Quotes about adult
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“In many matters children — not ensnared by dogmatism, passion, or erudition — judge far truer than adults.”

Adolph Freiherr Knigge book Über den Umgang mit Menschen

Über viele Dinge urteilen Kinder, von Systemgeist, Leidenschaft und Gelehrsamkeit unverführt, weit richtiger als Erwachsene.
Über den Umgang mit Menschen (1788)

Children, Passion

“There are children born to be children, and others who must mark time till they can take their natural places as adults.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Children, Nature, Time

“When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever. Dictatorship is the obvious means in a world of enemies at home and abroad. I dislike it in principle as dangerous to its own objects. But the Soviet Union has already created liberties far greater than exist elsewhere in the world. They are liberties that most closely affect the lives of the people — power in the trade unions, in peasant organizations, in the cultural life of nationalities, freedom of women in public and private life, and a tremendous development of education for adults and children.”

Roger Nash Baldwin (1884–1981) American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) co-founder

Article from Soviet Russia Today

Life, Women, Children, People

“I think we went through — in America, at least, we went through a period in the ’60s and ’70s when the education establishment became extremely liberal, and part of that is a flirtation with relativism. And a resistance — it’s horrible to think of — of adults telling kids what’s right and wrong. What a terrible thing. That’s oppression. And so we created these sort of value-free spaces, which conveys a value, which is that there’s no right or wrong, everyone decides for themselves. Uh, everyone’s opinion is equal. You should say your opinion and then you get a lot of incivility. What I would like to see is a revamped civics curriculum where we teach very explicitly the long tradition of left-right. Um, we teach what each side is. You can’t say right about it, that’s my language. But, um, you teach what each side is concerned about. You know, very much like the line here. Uh, both are essential. One without the other creates an unbalanced American civic order.”

Jonathan Haidt (1963) American psychologist

"The Psychology Behind Morality" (12 June 2014) http://www.onbeing.org/program/jonathan-haidt-the-psychology-behind-morality/transcript/6347#main_content

Education, Thinking, Parting

“She's telling us how to fight ISIS. Just go to her website. She tells you how to fight ISIS on her website. I don't think General Douglas MacArthur would like that too much. … See, you're telling the enemy everything you want to do. No wonder you've been fighting ISIS your entire adult life.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, September, First presidential debate (September 26, 2016)

Life, Thinking, Fight

“Is a virus a living organism? What is a gene, and how does the original genetic constitution of a living organism express itself in the developed characteristics of the adult? Do complex protein molecules "know how" to reduplicate their pattern, and is this an essential clue to the problem of reproduction of living creatures? All these are certainly complex problems, but they are not problems of disorganized complexity, to which statistical methods hold the key. They are all problems which involve dealing simultaneously with a sizable number of factors which are interrelated into an organic whole. They are all, in the language here proposed, problems of organized complexity.”

Warren Weaver (1894–1978) American mathematician

Source: Science and Complexity, 1948, p. 537

Problem

“(on her DUI) I have a responsibility, and it's something that I did wrong, and if I could personally apologize to every single person that has lost a loved one from drunk driving I would. And unfortunately, I can't, but this is my way of paying my dues and taking responsibility and being an adult.”

Nicole Richie (1981) American television personality, musician, actress, and author

Source: Madden, Pregnancy Made Richie Change Her Ways http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3433390 Interview with Diane Sawyer, August 2, 2007 (March 6, 2008)

Love, Way, Personality

“There is an issue of vital importance that most well-meaning parents are not aware of: the modern diet that most children are eating today creates a fertile cellular environment for cancer to emerge at a later age. Trying to prevent breast, prostate, and other cancers as an adult may not be totally possible because most risk factors cannot be changed at this late stage. The bottom line is that in order to have a major impact on preventing cancer we must intervene much earlier, even as early as the first ten years of life. In other words, childhood diets create adult cancers.”

Joel Fuhrman (1953) Family Physician and author

Introduction, p. xviii
Disease-Proof Your Child (2005)

Life, Children, Age, Parent

“We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

"Children’s Song"
Song at the Year's Turning (1955)

World

“Pretty woman, he thought. Pretty little black-skinned woman. Who wanted to kill for love, die for love. The pride, the conceit of these doormat women amazed him. They were always women who had been spoiled children. Whose whims had been taken seriously by adults and who grew up to be the stingiest, greediest people on earth and out of their stinginess grew their stingy little love that ate everything in sight. They could not believe or accept the fact that they were unloved; they believed that the world itself was off balance when it appeared as though they were not loved. Why did they think they were so lovable? Why did they think their brand of love was better than, or even as good as, anybody else's? But they did. And they loved their love so much they would kill anybody who got in its way.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Song of Solomon (1977)

Love, Women, Children, People

“Much of what we do as adults is based on this imitative absorption during our childhood years. Frequently we imagine that we are behaving in a particular way because such behaviour accords with some abstract, lofty code of moral principles, when in reality all we are doing is obeying a deeply ingrained and long 'forgotten' set of purely imitative impressions (along with out carefully concealed instinctive urges) that makes it so hard for societies to change their customs and their 'beliefs'. Even when faced with exciting, brilliantly rational new ideas, based on the application of pure, objective intelligence, the community will still cling to its old home-based habits and prejudices. This is the cross we have to bear if we are going to sail through our vital juvenile 'blotting-paper' phase of rapidly mopping up the accumulated experiences of previous generations. We are forced to take the biased opinions along with the valuable facts.”

Desmond Morris book The Naked Ape

(2010), p. 86
The Naked Ape (1967)

Way, Home, Imagination, Intelligence

“When I say I am free, I merely state a fact. If you are an adult, you are free from infancy. I am free from all description and identification. (…).”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Freedom
Source: I am That, P.152.

“What I am seeing right now is a man who is so dominated by his mother that he is willing to throw away his marriage in order to protect her from the trauma of growing up and acting like an adult.”

Orson Scott Card book Lovelock

Lovelock (1994)

Marriage

““Your collection is not a woman. That’s only a metaphor—an abstraction! You’ll be dying for nothing, for a principle that nobody else can even comprehend.”
As she spoke, Jane became convinced that she herself would never willingly die for a principle. She might feel guilty about it, but she’d smile and lie, knuckle under, pretend, anything, in order to survive. It made her feel a little sad to realize this, but also, at the same time, very adult.”

Michael Swanwick book The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 15 (p. 263)

Lie, Sadness, Smile, Feeling

“Every neighborhood on the planet has a house like this on the block. We've all driven past it. A bunch of people living there, too old to be kids, but never gonna be adults… You can tell that by the "AEROSMITH ROCKS" banner in the living room window… Four sociopathic pitbulls roaming the yard at all times… The brown one has one leg, just flops to the fence every couple of hours… You can tell when the family's doubled their net worth 'cause they parked a new gutted Chevelle in the driveway… The mailman's afraid to bring the mail, so he just gives it to the cops, 'cause hell, they're gonna be there anyway… And if you don't recognize this house in your neighborhood, you live in this house in your neighborhood.”

Christopher Titus (1964) actor, writer, podcaster

Love is Evol (2009)

People, Family, Hell, Time

“As I describe inspiration I do not want you to think I am speaking of religion.
That which takes us by surprise - moments of happiness - that is inspiration. Inspiration which is different from daily care.
Many people as adults are so startled by inspiration which is different from daily care that they think they are unique In having had it. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Inspiration is there all the time.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

Source: 1970's, The Untroubled Mind', 1972, p. 61

Happiness, People, Truth, Religion

“Identical in the physical processes by which he originates—identical in the early stages of his formation—identical in the mode of his nutrition before and after birth, with the animals which lie immediately below him in the scale—Man, if his adult and perfect structure be compared with theirs, exhibits, as might be expected, a marvellous likeness of organization. He resembles them as they resemble one another—he differs from them as they differ from one another.—And, though these differences and resemblances cannot be weighed and measured, their value may be readily estimated; the scale or standard of judgment, touching that value, being afforded and expressed by the system of classification of animals now current among zoologists.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 83

Lie, Birth, Animals, Perfection

“I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

Guardian columns

Hate, People, Cats, Learning

“Dawns and sunsets. The Magic Hour -- when the sun and the moon can be in the sky at the same time -- a magic and disturbing occurrence for a child. And for an adult.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Fear of Drowning By Numbers

Time, Sun

“Remember the words George Carlin said could not be said on TV? There's now a kind of movie that cannot be made without using all of them except one. Even the online trailer may startle you. It's one of those adults-only Red Band Trailers which you have to give your age in order to view. I lied about my age. Nobody under 17 would ever do that.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-sitter-2011 of The Sitter (7 December 2011) Reviews, One-star reviews

Age

“Thank you for your very detailed letter regarding Scientology. We haven't yet found a way to attack these jackals who feed on children and young adults who are too emotionally weak to stand by themselves when they reach the age of consent. It's too bad there isn't a 20th Century Charles Dickens to write about the terrible destruction of these 20th Century fagins who make themselves rich while they destroy the psyche of so many. At the present time, I can only encourage you to do more of what you have been doing.”

Leo Ryan (1925–1978) American teacher and politician

Letter to Ida Camburn (10 December 1976).

Children, Age, Way, Time

“He's one of my closest friends in the industry. He makes me feel like a teenager — I have to act and think like an adult so much. He makes me feel young again.”

Rihanna (1988) Barbadian singer, songwriter, and actress

On Chris Brown. Allure magazine, January 2008.

Feeling, Thinking

“Secondly, the student is trained to accept historical mis-statements on the authority of the book. If education is a pre- paration for adult life, he learns first to accept without question, and later to make his own contribution to the creation of historical fallacies, and still later to perpetuate what he has learnt. In this way, ignorant authors are leading innocent students to hysterical conclusions. The process of the writers' mind provides excellent material for a manual on logical fallacies. Thirdly, the student is told nothing about the relationship between evidence and truth. The truth is what the book ordains and the teacher repeats. No source is cited. No proof is offered. No argument is presented. The authors play a dangerous game of winks and nods and faints and gestures with evidence. The art is taught well through precept and example. The student grows into a young man eager to deal in assumptions but inapt in handling inquiries. Those who become historians produce narratives patterned on the textbooks on which they were brought up. Fourthly, the student is compelled to face a galling situation in his later years when he comes to realize that what he had learnt at school and college was not the truth. Imagine a graduate of one of our best colleges at the start of his studies in history in a university in Europe. Every lecture he attends and every book he reads drive him mad with exasperation, anger and frustration. He makes several grim discoveries. Most of the "facts", interpretations and theories on which he had been fostered in Pakistan now turn out to have been a fata morgana, an extravaganza of fantasies and reveries, myths and visions, whims and utopias, chimeras and fantasies.”

Khursheed Kamal Aziz (1927–2009) historian

The Murder of History, critique of history textbooks used in Pakistan, 1993

Life, Truth, Books, Education

“You too need the lecture on the childishness of coupling? Of course it's childish. Family life is, today more than ever, when the ethos is created substantially by the children. It's even worse when there are no children around. Because the childish adult replaces the child. Coupled life and family life bring out everything that's childish in everyone involved. Why do they have to sleep night after night in the same bed? Why must they be on the phone to each other five times a day? Why are they always with each other? The forced deference is certainly childish. The unnatural deference.”

Philip Roth book The Dying Animal

The Dying Animal (2001)

Life, Children, Family, Sleep

“This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere - that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

The Precession of Simulcra, The Hyperreal and the Imaginary
1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

World

“Well, the New York Times editorial board, that reliable abettor of all the liars, haters, and fantasists, aka Democrats, who detest the American South and lust to rewrite America's history into party-serving fiction, has endorsed dumping Andrew Jackson in favor of rewarding a woman with his place on the twenty dollar bill. So fundamentally important to the nation is this switch that the Board’s reputedly adult members have decided that the only group sober and knowledgeable enough to decide how to destroy another piece of American history and further persecute the South is 'the nation's schoolchildren' who should be made to 'nominate and vote on Jackson’s replacement. Why not give them another reason to learn about women who altered history and make some history themselves by changing American currency?' Why of course, what geniuses! And, then, why not let these kids — who cannot figure out that the brim of baseball cap goes in the front — go on to decide other pressing national issues. Maybe they can replace General Washington on the $1 bill with a Muslim woman and thereby end America's war with Islam. As the saying goes, you could not make this stuff up. Now Andrew Jackson was not the most unblemished of men, but he risked his life repeatedly for his country; killed its enemies; expanded U. S. territory in North America; defeated the British at New Orleans; was twice elected president; and faced down and was prepared to hang the South Carolina nullifiers when he believed they were seeking to undermine and break the Union. Jackson is one of those southern fellows, and so he is now a target for banishment from our currency and eventually our history because he did not treat slaves and Indians as if they were his equals and, indeed, inflicted pain on both. But he also was, along with Thomas Jefferson, another insensitive chap toward blacks and Indians, the longtime icon of the Democratic Party and its great self-praising and fund-raising feast, the annual 'Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner', which was, of course, a fervent tribute to those that General Jackson would have hanged without blinking.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

As quoted in Michael Scheuer's Non-Intervention http://non-intervention.com/1689/democrats-scourge-the-south-after-the-battle-flag-it%e2%80%99s-on-to-old-hickory/ (9 July 2015), by M. Scheuer. 2010s

Life, Women, Men, Pain

“Greeks and Romans alike engaged openly in a variety of sanctioned atrocities, including adult human sacrifice. …according to …Cicero, human sacrifice was not restricted to the western Phoenicians but was widely accepted among Mediterranean societies as a pious act that would please the gods.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

What the Bones Tell Us (1997)

God

“Haven't you ever seen a 3-year-old when he makes a foolish blunder? He looks at whatever child or adult is nearby and screams at him "Look at what you made me do!" That's the moral universe that [they] always lived in.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, Earthfall (1995)

Universe

“Your teachers are always telling you [high school students] to behave like adults. I wonder if they'd like it if you did. You may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile compared to adults…. Imagine the reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go at a time.”

Paul Graham (1964) English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist

"What You'll Wish You'd Known", January 2005

School, Imagination, Teachers, Time

“All mammals nurse their young, and breast milk benefits a newborn infant in ways above and beyond nutrition. In fact, until 1 to 2 years of age, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the World Health Organization, the Institute of Medicine and more promote breast-feeding as optimal. Unfortunately, breast-feeding until that age is often difficult, if not impossible, because mothers have to return to work, and children go off to preschool or day care. So we often replace human milk with the milk of cows or other animals. But at a certain point, we have to acknowledge that we are the only mammals on the planet that continue to consume milk after childhood, often in great amounts. More and more evidence is surfacing, however, that milk consumption may not only be unhelpful, it might also be detrimental. … there’s very little evidence that most adults need it. There’s also very little evidence that it’s doing them much good.”

Aaron Carroll American pediatrician

"Got Milk? Might Not Be Doing You Much Good", in The New York Times (17 November 2014) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/18/upshot/got-milk-might-not-be-doing-you-much-good.html?_r=0

Children, Health, Age, World

“Already as a small child I criticized the injustice of adults and I experienced as a blatant contradiction the fact that everything was offered to me whereas so much was denied to the other children. My criticism sharpened as the years went by and the feeling of revolt against the many proofs of love around me grew apace.”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Love, Children, Feeling

“The distinction between central and peripheral claims is applicable to many aspects of human sexuality. Consider, for instance, the emotion of jealousy. Evolutionary psychologists place a strong emphasis on sex differences in this domain. The standard claim is that men are more worried by a partner’s sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity, whereas women are more worried by a partner’s emotional infidelity… [However] the overwhelming trend is that most men and most women are extremely upset by both sexual and emotional infidelity. This suggests that the central EP claim regarding jealousy should be “Human beings evolved to experience jealousy in romantic relationships” rather than “Men and women evolved different patterns of jealousy.” The latter statement is true but should be considered a qualification to the former: a peripheral rather than a central claim. To stress the sex difference alone would be like observing that male elephants are bigger than females while steadfastly neglecting to mention that all adult elephants are large compared to most terrestrial animals. It would almost certainly foster an inaccurate view.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

(pp. 266-267)
The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013)

Women, Men, Jealousy, Sex

“Let's face it; regular monthly superhero comic books have taken on the look and smell of old men's pants. It's hardly a surprise comics lost the teenage audience or that the adult audience is now bored and irritated by the endless recycling of images they've already seen and words they've already read.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2003
http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=36&t=001597
On comics

Men, Books, Reading

“The first Elm Street was such a fresh idea and it absolutely blew me away. But the second one didn’t have Wes involved and I think it suffered as a result of that. With the third one Wes and his writing partner Bruce Wagner already had a script before I came onboard. Then me and Frank Darabont did some re-writes. We thought ‘why can’t we make this film wilder and much more fun that the first one’. I realised that the heart of it was these adolescent kids. These 15/16 year old kids who are just at that age when you start to realise that bad things happen in the world. Of course, none of the adults believe the kids about Freddy so going to them always makes things worse in these films.”

Chuck Russell (1958) American film director

THN Exclusive: Chuck Russell talks I Am Wrath, The Mask and Freddy Krueger http://www.thehollywoodnews.com/2016/05/23/thn-exclusive-chuck-russell-talks/ (May 23, 2016)

Age, World, Idea, Thinking

“As a teacher, I have seen time and again a certain kind of American middle-class girl who projects winsome malleability, a soft, unfocused help-me-please persona that, in adult life, is a recipe for disaster. These are the ones who end up with a string of abusive boyfriends or in sticky situations with overfamiliar male authority figures who call them “honey.””

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 36

Life, Girl, Teachers, Time

“In 1990, the MPAA introduced the NC-17 rating to provide an outlet for legitimate adult fare — non-pornographic motion pictures with content deemed too strong for the under-17 crowd. The first movie released with an NC-17 was Henry & June, whose financial failure was widely blamed on the new rating. After that, all potentially-lucrative films receiving an NC-17 made the cuts required by the MPAA to earn an R. Now, in 1995, there's Showgirls, the most significant test of the NC-17's commercial viability to date. Helmed by Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall, Basic Instinct) and written by Joe Eszterhas (Jagged Edge, Basic Instinct), this movie is going into wide release with the adult rating. Too bad it's one of the worst films of the year.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=221 of Showgirls (1995). Half-star reviews

Failure, Strong

“I don't want to become adult!”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

“We treat the children like children. It is the powerful with their war that treats them like they are adults. We talk to them. We teach them that the word, together with love and dignity, is what makes us human beings. We don't teach them how to fight. Well, yes, but only how to fight with their words. They learn. They know that the reason we are in all this is so that they won't have to do the same. And they talk and they also listen. Contrary to what you say, we teach the children that words don't kill but that yes it is possible to kill words and, along with them, the act of being human.”

Subcomandante Marcos (1957) Mexican activist

"I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of this planet" http://www.csuchico.edu/zapatist/HTML/Archive/Communiques/etaJAN.html January, 2003

Love, War, Children, Learning

“We are the adult power in the world. It is because of the United States, our action or inaction, that there will be a resolution here.”

Chuck Hagel (1946) United States Secretary of Defense

[Foster, Klug, http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6149419,00.html, U.S. Presses China on N. Korea Sanctions, Associated Press (via The Guardian), October 15, 2006, 2006-10-16]
2006

World

“We should therefore, with grace and optimism, embrace NOMA's tough-minded demand: Acknowledge the personal character of these human struggles about morals and meanings, and stop looking for definite answers in nature's construction. But many people cannot bear to surrender nature as a “transitional object”—a baby's warm blanket for our adult comfort. But when we do (for we must), nature can finally emerge in her true form: not as a distorted mirror of our needs, but as our most fascinating companion. Only then can we unite the patches built by our separate magisteria into a beautiful and coherent quilt called wisdom.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Rocks of Ages

Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (Ballantine, 1999), p. 178

Wisdom, People, Beauty, Optimism

“Children like to work, and are always eager to imitate the work of adults.”

Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918) Russian revolutionary

Utopian Socialism in the Nineteenth Century, 1913, Ch. 5.

Children

“I want to do kiddie movies now. I'm fed up with adult movies — most of them stink. At a certain point with movies it becomes all about mathematics: this has to lead up to this, this has to lead up to that — you're always bound by some kind of formula. But since having kids and watching lots of animated cartoons and all those great old Disney films, I think they're better, they're much better. They're more fun and they take more risks.”

Johnny Depp (1963) American actor, film producer, and musician

Quoted in Jessamy Calkin, "One That Got Away," http://www.johnnydeppfan.com/interviews/telegraphmag.htm The Daily Telegraph Magazine (2002-08-03)

Mathematics, Thinking, Animals

“I think [my experience] gave me—without I think ever romanticizing (because these were people you romanticize as somehow super people), it gave me a very deep and lasting respect for the common sense and the abilities of human beings, adults. At the same time, it increased my awareness of the importance of information and the challenge that that posed, therefore the challenge of education. And the great gap between what people need to know in order to protect their own self-interest and what they do know, which of course in some Platonic and other theories is filled in by those who believe that they know best, a view which as you know I’ve always greatly distrusted.”

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) American political scientist

A Conversation with Robert A. Dahl (2009)

People, Education, Thinking, Sense

“Planning a good society as far ahead as one can see, does not mean that our adventures have ended; they have just begun. Human nature is growing up. As we put behind us the accidents and tears of childhood squabbles and the wooden swords and shields, and begin to try on our new space pilots'" uniform, so to speak, we begin to see what we can teach ourselves and what we can really become with new self-control over new adult powers.”

John R. Platt (1918–1992) American physicist

Cited in: Bernhard Joseph Stern ed. Science and Society. p. 135
Source: The step to man, 1966, p.169.

Nature, Tear, Childhood

“A lifetime career goal for me has always been wanting to lift up little girls. I feel like society has contempt for girls and little girl things. When athletes are performing badly their coaches call them ladies, or when somebody is being weak they say they're crying like a little girl, that's contempt. When somebody's trying to describe something as stupid or lame they say it's for little girls or only a little girl would like that, or when something is pink or full of rainbows and hearts people jump to the immediate conclusion that it's dumb, and if adult men are liking that sort of thing there's something wrong with them, because there's something contemptuous and unworthy about girl things and being a girl.”

Lauren Faust (1974) American animator and writer

Men, People, Stupidity, Feeling

“What constitutes the primordium of the adult parasite [ Rhizocephala ]? What can be injected through the narrow opening of the dart's hypodermic device? …Imagine going through such complexity as nauplius, cyprid, and kentrogon - and then paring yourself down to just a few cells for a quick and hazardous transition to the adult stage. What a minimal bridge at such a crucial transition! …But other species have achieved the ultimate reduction to a single cell! The dart injects just one cell into the host's interior, and the two parts of the life cyle maintain their indispensable continuity by an absolutely minimal connection - as though, within the rhizocephalan life cycle, nature has inserted a stage analogous to the fertilized egg that establishes minimal connection between generations in ordinary sexual organisms.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 363
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Life, Imagination, Nature, Parting

“The path that leads from the persona to the self, from the adult to the outlaw, consists of learning to distinguish between false desire and true desire, or superficial desire and profound desire, or obsessive desire and free passion, … or illusory needs and real needs.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 138

Learning, Passion, Falseness

“America's first great surrealist artists were named Walt Disney, Max Fleischer, and Tex Avery. Their artistic medium was cartoon animation, though we must remember that cartoons of this era were seen not only by children but by a mixed audience, consisting mainly of adults. These men took — quite literally — the principles of surrealism and turned them into mass entertainment. As Fleischer's scantily clad Betty Boop ran through a phantasmagoric underground landscape to the driving beat of Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher," moviegoers of the Thirties saw surrealist dream-logic unfold more powerfully than in any experimental poem created in Greenwich Village. To this day the greatest moment of North American surrealism is probably Dumbo's drunken nightmare choreographed to the demonic oom-pah-pah of "Pink Elephants on Parade" from Walt Disney's 1941 movie. When the surrealist style was so quickly assimilated into mass-media comedy, what avant-garde poet could consider it sufficiently chic?”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"James Tate and American Surrealism," BBC Radio 3, published in Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998)
Essays

Men, Children, Dreams, Animals

“… there is nothing that the most prominent men in the Liberal party more earnestly desire than that labour representation, direct labour representation, shall be as large as possible… It is sometimes said to me, "Oh! but you are against State intervention in matters of great social reform". At this time of the day it would be absurd for any man who has mastered all the Mining Regulations Acts, the Factories Acts, the great mass of regulation which affects trade; it would be absurd for any man to stand on a platform and say he was entirely against State intervention. I, for my part, have never taken that position… My own belief is that in the matters of hours and of wages for adult male labour the interference would be a bad and mischievous thing… that in such matters, for example, as housing of the poor and so forth, the proper machinery through which to carry out these operations is municipal and not Parliamentary.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Speech at Huddersfield (21 May 1892), quoted in 'Mr. Morley At Huddersfield', The Times (23 May 1892), p. 7.

Men, Time, Parting, Housing

“I have asked many teachers and parents what they thought mathematics to be and why it was important to learn it. Few held a view of mathematics that was sufficiently coherent to justify devoting several thousand hours of a child's life to learning it, and children sense this. When a teacher tells a student that the reason for those many hours of arithmetic is to be able to check the change at the supermarket, the teacher is simply not believed. Children see such "reasons" as one more example of adult double talk. The same effect is produced when children are told school math is "fun" when they are pretty sure that teachers who say so spend their leisure hours on anything except this allegedly fun-filled activity. Nor does it help to tell them that they need math to become scientists---most children don't have such a plan. The children can see perfectly well that the teacher does not enjoy math any more than they do and that the reason for doing it is simply that it has been inscribed into the curriculum. All of this erodes children's confidence in the adult world and the process of education. And I think it introduces a deep element of dishonestly into the education relationship.”

Seymour Papert book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

Source: Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980), Chapter 2, Mathophobia: The Fear of Learning

Life, Children, World, Education

“I have retained a belief that it is the popular sporty kids at school who grow up to have the least interesting lives, and the unhappy young souls who develop into the most extraordinary adults. Whoever heard of a creative genius being understood as a child and well loved by his class mates? Who like to imagine an artist who emerged into adulthood content with his lot? And, conversely, how satisfying to hear that almost without exception, the untroubled, popular kids at school have ended up blandly as accountants, solicitors or ‘in IT’. Hold on, misfits, your day will come.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

Love, School, Soul, Imagination

“My father, more perceptive than many, wryly commented that by the time I was an adult there might not be an Indian Civil Service to enter. He turned out to be right. I had to settle for British politics instead.”

Margaret Thatcher book Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World

Source: Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World, p. 195

Time

“We wince at the brutality of parents who ship their young kids around to perform for adults at the expense of their childhood — but, then, that was Mozart’s childhood, and though by the end Mozart may have wished for less attention as a kid performer and more as a grownup composer, he never for a moment wished not to be Mozart.”

Adam Gopnik (1956) American journalist

How to Raise a Prodigy, The New Yorker (2018)

Parent, Childhood

“The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.”

Jean Kerr book Please Don't Eat the Daisies

" Children Really are Not People http://books.google.com/books?id=TPRaAAAAMAAJ&q=%22The+average+healthy+well+adjusted+adult+gets+up+at+seven+thirty+in+the+morning+feeling+just+plain+terrible%22&pg=PA160#v=onepage," Please Don't Eat the Daisies, The Saturday Evening Post, 27 July 1957 http://books.google.com/books?id=0QkfAQAAMAAJ&q=%22The+average+healthy+well+adjusted+adult+gets+up%22+%22at+seven+thirty+in+the+morning+feeling+just+plain+terrible%22&pg=PA50#v=onepage Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1957)

Feeling

“It is not uncommon for intelligent adults to turn into passive observers of their own incompetence in anything but the most elementary mathematics. Individuals may see the direct consequences of this intellectual paralysis in terms of limiting job possibilities. But the indirect, secondary consequences are even more serious. One of the main lessons learned by most people in math class is a sense of having rigid limitations. They learn a balkanized image of human knowledge which they come to see as a patchwork of territories separated by impassable iron curtains.”

Seymour Papert book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

Source: Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980), Chapter 2, Mathophobia: The Fear of Learning

People, Intelligence, Mathematics, Knowledge

“Rather than just a depiction of nature, I searched for something like soul. I was occupied with painting children, studying them was more rewarding to me than studying adults at that time. I also wanted to give more to the children.”

Fritz von Uhde (1848–1911) German artist

As quoted in Bowron, Aurisch, Supan, Künste (2000). Romantics, realists, revolutionaries: masterpieces of 19th-century German painting from the Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig. Prestel. p. 158

Children, Soul, Search, Nature

“The fourth way to get a boy to like you is to be yourself. Now, I am contractually obligated as an adult to give that advice, even though it doesn't work. But yeah, be yourself, even though no one has any idea what it means to be yourself. Like whose self would I otherwise be being?”

John Green (1977) American author and vlogger

How to Make Guys Like You http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFiApf_m4H0 YouTube

Way, Boy, Idea

“Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society… But for me, education means making creators… You have to make inventors, innovators, not conformists.”

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

Conversations with Jean Piaget (1980) by Jean Claude Bringuier

People, Education

“Every child and adult should have the skills and the tools to respond to the challenges of the world today and make the most of the opportunities that are available.”

Irina Bokova (1952) Bulgarian diplomat

leadersmag.com http://www.leadersmag.com/issues/2012.3_Jul/Women%20Leaders/LEADERS-Irina-Bokova-UNESCO.html.

World

“Lord, give me the heart of a child, and the awesome courage to live it out as an adult.”

Catherine Doherty (1896–1985) Religious order founder; Servant of God

Molchanie (1982)

Courage, Heart

“I am convinced, based on more than three decades of studying NRMs through participant-observation and through interviews with both members and ex-members, that these movements have unleashed social and psychological forces of truly awesome power. These forces have wreaked havoc in many lives - in both adults and in children. It is these social and psychological influence processes that the social scientist has both the right and the duty to try to understand, regardless of whether such understanding will ultimately prove helpful or harmful to the cause of religious liberty. … the real sociological issue ought not to be whether brainwashing ever occurs but rather whether it occurs frequently enough to be considered an important social problem.”

Benjamin Zablocki (1941) American sociologist

Benjamin Zablocki (1997) The Blacklisting of a Concept: The Strange History of the Brainwashing Conjecture in the Sociology of Religion. ( online http://www.apologeticsindex.org/z03.html)

Children, Understanding, Problem, Study

“The American Academy of Emergency Medicine confirms it: Each year, between one and two dozen adult US males are admitted to ERs after having castrated themselves. With kitchen tools, usually sometimes wire cutters. In answer to the obvious question, surviving patients most often report that their sexual urges had become a source of intolerable conflict and anxiety. The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.”

David Foster Wallace book Consider the Lobster

Big Red Son
Consider the Lobster (2007)

World, Question, Perfection

“When I was young, I thought the act of getting older meant, year by year, getting more sophisticated, more hard, cool, and unpitying. Less innocent.
Maybe that was a childish idea of what getting older was about. Maybe adults, mature adults, get more innocent with time, not less. Because the word “innocent” does not mean “naïve,” it means “not guilty.”
Children do small evils to each other, schoolyard fights and insults, not because their hearts are pure, but because their powers are small. Grownups have more power. Some of them do great evils with that power. But what about the ones who don’t? Aren’t they more innocent than children, not less?”

John C. Wright (1961) American novelist and technical writer

Source: Fugitives of Chaos (2006), Chapter 12, “North by Northwest” (p. 181)

Children, Idea, Evil, Time

“The Hunger Games is a reality television program. An extreme one, but that's what it is. And while I think some of those shows can succeed on different levels, there's also the voyeuristic thrill, watching people being humiliated or brought to tears or suffering physically. And that's what I find very disturbing. There's this potential for desensitizing the audience so that when they see real tragedy playing out on the news, it doesn't have the impact it should. It all just blurs into one program. And I think it's very important not just for young people, but for adults to make sure they're making the distinction. Because the young soldier's dying in the war in Iraq, it's not going to end at the commercial break. It's not something fabricated, it's not a game. It's your life.”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

Q&A with Hunger Games Author Suzanne Collins, July 31, 2013, Hannah Trierweiler Hudson, Scholastic.com http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/qa-hunger-games-author-suzanne-collins,

Life, Hunger, War, People

“The hedonistic approach to education did make a difference to him [Montaigne]. Having been guided early in life by his own curiosity alone, he grew up to be an independent-minded adult, following his own path in everything rather than deferring to duty and discipline.”

Sarah Bakewell book How to Live

Source: How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in one Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010), p. 55.

Life, Education

“Such is our ideal – not another museum, another bleak exhibition gallery, another classical building in which insulated and classified specimens of a culture are displayed for instruction, but an adult play-centre, a workshop where work is a joy, a source of vitality and daring experiment. We may be mocked for our naive idealism, but at least it will not be possible to say that an expiring civilisation perished without a creative protest.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

On the occasion of the opening of Forty Years of Modern Art (February 1948)
Literary Quotes

Joy

“Perhaps the dissenters believe that 'offense to others' ought to be the only reason for restricting nudity in public places generally.... The purpose of Indiana's nudity law would be violated, I think, if 60,000 fully consenting adults crowded into the Hoosierdome to display their genitals to one another, even if there were not an offended innocent in the crowd.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

On decency laws: Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc. (1991) (concurring).
1990s

Law, Thinking

“Learning is most often considered a process of getting rather than giving. This is most evident in conceptions of student/teacher roles: Teachers give and students get. Yet, in adult learning both giving and getting are critical.”

David A. Kolb (1939) American psychologist

[Kolb, DA, Osland JS, Rubin IM, Organizational Behavior: an experiential approach, 1971, 7, 2001, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, English, 42]

Learning, Teachers

“If done right, biotechnology can enhance the entire world's well-being. And that's why the radical middle is drawn to it. One of our key value commitments is maximizing human potential. … Although the biotech debate may seem hopelessly polarized, a third voice – nuanced, hopeful, adult – has begun to be heard. Call it the voice of cautious optimism. Call it the voice of the radical middle.”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

Source: Radical Middle (2004), Chapter 11, "Long Live Biotech – With Adult Supervision," p. 116.

World, Hope, Optimism

“We live in a capitalist economy, and I have no particular objection to honorable self-interest. We cannot hope to make the needed, drastic improvement in primary and secondary education without a dramatic restructuring of salaries. In my opinion, you cannot pay a good teacher enough money to recompense the value of talent applied to the education of young children. I teach an hour or two a day to tolerably well-behaved near-adults—and I come home exhausted. By what possible argument are my services worth more in salary than those of a secondary-school teacher with six classes a day, little prestige, less support, massive problems of discipline, and a fundamental role in shaping minds.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

In comparison, I only tinker with intellects already largely formed.
"The Dinosaur Rip-off", pp. 101–102
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

Money, Children, Education, School

“Of course we know that an untroubled state of mind cannot last. So we say that inspiration comes and goes but really it is there all the time waiting for us to be untroubled again. We can therefore say that it is pervasive. Young children are more untroubled than adults and have many more inspirations.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

Source: 1970's, The Untroubled Mind', 1972, p. 62

Children, Time, Waiting

“Universal-suffrage democracy may have been a good idea 120 years ago, when most adults did productive work into their sixties, then died. In today’s top-heavy welfare states, it just empowers tax-eaters to loot the national wealth.”

John Derbyshire (1945) writer

Two Bad Answers http://takimag.com/article/two_bad_answers_john_derbyshire/print#axzz33lq12wO9, Taki's Magazine, June 5, 2014.

Democracy, Idea, Universe, Wealth

“The family plots are close together in the sparse shade. My father, Ray. My mother, Lorene. Aunt Mildred and Uncle Bob, Docie, Betty, Johnny and Doris Jean. All of them there, all of them at rest. Seeing my father's grave, I smile, remembering something he told me when I was a teenager, conflicted over some long-forgotten crisis. "What do you think you should do about it, Tommy Ray?" He'd asked. "I dunno," I'd said. "It's all so confusing." He looked at me with a gentle smile. "Remember this, son. You don't necessarily need to know anything to have an opinion." Since that day, I've been what you might call opinionated, although as an adult, I like to believe I've earned the opinions I have.”

Tommy Franks (1945) United States Army general

Source: American Soldier (2004), p. 561

Family, Smile, Thinking

“Children aren't like that, which is why they look so young, 'cause they always have a sense of style and purpose. When they're walking around, they have a very definite purpose, they're walking. And it's a great walk as well, it's not an adult's sort of bemused shuffle, it's that 'I'm going over here.' And you say 'Why are you going over there?' 'Because I have a harmonica.' 'What are you doing with the harmonica?' 'I'm going to put it in the toilet.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

'Why are you doing tha—' 'Enough questions, goodbye!'
On children's attitude.
Like, Totally (2006)

Children, Question, Sense

“The hope of the nation and of Christendom, and of the lands called heathen, alike is to be found in the indoctrination of little children in the knowledge of God's truth; for the missionaries will tell you that the adult heathen population of to-day are to die heathen; the minister will tell you that the adult, virtually heathen population of Christian lands to-day are to die in that condition, unless God showers down altogether unprecedented grace — with only such occasional exceptions as confirm this general and terrible law. If this be so, the hope of Christianity is in childhood. Towards childhood must be directed the work of the sappers and miners of the church. Here is the weak point of the enemy's fortress. Here let the breach be made, and his topmost turret shall be laid low.”

Cyrus David Foss (1834–1910) American bishop

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 570.

God, Children, Truth, Law

“I started thinking about charismatic psychopaths like Charles Manson and wondering what they were like as teenagers? They didn't just spring full-blown from oyster shells -- they had to hone the "people skills" that allowed them to become so manipulative as adults. Kids like that are growing up within our school systems and can exert tremendous control over their fellow students. I consider "Griffin" a cautionary tale about the danger of peer pressure.”

Lois Duncan (1934–2016) American young-adult and children's writer

On the basis of her novel Killing Mr. Griffin (1978), interview in Absolute Write (2002)
1990–2002

People, School, Spring, Thinking

“Modern 3D cinema technology works by ensuring your left eye sees one image while your right sees another. But they could, presumably, issue one pair of specs comprising two left-eye lenses (for children to wear), and another with two right-eye lenses (for adults). This would make it possible for parents to take their offspring to the cinema and watch two entirely different films at the same time. So while the kiddywinks are being placated by an animated CGI doodle about rabbits entering the Winter Olympics or something, their parents will be bearing witness to some apocalyptically degrading pornography. The tricky thing would be making the soundtracks match. Those cartoon rabbits would have to spend a lot of time slapping their bellies and moaning.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

The Guardian 15 February 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/15/charlie-brooker-ebook-convert Guardian columns

Children, Parent, Winter, Time

“Don’t children have the same rights to life and equal concern as adults? Don’t we have moral reasons to concern ourselves with the welfare of nonrational beings, such as animals? Mustn’t that status rest on some value independent of the rational nature in persons?
Kantian ethics must answer the last question in the negative, but it answers the other two in the affirmative. I think the right account of the moral status of nonrational living things and of human beings who lack personality in the strict sense can best be derived from Kantian principles, even though Kant himself did not worry about these questions as much as he should have, and some of the things he said about them do not seem to me entirely cogent, or to be the best account available to him.”

Allen W. Wood (1942) academic

Kantian Ethics (2008)

Life, Children, Question, Nature

“I know it's a rare privilege, but if one can really tackle something in adult life that means that much to you, then it's more rewarding than anything I can imagine.”

Andrew Wiles (1953) British mathematician

Nova Interview

Life, Imagination

“People say, "Dinosaurs on the Ark? Now, Hovind, they are kind of big aren't they?" The big ones were big, but the little ones were little. You see Noah was 600 years old when he built that big boat. He was probably smart enough to know that you do not have to bring the biggest dinosaurs. You bring two babies, be sure to bring a pink one and a blue one that will be important later, okay. There are all kinds of reasons for bringing babies on the ark. You bring babies because they are smaller. The biggest dinosaur egg is smaller than a football. You bring babies because they weigh less, they eat less, they sleep a lot more, and they are a lot tougher. Do you know that when kids fall they bounce and then they get up and keep running? Adults fall down and break or they lay there a while. Plus you bring babies because after the flood they will live longer to produce the offspring. And that's the whole reason that you are bringing them. Why on earth would you bring big elephants on the ark? That would be stupid, for multiple reasons. Why would you bring a big giraffe? Just bring babies of everything.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), Dinosaurs and the Bible

People, Stupidity, Sleep, Football

“I’ve only known a vegan life and have been constantly teaching others of the joys and benefits of being a vegan … As an adult, I THANK my Mother profusely for being extremely honest with me as a kid and for never hiding the truth about milk, “meat”, animal experimentation … There is speciesism and that is about as cruel as it gets because it sets the stage and practice for cruelty amongst human beings. … Discrimination is discrimination—as abuse is abuse … regardless of an animals human or nonhuman form, gender, ethnicity, ability, sexual orientation or level of intelligence/knowledge it should be our birthright to LIVE our lives peacefully and harmoniously without inflicting pain on others. People who inflict intentional pain without moral or ethical regard for other human or nonhuman animals are just reminders of how much further we have to go until oppression is completely eradicated.”

Seba Johnson (1973) Olympic skier

"Interview with Seba Johnson" http://www.theghostsinourmachine.com/interview-with-seba-johnson/, The Ghosts in Our Machine (2014).

Life, Pain, People, Truth

“Typical Hollywood crowd - all the kids are on drugs, and all the adults are on roller skates.”

Eric Idle (1943) British comedian, actor, singer and writer

Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl

“The single most valuable human trait, the one quality every schoolchild and adult should be taught to nurture, is, quite simply, kindness.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

“The first part of "The Double Axe" was written during the war and finished a year before the war ended, and it bears the scars; but the poem is not primarily concerned with that grim folly. Its burden, as of some previous work of mine, is to present a philosophical attitude, which might be called Inhumanism, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.”

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) American poet

Preface to The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948)

Love, Hate, War, People

“This happened by accident," [Referring to his long hair] "I didn't get round to having a haircut for a while, and when it got long I thought it looked cool. I don't want anyone to change me. And hopefully, one day, I'll be known as the great child singer who developed into a great adult singer. That would be so cool.”

Joseph McManners (1992) British singer, actor

Interview with British Newspaper The Mirror http://www.mirror.co.uk:

Change

“In using the terms play and playfulness, I do not intend to suggest any lack of seriousness; quite the contrary. Anyone who has watched children, or adults, at play will recognize that there is no contradiction between play and seriousness, and that some forms of play induce a measure of grave concentration not so readily called forth by work.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 30

Children

“Throughout my adult life governments around the Western world have been propagating the gospel of multiculturalism, which tells us that immigrants, from whatever part of the world and whatever way of life, are a welcome part of our “multicultural” society. Differences of language, religion, custom, and attachment don’t matter, they have reassured us, since all can form part of the colorful tapestry of the modern state. Anybody who publicly disagreed with that claim invited the attentions of the thought police, always ready with the charge of racism, and never so scrupulous as to think it a sin to destroy the career of someone, provided he was white, indigenous, and male. To be quite honest, living through this period of organized mendacity has been one of the least agreeable ordeals that we conservatives have had to undergo. Keeping your head down is bad enough; but filling your head with official lies means sacrificing thought as well as freedom.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"Multiculturalism, R.I.P." http://spectator.org/38473_multiculturalism-rip/ The American Spectator (December 2010).

Life, World, Religion, Color

“We are changing the law and I am personally working on it to bring 16-year-olds into the purview. According to the police, 50 per cent of the crimes are committed by 16-year-olds who know the Juvenile Justice Act. But now for premeditated murder, rape, if we bring them into the purview of the adult world, then it will scare them.”

Maneka Gandhi (1956) Indian politician and activist

On the Juvenile Justice Act, as quoted in "Juveniles who commit rape should be tried as adults: Maneka Gandhi" http://ibnlive.in.com/news/juveniles-who-commit-rape-should-be-tried-as-adults-maneka-gandhi/485770-37-64.html, IBNLive (14 July 2014) 2011-present

World, Justice, Law, Change

“Cow milk has no valid claim as the perfect food. As nutrition, it produces allergies in infants, diarrhea and cramps in the older child and adult, and may be a factor in the development of heart attacks and strokes. Perhaps when the public is educated as to the hazards of milk only calves will be left to drink the real thing. Only calves should drink the real thing.”

Frank Oski (1932–1996) American pediatrician

Source: Don't Drink Your Milk! (1983), p. 84

Education, Food, Drink, Heart

“People ask me what I think about euthanasia. I said I'm more concerned about the adults.”

Jay London (1966) American comedian

One-liners

People, Thinking

“It becomes logical to ask where the idea originates that the rules of the game of life ought to be such that those who are weak, disabled or ill should be helped?
One answer is obvious: this is the game typically played in childhood. Every one of us was, at one time, a weak and helpless child, cared for by adults: without such help we would not have survived and become adults.
Another, almost equally obvious answer is that the prescription of a help-giving attitude toward the weak is embodied in the dominant religions of Western man.
Judaism, and especially Christianity, teach these rules by means of parable and prohibition, example and exhortation, and by every other means available to their representatives.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961), Chapter 10: The Ethics of Helplessness and Helpfulness.

Life, Religion, Game, Idea

“[T]he wall of separation between public and private higher education has been eroding for the last half-century. Funding from public sources now constitutes the bulk of higher-education resources in the United States, whether in the form of government subventions for research and programs, or in the much vaster influx of government-guaranteed student loans. For all realistic purposes, the distinction between public and private higher education has ceased to exist. Further, the vast numbers of young American adults being drawn in to the college and university system (some 20.4 million, up by 25 percent from 2000 alone)—on the assumption that college degrees are virtually a sine qua non of entrance into profitable commerce or lucrative professions—has evaporated what little is left of the pretense that academe constitutes some monastic realm, beyond the orbit of civil society.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Free Speech and Its Present Crisis (2018)

Education, Universe

“I feel like my marriage came apart because of me, not because of anyone else. I can take responsibility. I knew I was a good mom. I thought I was adult enough to be a wife and a mother, but really I wasn't. Tommy bore the brunt of that. It was this constant pressure and it was hard for both of us to take. We broke up when my son was a little more than 18 months old. I came out of a divorced home. I did what I knew, which was to take my son and leave.”

Erika Jayne (1969) American singer, actress and television personality

pg. 98-99
Pretty Mess book (2018)

Marriage, Feeling, Home, Moms

“Following the positive HIV test of adult actress Darren James on April 13, 2004, a new HIV scare led to a search for all potentially infected partners of the actor, as well as a two-month shut down of adult movie production in Los Angeles. Commenting on this on April 29, 2004, Gibson said that the actors "should not be surprised, considering what they do" and noted that "this was bound to happen to them sooner or later."”

John Gibson (media host) (1946) American radio talk show host

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1521&ncid=1505&e=3&u=/afp/20040502/pl_afp/afplifestylehivscare

Angels, Search

“Titchener interest lay in the generalized, normal, adult mind that had also been Wundt's main concern.”

Edwin Boring (1886–1968) American psychologist

Source: A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929, p. 407

“Thus, because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world's environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies. While all of those grim phenomena have been endemic to humanity throughout our history, their frequency increases with environmental degradation, population pressure, and the resulting poverty and political instability.”

Jared Diamond book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Source: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), Chapter "The world as a polder: what does it all mean to us today?", section "If we don't solve them..." (Penguin Books, 2011, page 498, ISBN 978-0-241-95868-1.

Children, World, Disease, Way

“The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skits, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list — yes, even the short skirts and the dancing — are worth dying for? The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them. How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002

Love, Life, Women, War

“Where do babies come from? Don't bother asking adults. They lie like pigs. However, diligent independent research and hours of playground consultation have yielded fruitful, if tentative, results. There are several theories. Near as we can figure out, it has something to do with acting ridiculous in the dark. We believe it is similar to dogs when they act peculiar and ride each other. This is called "making love". Careful study of popular song lyrics, advertising catch-lines, TV sitcoms, movies, and T-Shirt inscriptions offers us significant clues as to its nature. Apparently it makes grown-ups insipid and insane. Some graffiti was once observed that said "sex is good."”

Matt Groening (1954) American cartoonist

All available evidence, however, points to the contrary.
Bongo in Childhood Is Hell (1988)

Love, Lie, Making love, Dogs

“I don’t care if you call it AO for Adults Only, or Chopped Liver or Father Goose. Your movie will still have the stigma of being in a category that’s going to be inhabited by the very worst of pictures.”

Jack Valenti (1921–2007) President of the MPAA

On changing the un-trademarked "X" rating to an "A" for Adults; it was eventually changed to the trademarked "NC-17". The New York Times (5 March 1987)

“Now, I meant to talk about something else earlier on, and I've forgotten what it was. I've remembered what it is again, but I've also forgotten. And that's really what adult life is like most of the time.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

Like, Totally (2006)

Life, Time

Quotes about adult page 3

Quotes about adult
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