Children Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Children are like wet cement. Whatever falls on them makes an impression.

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof.

Anzia Yezierska

It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place-but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead.

When motherhood becomes the fruit of deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race.

Margaret Sanger

Coughs seem very common here, especially among the children, though people look strong and healthy, but in the absence of proper statistics one cannot undertake to say whether the district is a healthy one or not.

Edward Burnett Tylor

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.

Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.

Every generation tries to put its doctrine on a high shelf where the children can not reach it.

Walter Rauschenbusch

My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.

We will have to give up the hope that, if we try hard, we somehow will always do right by our children. The connection is imperfect. We will sometimes do wrong.

At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.

Madeleine L'Engle

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. From a biological point of view it is inconceivable that any culture will forget that it needs to reproduce itself. But it is quite possible for a culture to exist without a social idea of children. Unlike infancy, childhood is a social artifact, not a biological category.

Children play soldier. That makes sense. But why do soldiers play children?

It's a failure of national vision when you regard children as weapons, and talents as materials you can mine, assay, and fabricate for profit and defense.

John Richard Hersey

The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.

The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

Anyone who is interested in the psychology of children will have observed that whereas one child will resist temptation or seduction, another will easily yield to it. There are children who will hardly oppose any resistance to the invitation of an unknown person to follow him; others who react in an opposite way in the same circumstances.

Parents—especially step-parents—are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.

Women of the working class, especially wage workers, should not have more than two children at most. The average working man can support no more and and the average working woman can take care of no more in decent fashion.

Margaret Sanger

Mr. Chairman, delegates, and fellow citizens: I am honored by the support of this convention for vice president of the United States. I accept the duty to help lead our nation out of a jobs crisis and back to prosperity — and I know we can do this. I accept the calling of my generation to give our children the America that was given to us, with opportunity for the young and security for the old — and I know that we are ready. Our nominee is sure ready. His whole life has prepared him for this moment — to meet serious challenges in a serious way, without excuses and idle words. After four years of getting the run-around, America needs a turnaround, and the man for the job is Governor Mitt Romney.

I love people. I love my family, my children … but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.