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Amos Bronson Alcott ~
• “The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-distrust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciple.”
Isabel Allende ~
• “Accept the children the way we accept trees – with gratitude, because they are a blessing – but do not have expectations or desires. You don’t expect trees to change, you love them as they are.”
Susan B. Anthony ~
• “If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.”
L. Frank Baum ~
• “The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization.”
Bruno Bettelheim ~
• “The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ...” ~ The Uses of Enchantment: the Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
Ambrose Bierce ~
• “Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.”
Martin Buber ~
• “Play is the exultation of the possible.”
Paulo Coelho
• “The parents always insisted on telling their child that their secret friends didn't exist — perhaps because they had forgotten that they too had spoken to their angel at one time.”
Roald Dahl
• “I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.
Clarence Darrow ~
• “The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, the second half by our children.”
Robertson Davies ~
• “To instruct calls for energy, and to remain almost silent, but watchful and helpful, while students instruct themselves, calls for even greater energy. To see someone fall (which will teach him not to fall again) when a word from you would keep him on his feet but ignorant of an important danger, is one of the tasks of the teacher that calls for special energy, because holding in is more demanding than crying out.”
• “A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.”
• “A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.”
Charles Dickens ~
• “In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.” ~ Great Expectations
Fyodor Dostoevsky ~
• “The soul is healed by being with children.”
Rita Dove ~
• “If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.”
Alexandre Dumas, pere ~
• “How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.”
Albert Einstein ~
• “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson ~
• “A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.”
Epictetus ~
• “Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.”
Kahlil Gibran ~
• “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself... You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”
Jane Goodall ~
• “One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun.”
Dorothy Irene Height ~
• “We've got to work to save our children and do it with full respect for the fact that if we do not, no one else is going to do it.”
Robert Heinlein ~
• “Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy.”
• “There comes a time in the life of every human when he or she must decide to risk ‘his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor’ on an outcome dubious. Those who fail the challenge are merely overgrown children, can never be anything else.”
belle hooks ~
• “I entered the classroom with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer ... education as the practice of freedom ... education that connects the will to know with the will to become. Learning is a place where paradise can be created.”
Johannes Kepler ~
• “The soul of the newly born baby is marked for life by the pattern of the stars at the moment it comes into the world, unconsciously remembers it, and remains sensitive to the return of configurations of a similar kind.”
Wassily Kandinsky ~
• “Every work of art is the child of its time; each period produces an art of its own, which cannot be repeated.”
Ursula Le Guin ~
• “I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.”
• “The creative adult is the child who has survived.”
James Russell Lowell ~
• “The best academy, a mother's knee.”
Francois Mauriac ~
• “Where does discipline end? Where does cruelty begin? Somewhere between these, thousands of children inhabit a voiceless hell.”
Colman McCarthy ~
• “Unless we teach our children peace, someone will teach them violence.”
• “What makes us happy is service to others. If schools don't expose students to the joys of community service, we graduate people who are idea rich but experience poor. In these addled times of leave no child untested, we think it's enough to pound ideas into the kids' heads. You can make all A's in school and go out and flunk life.”
• “Too many schools process students as if they are slabs of cheese going to Velveeta High on the way to Cheddar U and Mozzarella Grad School.”
Phyllis McGinley ~
• “Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved, like a hug from a child.”
Margaret Mead ~
• “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”
• “Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.”
H. L. Mencken ~
• “The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberated scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.”
• “School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, and brutal violations of common sense and common decency.”
A. S. Neill ~
• “The function of a child is to live his/her own life, not the life that his/her anxious parents think he/she should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educators who thinks they knows best.”
Pablo Neruda ~
• “A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who doesn't play has lost forever the child who lived in him and who he will miss terribly.”
Roger Penrose ~
• “Children sometimes see things clearly that are obscured in later life. We often forget the wonder that we felt as children when the cares of the "real world" have begun to settle on our shoulders. Children are not afraid to pose basic questions that may embarrass us, as adults, to ask. What happens to each of our streams of consciousness after we die; where was it before we were born; might we become, or have been, someone else; why do we perceive at all; why are we here; why is there a universe here at all in which we can actually be? These are puzzles that tend to come with the awakenings of awareness in any one of us — and, no doubt, with the awakening of self-awareness, within whichever creature or other entity it first came.”
Jean Piaget ~
• “There is an adult in every child and a child in every adult.”
Pablo Picasso ~
• “When I was young I could draw like Raphael, but it has taken me my whol life to draw like a child.”
Rita Pierson
• “Every child needs a champion.”
Plato ~
• “Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”
Letty Cottin Pogrebin ~
• “Children's liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list.”
Isidor Isaac Rabi ~
• “My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: So? Did you learn anything today? But not my mother. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?” That difference — asking good questions — made me become a scientist.”
Otto Rank ~
• “Fathers and Mothers! Honor your children and love them.”
Samuel Richardson ~
• “If the education and studies of children were suited to their inclinations and capacities, many would be made useful members of society that otherwise would make no figure in it.”
Rainer Maria Rilke ~
• “Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.”
• “May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.”
Arthur Rimbaud ~
• “Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.”
Sir Ken Robinson ~
• “If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. People are being educated out of their creative capacity. We do not grow into creativity, we grow out of it. As far as education for children, we need to educate their whole being. Picasso said “All children are born artists.” How do we remain artists as we grow up?”
Fred Rogers ~
• “Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt ~
• “We may not be able to prepare the future for our children, but we can at least prepare our children for the future.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau ~
• “The noblest work in education is to make a reasoning man, and we expect to train a young child by making him reason! This beginning at the end; this is making an instrument of a result. If children understood how to reason they would not need to be educated.”
• “The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.”
Antoine e Saint-Exupery ~
• “Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.”
Saki ~
• “Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.”
• “The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.”
Carl Sandburg ~
• “A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.”
George Santayana ~
• “A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”
Friedrich Schiller ~
• “Dare to err and to dream. Deep meaning often lies in childish plays.”
Arthur Schopenhauer ~
• “Every child is in a way a genius; and every genius is in a way a child.”
Sir Walter Scott ~
• “Teach your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.”
George Bernard Shaw ~
• “Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
• “Youth is wasted on the young.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer ~
• “When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.”
B.F. Skinner ~
• “Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.”
Adam Smith ~
• “But poverty, though it does not prevent the generation, is extremely unfavourable to the rearing of children. The tender plant is produced, but in so cold a soil, and so severe a climate, soon withers and dies.”
Tom Stoppard ~
• “If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.”
Annie Sullivan ~
• “I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less “showily”. Let him come and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself... Teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences.”
Rabindranath Tagore ~
• “Children are living beings – more living than grown-up people who have built shells of habit around themselves. Therefore it is absolutely necessary for their mental health and development that they should not have mere schools for their lessons, but a world whose guiding spirit is personal love.”
Leo Tolstoy ~
• “School is established, not in order that it should be convenient for the children to study, but that teachers should be able to teach in comfort. The children’s conversations, motion, merriment are not convenient for the teacher, and so in the schools, which are built on the plan of prisons, ... are prohibited.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ~
• “Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.”
Oscar Wilde ~
• “Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.” ~ The Picture of Dorian Gray
Thornton Wilder ~
• “I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.”
• “Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.”
William Butler Yeats ~
• “Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.”
Howard Zinn ~
• “What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor--inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing--permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own. I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children.”
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