Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Adams

I have accepted a seat in the House of Representatives, and thereby have consented to my own ruin, to your ruin, and to the ruin of our children. I give you this warning that you may prepare your mind for your fate.

John Adams

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. (12 May 1780)

John Adams

It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.

John Adams

Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.

Joe Orton

Every luxury was lavished on you - atheism, breastfeeding, circumcision.

Jackson Katz

There's been an awful lot of silence in make culture about this ongoing tragedy of men's violence against women and children... we need to break that silence, and we need more men to do that.

Jaclyn Smith

Time whizzes by when you have children. They make you aware of the passing of time, but also help keep you young.

Jaclyn Smith

After having children, life becomes about living beyond yourself; about being bigger and better.

Jacob Bronowski

The child is not a prisoner of its inheritance; it holds its inheritance as a new creation which its future actions will unfold.

Jack Welch

Some think that it is cruel or brutal to remove the bottom 10 percent of our people. It isn't. It's just the opposite. What I think is brutal and "false kindness" is keeping people around who aren't going to grow and prosper. There's no cruelty like waiting and telling people late into their careers that they don't belong - just when the options are limited and they're putting their children through college or paying off big mortgages.

Harvey Karp

Simple, practical, brilliant. What a wonderful world it will be when all families give their children the gifts presented in Dr. Reznick’s book. Joy, success . . . and health and happiness are just around the corner!

Harvey Cox

"Religion" can no more be equated with what goes on in churches than "education" can be reduced to what happens in schools or "health care" restricted to what doctors do to patients in clinics. The vast majority of healing and learning goes on among parents and children and families and friends, far from the portals of any school or hospital. The same is true for religion. It is going on around us all the time. Religion is larger and more pervasive than churches.

Harvey Fierstein

You may feel powerless as a child, but the world will one day be yours. And you're responsible for it. So, seize the day and take charge of it.

Harvey Fierstein

A child's kiss is magic. Why else would they be so stingy with them?

Healthy parenting is nothing if not a process of empowerment. As we help to raise our children's self-esteem, we also increase their personal power. When we encourage them to be confident, self-reliant, self-directed, and responsible individuals, we are giving them power.

If you tell children they are bad, that's what they believe they are--and that's probably what they will become.

In healthy families, children discover (through being listened to) that what they have to say is important and that their experiences and ideas (and they themselves) have worth. They are encouraged to think for themselves, express opinions, and make decisions for themselves. Parents supporting them in standing on their own two feet and doing what they think is right. Trusting and gaining confidence in themselves, they develop an inner locus of control.

Before I had my first child, I never really looked forward in anticipation to the future. As I watched my son grow and learn, I began to imagine the world this generation of children would live in. I thought of the children they would have, and of their children. I felt connected to life both before my time and beyond it. Children are our link to future generations that we will never see.

Conditional love is love that is turned off and on....Some parents only show their love after a child has done something that pleases them. "I love you, honey, for cleaning your room!" Children who think they need to earn love become people pleasers, or perfectionists. Those who are raised on conditional love never really feel loved.

The best thing to spend on your children is your time.

Our children give us the opportunity to become the parents we always wished we'd had.

Louise Gluck

I’m like the child who buries her head in the pillow so as not to see, the child who tells herself that light causes sadness—

Louise J. Kaplan

It didn't take elaborate experiments to deduce that an infant would die from want of food. But it took centuries to figure out that infants can and do perish from want of love.

Louise J. Kaplan

The adolescent frequently supposes that she is breaking out of the confines of her mundane, schoolgirl existence simply in order to break rules and defy authority. . . . She rids herself of the "oughts" and "musts" that convert every minor infraction into a sin of omission or commission. It certainly does not occur to her or to her family that by questioning the moral standards she erected as a child she is taking the first steps in her journey toward a firmer, more reasonable, less harsh, more ethical form of conscience.

Louise J. Kaplan

In all times and in all places--in Constantinople, northwestern Zambia, Victorian England, Sparta, Arabia, . . . medieval France,Babylonia, . . . Carthage, Mahenjo-Daro, Patagonia, Kyushu, . . . Dresden--the time span between childhood and adulthood, however fleeting or prolonged, has been associated with the acquisition of virtue as it is differently defined in each society. A child may be good and morally obedient, but only in the process of arriving at womanhood or manhood does a human being become capable of virtue--that is, the qualities of mind and body that realize society's ideals.

Louise J. Kaplan

Schoolchildren make up their own rules and enforce their own conformities. They feel safest when leisure time is rationed and dosed. They like to wear uniforms, and they frown on personal idiosyncrasies. Deviance is the mark of an outsider.

Louise J. Kaplan

From the beginning moments of life, the urges for each of us to become a self in the world are there--in the liveliness of our innate growth energies, in the vitality of our stiffening-away muscles, in our looking eyes, our listening ears, our reaching-out hands.

Louise Erdrich

The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.

Louise Erdrich

But then as time passed, I learned the lesson that parents do early on. You fail sometimes. No matter how much you love your children, there are times you slip. There are moments you can't give, stutter, lose your temper, or simply lose face with the world, and you can't explain this to a child.

Louise Erdrich

All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. ... That in her creation of her children there should be the unspeakable promise of their death, for by their birth she had created mortal beings.

Louise Hay

It's what we all wanted when we were children- to be loved and accepted exactly as we were then, not when we got taller or thinner or prettier...and we still want it... but we aren't going to get it from other people until we can get it from ourselves.

Genghis Khan

Perhaps my children will live in stone houses and walled towns - Not I

Gene Wilder

A lot of comic actors derive their main force from childish behavior. Most great comics are doing such silly things; you'd say, 'That's what a child would do.