“It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary… to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.”

“Childhood may be defined as the age of play; therefore some children are never young, and some adults are never old.”

“Childhood, after all, has to be an age of discovery. These are days you'll remember vividly all your life, even when you're old and forget why you came into a room. It must never be allowed to become the age of anxiety.
The anxiety has been greatly increased by this government's multiplication of exams and emphasis on starting training as a middle manager in a computer company from the age of six. Parents have made things worse by worrying unduly about exam results and seeing that their children work a great deal harder than most middle managers in computer companies.”

“Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending.”

“Old age is the harbor of all ills.”

“Old age is the harbor of all ills.”

“With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.”

“Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret.”

“In the Middle Ages there was no such thing as childhood. The medieval view of children was profoundly different from ours.”

“Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.”