want, to set them tasks, to punish them when they do wrong, to do all the unpleasant things. And then the father, who has nothing to do but pet them and spoil them, comes in when all her work is done and steals their affection from her."
"The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching."
"If only for a half hour a day, a child should do something serviceable to the community"
"If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven."
"Baby boomers helped me a great deal in my career. They launched me. They were there for me to sing my song to. And I'm not saying I'm better than anyone, but I think they turned that anti-authority baby boom mentality into their own enemy. Now I identify very closely with their children."
"I think it keeps the child alive in me. There's a thrill when you steal something in plain view of other people."
