“Adults have not understood children or adolescents and they are, as a consequence, in continual conflict with them. The remedy is not that adults should gain some new intellectual knowledge or achieve a higher standard of culture. No, they must find a different point of departure. The adult must find within himself the still unknown error that prevents him from seeing the child as he is.”

— Maria Montessori

Source: The Secret of Childhood (1936), Ch. 2

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Maria Montessori 39

Italian pedagogue, philosopher and physician 1870–1952

Alden Nowlan (1933–1983) Canadian writer

“Children in school are not students, they are pupils. It is typical of certain kinds of politicians that they should regard children as adults, the better subsequently, and consequently, to regard adults as children.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Mr Brown's self-esteem issue - or, asks Theodore Dalrymple, does Gordon Brown really believe that he can solve the problems of the world? http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001326.php (January 24, 2007).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

“Already, though, she understood the difference between being a child and being an adult. The difference is when someone says he can keep the bad things away, a child believes him.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

Source: NOS4A2

“There is an adult in every child and a child in every adult.”

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) Swiss psychologist, biologist, logician, philosopher & academic

Source: The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), Ch. 1 : The Rules of the Game, § 8 : Conclusions : Motor Rules and the Two Kinds of Respect 
Context: In certain circumstances where he experiments in new types of conduct by cooperating with his equals, the child is already an adult. There is an adult in every child and a child in every adult. … There exist in the child certain attitudes and beliefs which intellectual development will more and more tend to eliminate: there are others which will acquire more and more importance. The later are not derived from the former but are partly antagonistic to them.

“Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.”

William Faulkner book Light in August

Source: Light in August

“Adults must remember that they look like insane giants to children.”

Irving Fiske (1908–1990) American writer

Attributed without citation in Isabella Fiske McFarlin, et al., "Free The Kids! and Quarry Hill Community" http://search.proquest.com/openview/e76b1d1a966283049dcf60bcb9386c4d/1, Journal of Psychohistory, Vol. 21 No. 1 (Summer 1993), p. 21