Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.

- Michael Levine

It's easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

- Frederick Douglass

On the first day of school, my children said to me, "Aren't you glad that our education's free?"

- Erma Bombeck

It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.

- Anne Sullivan

You can't make your kids do anything. All you can do is make them wish they had. And then, they will make you wish you hadn't made them wish they had.

- Marshall Rosenberg

When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.

- Sophia Loren

Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The essence of our effort to see that every child has a chance must be to assure each an equal opportunity, not to become equal, but to become different -- to realize whatever unique potential of body, mind and spirit he or she possesses.

- John Fischer

Indeed -- judicious, consistent parenting is a dream of mine. No judgments, learning space and listening carefully are my goals.

- Emma Thompson

Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn.

- Alice Miller

Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.

- Robert Fulghum

Do not despair, every new born baby is a potential prophet.

- R. D. Laing

There never was a child so lovely, but his mother was glad to get him asleep.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

For these are all our children. We will all profit by, or pay for, whatever they become,

- James Baldwin

If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

- Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.

- Bishop Desmond Tutu



I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.

- Anne Sullivan



No ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as responsible as the work of a woman who is bringing up a family of small children; for upon her time and strength demands are made not only every hour of the day but often every hour of the night.

- Theodore Roosevelt



Wherever I look, I see signs of the commandment to honor one's parents and nowhere of a commandment that calls for the respect of a child.

- Alice Miller



Most children threaten at times to run away from home. This is the only thing that keeps some parents going.

- Phyllis Diller



Children don't need much advice but they really do need to be listened to and not just with half an ear.

- Emma Thompson



Hitler, Stalin, Mao and other dictators were exposed to severe physical mistreatment in childhood and refused to face up to the fact later. Instead of seeing and feeling what had happened to them, they avenged themselves vicariously by killing millions of people. And millions of others helped them to do so.

- Alice Miller



The first half of our lives is spoiled by our parents, and the last half by our children.

- Jennifer James



The claim that mild punishments (slaps or smacks) have no detrimental effect is still widespread because we got this message very early from our parents who had taken it over from their own parents. Unfortunately, the main damage it causes is precisely the broad dissemination of this conviction. The result of which is that each successive generation is subjected to the tragic effects of so called physical "correction."

- Alice Miller



Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing up is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.

- Phyllis Diller



In the short term, corporal punishment may produce obedience. But it is a fact documented by research that in the long term the results are inability to learn, violence and rage, bullying, cruelty, inability to feel another's pain, especially that of one's own children, even drug addiction and suicide, unless there are enlightened or at least helping witnesses on hand to prevent that development.

- Alice Miller



Someday, maybe there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child's spirit.

- Eric Erickson



The family endures because it offers the truth of mortality and immortality within the same group. The family endures because, better than the commune, kibbutz, or classroom, it seems to individualize and socialize its children, to make us feel at the same time unique and yet joined to all humanity, accepted as is and yet challenged to grow, loved unconditionally and yet propelled by greater expectations. Only in the family can so many extremes be reconciled and synthesized. Only in the family do we have a lifetime in which to do it.

- Letty Cottin Pogrebin



My parents were liberal intellectuals but even they expected me to stay at home and look after my younger siblings and do the housework.

- Sara Paretsky



We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

- Jimmy Carter



We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.

- Stacia Tauscher



A child too, can never grasp the fact that the same mother who cooks so well, is so concerned about his cough, and helps so kindly with his homework, in some circumstance has no more feeling than a wall of his hidden inner world.

- Alice Miller



How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because some day in life you will have been all of these.

- George Washington Carver



Children are the most wonderful audiences. What's struck me most is that that they watch it so silently, until the end when they shriek and shout and clap.

- Emma Thompson



A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

- George Santayana



It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic difficulties.

- Alice Miller



Good manners are the technique of expressing considerations for the feelings of others.

- Alice Miller



Children are the only form of immortality that we can be sure of.

- Peter Ustinov



Too often, I think, children are required to write before they have anything to say. Teach them to think and read and talk with self-repression, and they will write because they cannot help it.

- Anne Sullivan



The golf links lie so near the mill
      That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
      And see the men at play.
            [from "Through the Needle's Eye," 1916]

- Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn



America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.

- Letty Cottin Pogrebin



I've been to war. I've raised twins. If I had a choice, I'd rather go to war.

- George W. Bush



If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.

- George Bernard Shaw



Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken, and inconveniently willful? "Keep her," I replied.... The suffragettes refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me.

- Anna Quindlen



Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come back home.

- Bill Cosby