Quotes about babies

page 11

On her lifelong use of the name "Happy", in "The Happy Rhodes Interview" in Homeground #48 (Summer 1993) http://web.archive.org/web/20091023165015/http://geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/3450/homeground.html
Context: The first time my brothers saw me, when I was a day or two old and still in the hospital, my brother Mark could not pronounce the name "Kimberley," and I was an especially happy baby, so he decided it would be easier to call me "Happy." From that moment on, my family members never used the name Kimberley. I was forced, however, to use my given name while attending school. As soon as I turned sixteen, my name was legally changed to Happy Tyler Rhodes. As far as I'm concerned, it's the ony name I've ever had. When people ask me if it's my real name, I always say "yes."

2010s, Why Penn Jillette is Terrified of a President Trump (2016)
Context: The problem is, I know Trump, so my optimism has been squashed like a baby bird … Everything bad I had to say about him, I said to his face. … I think he’s very good, very compelling on that show [Celebrity Apprentice] … I really like him because of his absence of filters. I really like the glimpse we get into the human heart we get when someone loses their filters … If he weren’t running for president, you’d be seeing essays from me about how much I learned from Donald Trump and how much I loved being on the show … I’m feeling so, so, so guilty, because I feel like, along with millions of other people, I played right into this. The cynicism of the Clintons, the careful, tightrope walk of all politicians, forced me, as an atheist, to get down on my knees and pray that someone would come along with some kind of authenticity … Well, someone called my bluff, goddamn it. … I’m a pure and utter peacenik. I want a president who sings the praises of people, sings the praises of peace and sings the praises of working together for a great country … Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have laughed about waterboarding … If you told me right now I could have another eight years of Obama, I would not hesitate to grab at it. … He is unquestionably good and unquestionably smarter than I am, which is putting the bar pretty low. I want a president that is kinder, smarter and more measured than me.

Source: Fares, Please! (1915), Everything Upside Down, p. 185
Context: There is far-reaching appropriateness in the fact that the world's immortal baby story, that of Bethlehem, should be a story of turning things upside down — for that is a baby's chief business. It is a gross slander on babies that their chief passion is food. It is rearrangement. Every orthodox baby rearranges all that he sees, from the order of importance in the family to the bric-a-brac and window curtains. The advent of every baby completely upsets his little world, both physically and spiritually. And it is not one of the smallest values of the fact that the Saviour of the world came into it as a baby, that it reminds men that every baby is born a savior, to some extent, from selfishness and greed and sin in the little circle which his advent blesses.

"Cruel to Be Kind" on the single Little Hitler / Cruel to Be Kind (1978) (Top of the Pops 1979) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JJ7oGHwMTI
Context: I pick myself up off the ground to have you knock me back down
Again and again and when I ask you to explain
You say, you've got to be...
Cruel to be kind in the right measure
Cruel to be kind it's a very good sign
Cruel to be kind means that I love you
Baby, you got to be cruel, you got to be cruel to be kind.

Remembrance Rock (1948), Ch. 2, p. 7
Context: A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don't compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients. A baby doesn't know he is a hoary and venerable antique — but he is. Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make a baby — with the great help of woman, and his God and Maker.

Section 4.21 <!-- p. 244 - 245 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever.
Thank God there is kairos too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos.
Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake.

Source: Fares, Please! (1915), Everything Upside Down, p. 185
Context: There is far-reaching appropriateness in the fact that the world's immortal baby story, that of Bethlehem, should be a story of turning things upside down — for that is a baby's chief business. It is a gross slander on babies that their chief passion is food. It is rearrangement. Every orthodox baby rearranges all that he sees, from the order of importance in the family to the bric-a-brac and window curtains. The advent of every baby completely upsets his little world, both physically and spiritually. And it is not one of the smallest values of the fact that the Saviour of the world came into it as a baby, that it reminds men that every baby is born a savior, to some extent, from selfishness and greed and sin in the little circle which his advent blesses.

1963, Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty speech
Context: Continued unrestricted testing by the nuclear powers, joined in time by other nations which may be less adept in limiting pollution, will increasingly contaminate the air that all of us must breathe. Even then, the number of children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs might seem statistically small to some, in comparison with natural health hazards. But this is not a natural health hazard — and it is not a statistical issue. The loss of even one human life, or the malformation of even one baby — who may be born long after we are gone — should be of concern to us all. Our children and grandchildren are not merely statistics toward which we can be indifferent.

Radio From Hell (January 30, 2006)

His reaction to a baby announcement on a SFBA social mailing list (21 February 1993), as quoted in "RMS -vs- Doctor, on the evils of Natalism" at Art.net http://www.art.net/Studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html
1990s
Context: Hundreds of thousands of babies are born every day. While the whole phenomenon is menacing, one of them by itself is not newsworthy. Nor is it a difficult achievement — even some fish can do it. (Now, if you were a seahorse, it would be more interesting, since it would be the male that gave birth.)... These birth announcements also spread the myth that having a baby is something to be proud of, which fuels natalist pressure, which leads to pollution, extinction of wildlife, poverty, and ultimately mass starvation.

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART II: OTHER WORLDS, Chapter 21. How I Tried to Teach the Theory of Three Dimensions to My Grandson, and With What Success
Context: When my Grandson entered the room I carefully secured the door. Then, sitting down by his side and taking our mathematical tablets, — or, as you would call them, Lines — I told him we would resume the lesson of yesterday. I taught him once more how a Point by motion in One Dimension produces a Line, and how a straight Line in Two Dimensions produces a Square. After this, forcing a laugh, I said, "And now, you scamp, you wanted to make me believe that a Square may in the same way by motion 'Upward, not Northward' produce another figure, a sort of extra Square in Three Dimensions. Say that again, you young rascal."At this moment we heard once more the herald's "O yes! O yes!" outside in the street proclaiming the Resolution of the Council. Young though he was, my Grandson — who was unusually intelligent for his age, and bred up in perfect reverence for the authority of the Circles — took in the situation with an acuteness for which I was quite unprepared. He remained silent till the last words of the Proclamation had died away, and then, bursting into tears, "Dear Grandpapa," he said, "that was only my fun, and of course I meant nothing at all by it; and we did not know anything then about the new Law; and I don't think I said anything about the Third Dimension; and I am sure I did not say one word about 'Upward, not Northward', for that would be such nonsense, you know. How could a thing move Upward, and not Northward? Upward and not Northward! Even if I were a baby, I could not be so absurd as that. How silly it is! Ha! ha! ha!"

"Love Letters, Some Not So Loving" (a review of H.G. Wells and Rebecca West by Gordon N. Ray), in The New York Times (13 October 1974) http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/10/specials/west-ray.html; this has often been paraphrased as "Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a Judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view."
Context: Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a Judge's chamber can believe in an unprejudiced point of view but, simply in self-interest, the biographer must try for one, or make us believe he has, or tell us that he hasn't.

The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)
Context: There is no Heav'en, there is no Hell; these be the dreams of baby minds,
Tools of the wily Fetisheer, to 'fright the fools his cunning blinds.
Learn from the mighty Spi'rits of old to set thy foot on Heav'en and Hell;
In Life to find thy hell and heav'en as thou abuse or use it well.

On censorship, in The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950), p. 188; this may be the origin of a remark which in recent years has sometimes become misattributed to Mark Twain: Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.
Context: How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show — it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.

Dark Horse, written by Katy Perry, Jordan Houston, Lukasz Gottwald, Sarah Hudson, Max Martin, and Henry Walter
Song lyrics, Prism (2013)
Context: So you wanna play with magic?
Boy, you should know what you're falling for.
Baby do you dare to do this?
Cause I’m coming at you like a dark horse.

Address to the US Green Party
Context: I am an anarchist in my personal life. I try to live my life in a way that I don't need cops or baby-sitters to keep me from infringing on others. But I don't feel we have evolved far enough as a species to make anarchy work in society itself. We still need government to transfer the wealth from those who have too much to those who have too little, to make sure important projects get done, and keep territorial humans from screwing over and killing each other.

When Churchill was in opposition after 1945, he led the Conservative Party in a debate about the Health Service. As he listened to Aneurin Bevan’s opening speech, he called for some statistics about infant mortality … [which were] supplied, copiously and accurately, by Iain Macleod, then working in the back rooms of the Conservative Research Department. But, in his speech, Churchill made only one bold and sweeping use … [of Macleod’s detailed research]. Encountering MacLeod afterward, Churchill made the above statement. As cited in The Life of Politics (1968), Henry Fairlie, Methuen, pp. 203-204.
Post-war years (1945–1955)
Context: I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is that, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic.

Letter to his fiancée Lee, (31 July 1978), published in Gerald Durrell: An Authorized Biography by Douglas Botting (1999)
Context: I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises, on land where it floods forest and mountains with honey coloured light, at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multicoloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers.
I have seen seas as smooth as if painted, coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and murderously. … I have known silence: the cold earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged midday silence when everything is hypnotised and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends.
I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones. … I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen Spoonbills fling home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen Whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling, while the sun irons their winds smooth. I have watched Tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed by an angry Raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of Dolphins. I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things… but —
All this I did without you. This was my loss.
All this I want to do with you. This will be my gain.
All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your sweet, ever surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve.

Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut (1996)

Song Walk Right In (1927)
Context: Walk right in, sit right down, baby let your hair hang down.
Everybody's talking 'bout a new way of walking;
Do you want to lose you mind?

The First Year of Life of the Child (1927), "The Egocentrism of the Child and the Solipsism of the Baby", as translated by Howard E. Gruber and J. Jacques Vonèche
Context: There are no really solipsistic philosophers, and those who think they are deceive themselves. The true solipsist feels at one with the universe, and so very identical to it that he does not even feel the need for two terms. The true solipsist projects all his states of mind onto things. The true solipsist is entirely alone in the world, that is, he has no notion of anything exterior to himself. In other words the true solipsist has no idea of self. There is no self: there is the world. It is in this sense it is reasonable to call a baby a solipsist: the feelings and desires of a baby know no limits since they are a part of everything he sees, touches, and perceives.
Babies are, then, obviously narcissistic, but not in the way adults are, not even Spinoza's God, and I am a little afraid that Freud sometimes forgets that the narcissistic baby has no sense of self.
Given this definition of solipsism, egocentrism in children clearly appears to be a simple continuation of solipsism in infants.. Egocentrism, as we have seen, is not an intentional or even a conscious process. A child has no idea that he is egocentric. He believes everybody thinks the way he does, and this false universality is due simply to an absence of the sense of limits on his individuality. In this light, egocentrism and solipsism are quite comparable: both stem from the absence or the weakness of the sense of self.

"Born to Run"
Song lyrics, Born to Run (1975)
Context: In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream.
At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines.
Sprung from cages on Highway 9,
Chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected
And steppin' out over the line.
Baby this town rips the bones from your back.
It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap.
We gotta get out while we're young,
'Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

Book IV, line 60 (tr. Fairclough)
Eclogues (37 BC)

Xfm 12 January 2002
On Stephen Merchant

Lyrics, Misc.

Alex Jones Describes the Future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvftj4CVmNo, The Alex Jones Show, February 8, 2017.
2017

ContraPoints, Feminism Did Not Destroy Atheism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klfH9QaEcqY (2016), Is Casual Sex Bad for Your Soul? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKrbvLkbHu8 (2017)

On correlating motherhood with writing in “Jackie Kay: Interview” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7800799/Jackie-Kay-Interview.html in The Telegraph (2010 Jun 5)

Oct 4 https://twitter.com/MaximeBernier/status/1180220350426238977
2019

On the trajectory of her life and career in “Sculptor Augusta Savage Said Her Legacy Was The Work Of Her Students” https://www.npr.org/2019/07/15/740459875/sculptor-augusta-savage-said-her-legacy-was-the-work-of-her-students in NPR (2019 Jul 15)

Twitter post, https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1080310857161232384 (1 January 2019)
Twitter Quotes (2019), January 2019

Said in a Guardian interview in January 2019. Sethi, Anita (19 January 2019) Jo Swinson MP: ‘I first wrote to my MP when I was about 10’ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/19/jo-swinson-mp-interview-equal-power-gender-equality-activism in the Guardian. Retrieved 23 July 2019.
2019

Commenting on the NATO bombing campaign against Bosnian Serb forces, during an interview for the Death of Yugoslavia documentary, 1995 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW4KU4FQ8qo
1990s

Aenea is looking at me as she speaks, and I feel the gooseflesh rise along my arms.
“The Void Which Binds is always under and above the surface of our thoughts and senses,” she continues, invisible but as present as the breathing of our beloved next to us in the night. Its actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite satisfying bullshit.”
Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 20 (p. 400)

Science-Fiction was considered bottom of the barrel in those days. Of course, that’s the picture I am most remembered for. It’s very ironic!
Interview with Lori Nelson http://www.westernclippings.com/interview/lorinelson_interview.shtml

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/tmlnp/louis_ck_reddit/ (2012)

It's Good, written with Aubrey Graham, Jason Phillips, Andre Lyon, Marcello Valenzano, B. Pickens, Alan Parsons, and Eric Woolfson
2010s, Tha Carter IV (2011)

"Kozmic Blues", co-written with Gabriel Mekler
I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! (1969)

"The Hospitals Are Coming", in Narrow Roads of Gene Land, Volume 2: Evolution of Sex (2002)

It is sad because you would like to believe that everyone is unique and then they disappoint you every time by being exactly the same, asking for the same things, reciting the exact same lines as though they have been handed a script.
All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to the fingerprints.
Essay, "Santaland diaries" - p.233-234, 235
Barrel Fever (1994)

"Some Pig" https://www.all-creatures.org/articles/ar-some-pig.html, All-Creatures.org (April 2013).

As quoted in [Brown, Lesley-Ann, The Graceful Power of Novelist Jason Reynolds, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/graceful-power-novelist-jason-reynolds-n399721, 10 March 2020, NBC News, August 22, 2015]

"Everything is Cool"
Song lyrics, The Missing Years (1991)

"Daddy’s Little Pumpkin" (Prine, Pat McLaughlin)
Song lyrics, The Missing Years (1991)

"It’s a Big Old Goofy World"
Song lyrics, The Missing Years (1991)

(zh-TW) 十月懷胎孕育身，悉心養護遂成人。
微低動物猶爭度，奮力求生勿化塵。

"Cherish life" (愛惜生命)

Source: Deng Feng-Zhou, "Deng Feng-Zhou Classical Chinese Poetry Anthology". Volume 6, Tainan, 2018: 85.

Ready or Not For Everyman (1973)

Song lyrics, Purple Rain (1984)

Source: As quoted in "A girl no longer, but . . . De Carlo's a beauty still" (1975)

Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, 1967, p. 4, co-authored with Charles V. Hamilton

Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
Source: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
p. 34-35

Source: The Expanse, Tiamat's Wrath (2019), Chapter 29 (p. 309)

Undercover Planned Parenthood investigator David Daleiden: ‘No one is going to be able to say anymore that they didn’t know’ https://www.liveaction.org/news/undercover-investigator-planned-parenthood-daleiden-know/ (June 7, 2020)

[ Link to tweet https://twitter.com/dril/status/1329464017417474048]
Tweets by year, 2020

The Comeback Kid (2015)

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (2016), Chapter 4 (p. 92)

The Magic Laundry (2015)
Source: Appel, Jacob M. The Magic Laundry Snake Nation Press 2015

Song lyrics, In Utero (1993)

New Rule: ‘Progressophobia’, (2021)

The State of the World 2010, public lecture in New York City, USA, (July 2010)

Source: Islands in the Net (1988), Chapter 4 (p. 97)

Source: Podkayne of Mars (1963), Chapter 10 (p. 127)

Source: The Lesson of Afghanistan', (2021)

Source: Memorandum to Robert T. Hartmann https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document/0204/1511691.pdf (1976)

Source: Bishops Want Catholic Baby Boom To Halt Slide In Kerala Christian Community https://www.ucanews.com/story-archive/?post_name=/2007/09/14/bishops-want-catholic-baby-boom-to-halt-slide-in-kerala-christian-community&post_id=6428 (September 13, 2007)

Source: https://amp/s/www.pulse.ng/entertainment/music/simi-speaks-with-pulse-nigeria-interview/wjmypg8.amp Simi during an Interview with Pulse Nigeria

Describing the events of the Sand Creek massacre in the prologue of the book
There There (2018)
Source: As quoted in [Buchanan, Rowan Hisayo, There There by Tommy Orange review – Native American stories, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/18/there-there-tommy-orange-review, 9 August 2018, The Guardian, July 18, 2018]

Source: 'When Calls the Heart' Star Andrea Brooks Opens Up About Her Pregnancy Journey (Exclusive) https://www.etonline.com/when-calls-the-heart-star-andrea-brooks-opens-up-about-her-pregnancy-journey-exclusive-128970 (July 20, 2019)

Broadcast (21 March 1943), quoted in The Times (22 March 1943), p. 6
The Second World War (1939–1945)

"Ooh, Baby" (song)
Gilbert O'Sullivan, "Ooh, Baby" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPsVmA742FE (song on YouTube)
Song lyrics

"Get Down" (song)
Song lyrics
Source: Gilbert O'Sullivan, "Get Down" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXl5P2xO9-o (song on YouTube)
Source: (+ Duet with Lulu. On YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlqoiBV6ETs

Source: Books, Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook (1996)

"Twenty One Reasons For Being A Vegetarian" (2007), in vernoncoleman.com http://www.vernoncoleman.com/twentyoner.htm.

"Fala Chen Is Bringing Her Excellence to Hollywood" in Town & Country https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a37223279/fala-chen-jiang-li-shang-chi-marvel-interview/ (1 September 2021)

Song lyrics, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

Quoted in Mother Reader by Moyra Davey (Seven Stories Press, 2011), p. xvii
A Frozen Woman (1981)

Source: Happy, G I R L (2014)

Spoken intro to "What a Wonderful World" (1970 version)