Quotes on Children

You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.

Nothing would please us more than to see our beloved children form the habit of reading the Gospels - not merely from time to time, but every day.

I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.

We, the soldiers who have returned from battle stained with blood, we who have seen our relatives and friends killed before our eyes, we who have attended their funerals and cannot look into the eyes of their parents, we who have come from a land where parents bury their children, we who have fought against you, the Palestinians We say to you today in a loud and clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough.

I have been very strongly advocating that poverty must not be used as an excuse to continue child labour. It perpetuates poverty. If children are deprived of education, they remain poor.

We're so preoccupied with protecting children from disappointment and discomfort that we're inadvertently excusing them from growing up.

That's my parenting style - 'Go watch the TV.' I'm one of 11 children, and my mother's parenting style was, 'There's the TV. Go watch it. Mommy's got 10 other people to take care of.'

I mean, I grew up in a community where people took care of each other. I grew up in a community where my mother, my parents, my extended family really wanted for children to be nurtured and challenged and not harmed.

...and I confess that, like a child, I cry. Ah, self-pity; I think we are at our most honest and sincere when we feel sorry for ourselves.

If you're an adult and you choose not to believe in science, fine, but please don't prevent your children from learning about it and letting them draw their own conclusions.

Black children need to see their lives reflected in the books they read. If they don't, they won't feel welcome in the world of literature. The lives of African-Americans are rich and diverse, and the books our children read should reflect that.

Many adult bullies hide behind the idea that bullying happens only among children. They conceive of themselves as adults who know better and are offering their hard-earned wisdom to others. The Internet makes that sort of certainty easier to attain: looking at their screens, adult bullies rarely see the impact of their words and actions.

We call for the end of bigotry as we know it. The end of racism as we know it. The end of child abuse in the family as we know it. The end of sexism as we know it. The end of homophobia as we know it. We stand for freedom as we have yet to know it. And we will not be denied.

The health care industry can play a great role in this by being aware of the fact that these children form perhaps the most neglected group of people in the country, largely because it is hard to find them.

Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.

Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.

I don't have any children, so I've decided to claim all the future freedom-fighters and hell-raisers as my kin.

I never get any protests from children. All you get are giggles of mirth and squirms of delight. I know what children like.

I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities, and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty, very bad, very cruel. If they are ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That, I think, is fun and makes an impact.

A film director is not a creator, but a midwife. His business is to deliver the actor of a child that he did not know he had inside him.