Quotes about children

page 7

Source: The Absorbent Mind (1949), Ch. 27 : The Teacher's Preparation, p. 283; part of this has become paraphrased as :
Context: One who has drunk at the fountain of spiritual happiness says good-by of his own accord to the satisfactions that come from a higher professional status … What is the greatest sign of success for a teacher thus transformed? It is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist."

Source: Peter and Wendy (1911), Ch. 1
Context: All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, "Oh, why can't you remain like this for ever!" This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.

On her near-death experience and final days in New York
Edie : American Girl (1982)
Context: "The Siege of the Warwick Hotel." I was left alone with a substantial supply of speed. I started having strange, convulsive behavior. I was shooting up every half-hour... thinking that with each fresh shot I'd knock this nonsense out of my system. I'd entertain myself hanging on to the bathroom sink with my hind feet stopped up against the door, trying to hold myself steady enough so I wouldn't crack my stupid skull open. I entertained myself by making a tape... a really fabulous tape in which I made up five different personalities. I realized that I had to get barbiturates in order to stop the convulsions, which lasted either hours. Something was spinning in my head.... I just kept thinking that if I could pop enough speed I'd knock the daylights out of my system and none of this nonsense would go on. None of this flailing around and moaning, sweating like a pig, and whew! It was a heavy scene. When I finally cooled down to what I thought was pretty good shape, I slipped on a little muumuu, ran down the stairs of the Warwick, barefoot to the lobby. My eye caught a mailman's jacket and a sack of mail hanging across the back of a chair in the hall way entrance, and before I knew what I was doing, I whipped on the jacket, flipped the bag over my shoulder, and flew out the door, whistling a happy tune. Suddenly I thought: "My God! This is a federal offense. Fooling around with the mail." So I turned around and rushed back and BAM! the manager was waiting for me. He ordered me into the back office. They telephoned an ambulance from Bellevue and packed me into it. Five policemen. I was back into convulsions again, which was really a drag, and I tried to tell the doctors and the nurses and the student interns that I'd run out of barbiturates and overshot speed.... I could speak sanely, but all my motor nerves were going crazy wild. It looked like I was out of my mind. If you had seen me, you wouldn't have bothered to listen, and none of them did. Oh, God, it was a nightmare. Finally six big spade attendants came and held me down on a stretcher. They terrified me... their force against mine. I got twice as bad. I just flipped. I told them if they'd just let go of me, I would calm down and stop kicking and fighting. But they wouldn't listen and they started to tell each other what stages of hallucinations I was in... how I imagined myself an animal. All these things totally unreal to my mind and just guessed on their part. Oh, it was insane. Then they plunged a great needle into my butt and BAM! out I went for two whole days. When I woke up, wow! Rats all over the floor, wailing and screaming. We ate potatoes with spoons. The doctors at Bellevue finally contacted my private physician, and after five days he came and got me out. They sent me back to Gracie Square, a private mental hospital that cost a thousand dollars a week. I was there for five months. Then I ran away with a patient and we went to an apartment in the Seventies somewhere which belonged to another patient in the hospital, who gave us the keys. The guy I ran away with was twenty, but he'd been a junkie since the age of nine, so he was pretty emotionally retarded and something of a drag. I didn't have any pills, so, kind of ravaging around, I went to see a gynecologist and a pretty well-off one. He asked me if I would like to shoot up some acid with him. I hadn't much experience with acid, but I wasn't afraid. He closed his office at five, and we took off in his Aston Martin and drove up the coast... no, what's the name of that river? The Hudson. We stopped at a motel and he gave me three ampules of liquid Sandoz acid, intravenously, mainlining, and he gave himself the same amount and he completely flipped, I was hallucinating and trying to tell him what I was seeing. I'd say, "I see rich, embroidered curtains, and I see people moving in the background. It's the Middle Ages and I am a princess, " and I told him he was some sort of royalty. We made love from eight in the evening until seven in the morning with ecstatic climax after climax, just going insane with it, until he realized it was seven and he had to get back to his office to open it at eight-thirty. He gave me a shot to calm me down, and because I couldn't come down, I took about fourteen Placidyls. On the way back something very strange happened. I didn't realize I was going to say it, but I said out loud, "I wish I was dead"... the love and the beauty and the ecstasy of the whole experience I'd just gone through were really so alien. I didn't even know the man... it had been a one-night jag... he was married and had children... and I just felt lost. It hardly seemed worth living any more because once again I was alone. He dropped me off at the apartment where I was staying with the runaway patient. I had a little Bloody Mary when I got there, and dropped a few more Placidyls. With my tolerance, nothing should have happened, but I suddenly went into a coma. My eyes rolled back in my head. It was lucky... I had called an aide, Jimmy, at the hospital - he had been a good friend - I had called him anonymously and asked him to come and visit us. He happened to turn up just as I went into the coma. He and the heroin addict tried to wake me up. They slapped me and pumped my chest and they put me in a bathtub full of really cold water. Jimmy began to call hospitals - not psychiatric but medical - and one of them actually told them to let me sleep it off. But Jimmy just flipped. He knew I was dying, and he was right. He called Lenox Hill Hospital, and the police finally came. Jimmy and the heroin addict were taken into custody, and I was rushed to the hospital. I was actually declared dead. My mother was called... and then BAM! I started breathing again. I was pretty shaken up by what happened because I didn't understand how I could have almost gone out on just fifteen Placidyls when I used to live on thirty-five three-grain Tunials a day, plus alcohol. They released Jimmy and the junkie, but of course I was still in the trap. I thought I was fine and that I could leave. But a psychiatrist came to interview me and I was put in the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital - committed on the grounds of unintentional, unconscious suicide. It was a pretty devastating experience. They put me on eight hundred milligrams of Thorazine four times a day plus six hundred milligrams at bedtime - an ugly-tasting liquid, but it took quick effect and you couldn't hide the pills or spit them out later. I had all kinds of bad reactions from it - I'd get bad tremors and all itchy and wormy. I said I wasn't going to take the stuff any more, no matter what, so they finally took me off it one day. I had a seizure, vomited all over the floor, and I couldn't get tremendous dosages of Thorazine, but they accused me of importing drugs and taking them there in the hospital. My doctor was young... a resident... and I just told him, "You think I've taken drugs. There's no point in even reasoning with you. I'll just go to some other hospital." I expected to go to some plush, tolerable hospital, but I was not accepted in any private hospital with the record they gave me. They committed me to Manhattan State on Ward's Island, in the middle of the East River, next to the prison. It was one of the most unpleasant experiences I've ever been through. Really terrifying. I lived in a big dormitory on a ward with about sixty to eighty women. We did all the mopping, cleaning, making beds, scrubbing toilets. And the people there were just so awful. Really pathetic. Some of them were mean. The staff completely ignored you except to administer medication. I thought it was never going to end. In Manhattan State, even in there, there were pushers. One girl who lived in a smaller dormitory - there were two with about ten beds in them - was pushing speed and heroin. And because I'd been warned that if ever you were caught using drugs in a state hospital you'd be criminally punished, I didn't touch any drugs during the three months I was there.

Source: The Emperor's New Mind (1989), Ch. 10, Where Lies the Physics of the Mind?, p. 448–9 (p. 580 in 1999 edition).
Context: Beneath all this technicality is the feeling that it is indeed "obvious" that the conscious mind cannot work like a computer, even though much of what is involved in mental activity might do so.
This is the kind of obviousness that a child can see—though the child may, later in life, become browbeaten into believing that the obvious problems are "non-problems", to be argued into nonexistence by careful reasoning and clever choices of definition. 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.

"Race and Rights Rhetoric", a law school paper, as quoted in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (2017) by David Garrow, and reported in "Young Obama Said the American Dream Is to Be Donald Trump", Vice (12 May 2017) https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/young-obama-said-the-american-dream-is-to-be-donald-trump
1990s
Context: [Americans have] a continuing normative commitment to the ideals of individual freedom and mobility, values that extend far beyond the issue of race in the American mind. The depth of this commitment may be summarily dismissed as the unfounded optimism of the average American—I may not be Donald Trump now, but just you wait; if I don't make it, my children will.

Source: Peter and Wendy (1911), Ch. 1
Context: Occasionally in her travels through her children's minds Mrs. Darling found things she could not understand, and of these quite the most perplexing was the word Peter. She knew of no Peter, and yet he was here and there in John and Michael's minds, while Wendy's began to be scrawled all over with him. The name stood out in bolder letters than any of the other words, and as Mrs. Darling gazed she felt that it had an oddly cocky appearance.
"Yes, he is rather cocky," Wendy admitted with regret. Her mother had been questioning her.

Book VIII 1337b.5 http://books.google.com/books?id=ZrDWAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA245&dq=%22absorb+and+degrade+the+mind%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=c6NaUbatEYWp4AOWp4CoBA&ved=0CHYQ6AEwDA#v=onepage&q=%22absorb%20and%20degrade%20the%20mind%22&f=false, 1885 edition
Politics
Context: There can be no doubt that children should be taught those useful things which are really necessary, but not all things, for occupations are divided into liberal and illiberal; and to young children should be imparted only such kinds of knowledge as will be useful to them without vulgarizing them. And any occupation, art, or science which makes the body, or soul, or mind of the freeman less fit for the practice or exercise of virtue is vulgar; wherefore we call those arts vulgar which tend to deform the body, and likewise all paid employments, for they absorb and degrade the mind. There are also some liberal arts quite proper for a freeman to acquire, but only in a certain degree, and if he attend to them too closely, in order to attain perfection in them, the same evil effects will follow.

2012, Sandy Hook Prayer Vigil (December 2012)
Context: We know our time on this Earth is fleeting. We know that we will each have our share of pleasure and pain, that even after we chase after some earthly goal, whether it’s wealth or power or fame or just simple comfort, we will, in some fashion, fall short of what we had hoped. We know that, no matter how good our intentions, we’ll all stumble sometimes in some way.
We’ll make mistakes, we’ll experience hardships and even when we’re trying to do the right thing, we know that much of our time will be spent groping through the darkness, so often unable to discern God’s heavenly plans.
There’s only one thing we can be sure of, and that is the love that we have for our children, for our families, for each other. The warmth of a small child’s embrace, that is true.
The memories we have of them, the joy that they bring, the wonder we see through their eyes, that fierce and boundless love we feel for them, a love that takes us out of ourselves and binds us to something larger, we know that’s what matters.
We know we’re always doing right when we’re taking care of them, when we’re teaching them well, when we’re showing acts of kindness. We don’t go wrong when we do that.

2011, Tucson Memorial Address (January 2011)
Context: That's what I believe, in part because that's what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed. Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation's future. She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted. I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us — we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations.

In reference to the Christian precept that God "hates sin but loves the sinner". Part IV, Chapter 9, A Tussle with Power. pp. 230-231. Also quoted in The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas (2012), p. 83
1920s, An Autobiography (1927)
Context: "Hate the sin and not the sinner" is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practiced, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world... Man and his deed are two distinct things. It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist and attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking one-self. For we are all tarred with the same brush and are children of one and the same Creator, and as such the divine powers within us are infinite. To slight a single human being is to slight those divine powers, and thus to harm not only that being, but with him, the whole world.

The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Cleveland, Ohio (April 3, 1964)
Context: A segregated school system produces children who, when they graduate, graduate with crippled minds. But this does not mean that a school is segregated because it’s all black. A segregated school means a school that is controlled by people who have no real interest in it whatsoever. Let me explain what I mean. A segregated district or community is a community in which people live, but outsiders control the politics and the economy of that community. They never refer to the white section as a segregated community. It’s the all-Negro section that’s a segregated community. Why? The white man controls his own school, his own bank, his own economy, his own politics, his own everything, his own community; but he also controls yours. When you’re under someone else’s control, you’re segregated.

Sec. 73
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
Context: Children have as much mind to shew that they are free, that their own good actions come from themselves, that they are absolute and independent, as any of the proudest of you grown men, think of them as you please.

2015, Naturalization Ceremony speech (December 2015)
Context: We celebrate this history, this heritage, as an immigrant nation. And we are strong enough to acknowledge, as painful as it may be, that we haven’t always lived up to our own ideals. We haven’t always lived up to these documents. [... ] We succumbed to fear. We betrayed not only our fellow Americans, but our deepest values. We betrayed these documents. It’s happened before. And the biggest irony of course was -- is that those who betrayed these values were themselves the children of immigrants. How quickly we forget. One generation passes, two generation passes, and suddenly we don’t remember where we came from. And we suggest that somehow there is “us” and there is “them,” not remembering we used to be “them.”

2012, Remarks at Clinton Global Initiative (September 2012)
Context: Our people and our children are not for sale. But for all the progress that we’ve made, the bitter truth is that trafficking also goes on right here, in the United States. It’s the migrant worker unable to pay off the debt to his trafficker. The man, lured here with the promise of a job, his documents then taken, and forced to work endless hours in a kitchen. The teenage girl, beaten, forced to walk the streets. This should not be happening in the United States of America.

Sec. 117
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
Context: Children should not be suffer'd to lose the consideration of human nature in the shufflings of outward conditions. The more they have, the better humor'd they should be taught to be, and the more compassionate and gentle to those of their brethren who are placed lower, and have scantier portions. If they are suffer'd from their cradles to treat men ill and rudely, because, by their father's title, they think they have a little power over them, at best it is ill-bred; and if care be not taken, will by degrees nurse up their natural pride into an habitual contempt of those beneath them. And where will that probably end but in oppression and cruelty?

1900s, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900), The Strenuous Life
Context: A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world. In the last analysis a healthy state can exist only when the men and women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the children are so trained that they shall endeavor, not to shirk difficulties, but to overcome them; not to seek ease, but to know how to wrest triumph from toil and risk.

As quoted in "The Paternal Pride of Maurice Sendak" by Bernard Holland, in The New York Times (8 November 1987) http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE6DC103CF93BA35752C1A961948260&scp=2&sq=Sendak+protecting&st=nyt
Context: Children are tough, though we tend to think of them as fragile. They have to be tough. Childhood is not easy. We sentimentalize children, but they know what's real and what's not. They understand metaphor and symbol. If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.

Tanks for the Memories : Floatation Tank Talks (1995)<!-- . Nevada City, CA: Gateways -->
Context: If you get into these spaces [non-ordinary states of consciousness] at all, you must forget about them when you come back. You must forget you're omnipotent and omniscient and take the game seriously so you'll engage in sex, have children, and participate in the whole human scenario. When you come back from a deep tank session — or a coma or psychosis —there's always this extraterrestrial feeling. You have to read the directions in the glove compartment so you can run the human vehicle once more.

2016, Memorial Service for Fallen Dallas Police Officers (July 2016)
Context: Faced with this violence, we wonder if the divides of race in America can ever be bridged. We wonder if an African-American community that feels unfairly targeted by police, and police departments that feel unfairly maligned for doing their jobs, can ever understand each other’s experience. We turn on the TV or surf the Internet, and we can watch positions harden and lines drawn, and people retreat to their respective corners, and politicians calculate how to grab attention or avoid the fallout. We see all this, and it’s hard not to think sometimes that the center won't hold and that things might get worse. I understand how Americans are feeling. But, Dallas, I’m here to say we must reject such despair. I’m here to insist that we are not as divided as we seem. And I know that because I know America. I know how far we’ve come against impossible odds. I know we’ll make it because of what I’ve experienced in my own life, what I’ve seen of this country and its people -- their goodness and decency --as President of the United States. [... ] I see what's possible when we recognize that we are one American family, all deserving of equal treatment, all deserving of equal respect, all children of God. That’s the America that I know.

Sec. 115
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
Context: Since the great foundation of fear is pain, the way to harden and fortify children against fear and danger is to accustom them to suffer pain. This 'tis possible will be thought, by kind parents, a very unnatural thing towards their children; and by most, unreasonable...

1860s, Speeches to Ohio Regiments (1864), Speech to One Hundred Forty-eighth Ohio Regiment (1864)
Context: It is vain and foolish to arraign this man or that for the part he has taken, or has not taken, and to hold the government responsible for his acts. In no administration can there be perfect equality of action and uniform satisfaction rendered by all. But this government must be preserved in spite of the acts of any man or set of men. It is worthy your every effort. Nowhere in the world is presented a government of so much liberty and equality. To the humblest and poorest amongst us are held out the highest privileges and positions. The present moment finds me at the White House, yet there is as good a chance for your children as there was for my father's.

Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh
Context: God's purpose in sending His Prophets unto men is twofold. The first is to liberate the children of men from the darkness of ignorance, and guide them to the light of true understanding. The second is to ensure the peace and tranquillity of mankind, and provide all the means by which they can be established. <!-- p. 79-80

"Celephaïs" - Written early November 1920; first published in The Rainbow, No. 2 (May 1922)<!-- p. 10-12 -->
Fiction
Context: 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. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy (2010)
Context: It is useless to know the future if one ignores who one is here in the moment. (...) The more I advance, the more I notice that all problems stem from the genealogy tree. To enter into a person's difficulties is to enter into his family, to penetrate the psychological atmosphere of his domestic milieu. We are all marked, not to say contaminated, by the psychomental universe of our people. A number of people have associated with them a personality that is not theirs, one that is borrowed from one or more members of their emotional environment. To be born into a family is to be, if I may say it this way, possessed. This possession is transmitted from generation to generation: the enchanted becomes the enchanter in projecting onto his children what was projected onto him—unless an awakening comes to break the cycle. (...) For the awakening to become operable, I must make the person act, lead them to commit a very precise act, but I must do so without taking charge or assuming the role of guide regarding their life.

"Tom Joad" (1940) http://web.archive.org/20020319170819/www.geocities.com/nashville/3448/tomjoad.html, a ballad based on the character Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Context: p>Ever'body might be just one big soul,
Well it looks that a-way to me.
Everywhere that you look, in the day or night,
That's where I'm a-gonna be, Ma,
That's where I'm a-gonna be.Wherever little children are hungry and cry,
Wherever people ain't free.
Wherever men are fightin' for their rights,
That's where I'm a-gonna be, Ma.
That's where I'm a-gonna be.</p

Sec. 82
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
Context: Of all the ways whereby children are to be instructed, and their manners formed, the plainest, easiest, and most efficacious, is, to set before their eyes the examples of those things you would have them do, or avoid; which, when they are pointed out to them, in the practice of persons within their knowledge, with some reflections on their beauty and unbecomingness, are of more force to draw or deter their imitation, than any discourses which can be made to them.

2014, Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Town Hall (April 2014)
Context: And when I think back to my journey, my past, I think the most important thing for -- and maybe the most important thing for all the young people here -- is to realize that you really can have an impact on the world; you can achieve your dreams. But in order to do so, you have to focus not so much on a title or how much money you’re going to make, you have to focus more on what kind of influence and impact are you going to have on other people’s lives -- what good can you do in the world. Now, that may involve starting a business, but if you want to start a business you should be really excited about the product or the service that you’re making. It shouldn’t just be how much money I can make -- because the business people who I meet who do amazing things, like Bill Gates, who started Microsoft -- they’re usually people who are really interested in what they do and they really think that it can make a difference in people’s lives. If you want to go into government, you shouldn’t just want to be a particular government official. You should want to go into government because you think it can help educate some children, or it can help provide jobs for people who need work. So I think the most important thing for me was when I started thinking more about other people and how I could have an impact in my larger society and community, and wasn’t just thinking about myself. That’s when I think your dreams can really take off -- because if you’re only thinking about you, then your world is small; if you‘re thinking about others, then your world gets bigger.

Sec. 81
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
Context: The foundations on which several duties are built, and the foundations of right and wrong from which they spring, are not perhaps easily to be let into the minds of grown men, not us'd to abstract their thoughts from common received opinions. Much less are children capable of reasonings from remote principles. They cannot conceive the force of long deductions. The reasons that move them must be obvious, and level to their thoughts, and such as may be felt and touched. But yet, if their age, temper, and inclination be consider'd, they will never want such motives as may be sufficient to convince them.

2015, Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney (June 2015)
Context: But I don't think God wants us to stop there. For too long, we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present. Perhaps we see that now. Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty, or attend dilapidated schools, or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career. Perhaps it causes us to examine what we’re doing to cause some of our children to hate. Perhaps it softens hearts towards those lost young men, tens and tens of thousands caught up in the criminal justice system and leads us to make sure that that system is not infected with bias; that we embrace changes in how we train and equip our police so that the bonds of trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve make us all safer and more secure. Maybe we now realize the way racial bias can infect us even when we don't realize it, so that we're guarding against not just racial slurs, but we're also guarding against the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for a job interview but not Jamal. So that we search our hearts when we consider laws to make it harder for some of our fellow citizens to vote. By recognizing our common humanity by treating every child as important, regardless of the color of their skin or the station into which they were born, and to do what’s necessary to make opportunity real for every American -- by doing that, we express God’s grace.

The Praise of Folly (1511)

Source: Peter and Wendy (1911), Ch. 17
Context: As you look at Wendy, you may see her hair becoming white, and her figure little again, for all this happened long ago. Jane is now a common grown-up, with a daughter called Margaret; and every spring cleaning time, except when he forgets, Peter comes for Margaret and takes her to the Neverland, where she tells him stories about himself, to which he listens eagerly. When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter's mother in turn; and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.

Last interview (1980)
Context: I’m 40, I wanna talk to the people my age. I’m happy if the young people like it, and I’m happy if the old people like it, I’m talkin’ to guys and gals that have been through what we went through, together — the sixties group that has survived. Survived the war, the drugs, the politics, the violence on the street – the whole she-bang – that we’ve survived it and we’re here. And I’m talkin’ to them. And the "Woman" song is to Yoko, but it’s to all women. And, because my role in society – or any artist or poet’s role – is to try to express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel, not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all. And it’s like that’s the job of the artist in society, not to... they’re not some alienated being living on the outskirts of town. It’s fine to live on the outskirts of town, but artists must reflect what we all are. That’s what it’s about – artists, or poets or whatever you wanna call it. And that’s what I’m tryin’ to express on behalf of all the men to all the women, through my own feelings about women – when it dawned on me, "God! It is the other half of the sky" as the late-great Chairman MacDougal said, right? I mean, they are the other half of the sky, and without them there is nothing. And without us there’s nothing. There’s only the two together creating children, creating society. So what’s all this B. S. about, you know, "women are this" and "men are that" – we’re all human, man. We’re all human. And, I am tryin’ to say it to Yoko, but to all women, you know? On behalf of all men, in a way. If that’s taken it too much on meself, I feel that artists are that – they’re reflections of society... Mirrors.

Sec. 108
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
Context: They should always be heard, and fairly and kindly answer'd, when they ask after any thing they would know, and desire to be informed about. Curiosity should be as carefully cherish'd in children, as other appetites suppress'd.

1910s, The New Nationalism (1910)
Context: Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself. I believe the same thing of a nation.

Call me an idiot (2012), pages 41, the whole piece

Quoted in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: 'Hope is contagious', The Guardian, Emma Brockes https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/29/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-met-greta-thunberg-hope-contagious-climate|When (29 June 2019)
2019

Speech by Greta Thunberg, climate activist https://www.eesc.europa.eu/en/avdb/video/speech-greta-thunberg-climate-activist to the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) in Brussels (21 February 2019)
Cited in No One is Too Small to Make a Difference, Penguin Books, 2019, pages 37 and 38-39 (ISBN 9780141991740).
2019, European Economic and Social Committee (February 2019)

2018, "You are stealing our future" (December 2018)

2019, "You did not act in time" (April 2019)

2018, "You are stealing our future" (December 2018)

Source: Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic (2000), p. 13

On portraying characters that might unintentionally hurt Auggie, the protagonist in Wonder, in “Author R.J. Palacio | Interview” https://www.timeout.com/chicago/kids/activities/author-r-j-palacio-interview?pageNumber=2 in TimeOut Chicago (2012 Apr 12)

Source: Decree Regarding Marriage (January 28, 1931)

And never under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.
"Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" https://books.google.com/books?id=ksOjjuy3issC&pg=PA44, in The Language of the Night (1979), p. 44

2014, Queensland University Address (November 2014)

Table Talk (1569)

As quoted in Grey Wolf: Mustafa Kemal – An intimate study of a dictator (1932) by Harold Courtenay Armstrong, pp. 199-200
Disputed

1900s, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900), National Duties

Seventh State of the Union (3 December 1907)
1900s

Glimpses of World History (1949)

Glimpses of World History (1949)

Oriana Fallaci. Interview with Indira Gandhi in New Delhi, February 1972

War is a racket (1935)

[Address by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to the Knesset, Anwar, Sadat, Visit to Israel by President Sadat, Jerusalem, November 20, 1977, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/address-by-egyptian-president-anwar-sadat-to-the-knesset, October 9, 2018]

That which the educator must seek is to be able to see the child as Jesus saw him. It is with this endeavour, thus defined and delimited, that we wish to deal.
The Secret of Childhood, p. 108

1910 - 1935, The mysteries of the forest' (1934)

Paolo Maldini, AC Milan Legend ( Source http://www.liverpoolfc.com/news/first-team/185608-maldini-steven-is-similar-to-baresi)

[The Goals Program. How to Stay Motivated, Volume III, chapter 5, Zig Ziglar]
Attributed

The Art of Living: Living within the Laws of Life (2006)

One didn't discuss serious matters nor did one curse in from of women and children; one didn't openly degrade them, one did it behind their backs.

Chapter Four
The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

http://books.google.com/books?id=YnY10fNqqp4C&q=%22There+is+some+irony+in+the+fact+that+children+imagine+that+parents+can+do+what+they+want+and+parents+imagine+that+children+do+When+I+grow+up+parallels+Oh+to+be+a+child+again%22&pg=PA102#v=onepage
The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

Interview with Lisa Owen at Newshub Nation, 21 October 2017

Umar ibn al-Khattab, Vol. 2, p. 389-390, also quoted in At-Tabqaat ul-Kabir, Vol. 3, p. 339
Last Advise

Source: Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (2006), Introduction, p. 6

Diogenes Laertius

Raised by Wolves, season 1, episode 4. Character Mother.

Nobody else did that. So I don't wanna hear shit about nobody telling me who I can't love and respect until you start doing what they did. To me, this is Mecca. This is the black family. You know what I'm saying? But, what makes it that much sadder, what makes me wanna cry, is that when I leave this place, so does Mecca. You understand what I'm saying? We're going back to the real deal. Right out there, you're going see the same sisters and Brenda, they're right out there, and y'all are going to get in your cars and drive the fuck home.
1990s, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Atlanta (1992)

twitter 7 feb 2021

Second Address to the Second Congress of Peace and Freedom (1868)

Drugs and Governments
Focus Fourteen

1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)

2020s, 2021

Source: The Goblin Quest Series, Goblin Quest (2004), Chapter 7 (p. 128)

Source: Philosophie der Erlösung, Erster Band (2014), Metaphysik, § 21 ISBN 978-1494963262

"Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko says he’s ready to give his life for Ukraine" https://nypost.com/2022/03/18/vitali-klitschko-says-hes-ready-to-give-his-life-for-ukraine/, New York Post, 18 March 2022

Sermon 39 Catholic Spirit http://new.gbgm-umc.org/umhistory/wesley/sermons/39/ from the 1872 edition of Wesley's Complete Works - Thomas Jackson, editor
Sermons on Several Occasions (1771)

1963, American University speech
Variant: For in the final analysis, our most basic common link, is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's futures, and we are all mortal.
Source: Profiles in Courage
Context: In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours — and even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interest. So, let us not be blind to our differences — but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

Variant: Goldfish get big enough only for the bowl you put them in. Bonsai trees twist in miniature. I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.
Source: My Sister's Keeper

Source: Time Enough for Love

Source: Invincible

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)
Context: Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them - a mother's approval, a father's nod - are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.

Variant: The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.

Source: Into the Wild

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: Uncommon Criminals

Source: It (1986)

Source: The Puppet Masters (1951), Chapter 11 (p. 65)