Quotes about child
page 21

Ken Robinson photo
Derryn Hinch photo

“Recently, I was evicted of contempt of court over my online editorial about (bleep). I was sentenced to pay a $100,000 fine, or go to jail for 50 days. I believe this was the highest personal fine ever issued in Australia. Other websites, newspapers, and radio stations were not charged for similar or even more controversial material. Yet the judge attacked me for portraying myself as a scapegoat — a whipping boy — and he punished me accordingly. Now it is true, I have prior convictions. In 1987, I was fined $15,000 and jailed for exposing a paedophile priest Michael Glennon. Glennon had already been to jail for raping a 10-year-old girl, but was still running a camp for kids in country Victoria. And he was still a Catholic priest. He eventually went to jail, and he died behind bars several weeks ago. And to be honest, I feel good about that — he was an evil, evil man. I also spent five months under house arrest in 2011 for breaching court suppression orders, revealing the names of two serial sex offenders at a rally outside Victoria's Parliament House. About 4000 other people also shouted their names. That one cost me my radio job at 3AW. And I was fined and did 250 hours of community service for naming a judge who ruled that a man could not be charged for raping his wife under a 300-year-old British law. In Victoria, that law has since been changed. Now, here we go again. I have made a decision not taken lightly. On principle, I will not pay the $100,000 fine, which was due today. Instead, I'll go to jail. I'll go to jail for 50 days; to draw attention to all the suspended sentences for crimes of violence and child pornography; for the obscenely short sentences given to king hit killers; to draw attention to my campaign for a national register of convicted sex offenders. Already, 30,000 of you have signed up. I'm happy to serve just 50 days of the many years that the convicted paedophile ex-magistrate should be serving. That pervert, Simon Cooper, wasn't even put on the sex offenders register. If my going to jail draws attention to the judges and magistrates, out of touch with community expectations and your safety, then every one of my 50 days behind bars will be worth it. And so I'll go to jail.”

Derryn Hinch (1944) New Zealand–Australian media personality

Today Tonight, 16 January 2014.

Aron Ra photo
André Maurois photo
Sylvia Plath photo
Robert Rauschenberg photo

“It’s easy enough to get along with a loved and loving child–at least till you try to get him to do something.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Nelson Mandela photo
Alison Bechdel photo

“Ginger: I can't do this, Lois! I can't go out with a woman who has a child! I'm too young, I tell you! I haven't sown my oats yet!
Lois: I think your oats are impacted.”

#370, "Not-for-Profit Motive" (2001), collected in Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life Forms TWOF (2003).
Dykes to Watch Out For

Ted Cruz photo
John Berridge photo

“Make me like a little child,
Simple, teachable, and mild;
Seeing only in Thy light;
Walking only in Thy might!”

John Berridge (1716–1793) British priest

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 334.

Bill Cosby photo

“We see a successful, elegant man now, but as a child, an adolescent, his life was not a done deal. Sidney respected his mistakes. When failure came, he never said, "This is too difficult, too hard," he had the resiliency to try again. His life is somewhere between astounding and unbelievable.”

Bill Cosby (1937) American actor, comedian, author, producer, musician, activist

Comment on Sidney Poitier, as quoted in a press release at AARP (24 July 2008) http://cq5.share.aarp.org/aarp/presscenter/pressrelease/articles/exclusive_hollywood_legend_sidney_poitier_opens_up.html

William S. Burroughs photo

“Don't ask me how to burn down a building. As me how to grow watermelons or how to explain nature to a child. that is what I want to grow old doing. Please afford me this.”

Rod Coronado (1966) Native American eco-anarchist and animal rights activist

Open letter to supporters http://www.supportrod.org/update.php?u=20060901

Simone Weil photo
Mark Pesce photo
Wilfred Thesiger photo
John Allen Fraser photo

“But while the American Constitution was the child of war, ours grew out of discussion, bargaining and negotiation.”

John Allen Fraser (1931) Canadian politician

Source: The House Of Commons At Work (1993), Chapter 1, The System of Government, p. 6

Edgar Rice Burroughs photo
John Steinbeck photo
Lily Tomlin photo
John Wallis photo
Prem Rawat photo
Thomas Campbell photo
Dylan Moran photo
William Saroyan photo
Benjamin Spock photo
Jerome David Salinger photo
Desmond Morris photo

“No matter how old we become, we can still call them 'Holy Mother' or 'Father' and put a child-like trust in them (or their agents, who often adopt similar titles for themselves).”

Desmond Morris (1928) English zoologist, ethologist and surrealist painter

Cited in: Daniel Rancour-Laferriere (1985), Signs of the flesh: an essay on the evolution of hominid sexuality, p. 112

Andrea Dworkin photo

“When you cook it should be an act of love. To put a frozen bag in the microwave for your child is an act of hate.”

Raymond Blanc (1949) French chef

In Nicola Woolcock, " Celebrity Chef Dishes Microwave Mothers http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1358173/Celebrity-chef-dishes-microwave-mothers.html", Daily Telegraph (2 October 2001).

Tony Benn photo
Agatha Christie photo
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg photo
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg photo
Warren Farrell photo
Germaine Greer photo

“The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.”

Germaine Greer (1939) Australian feminist author

Article "Abortion", The Sunday Times, 21 May 1972

Margaret Thatcher photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“…; but conscience, like a child, is soon lulled to sleep; and habit is our idea of eternity.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Dylan Moran photo
Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Randy Pausch photo

“The desire to have many books, and never to use them, is like a child that will have a candle burning by him all the while he is sleeping.”

The Compleat Gentleman, 1622
Quote from: 1001 quotations to inspire you before you die; Quintessence Editions Ltd., 2016, ISBN 978-1-84403-895-4

“I wasn't used to children and they were getting on my nerves. Worse, it appeared that I was a child, too. I hadn't known that before; I thought I was just short.”

Florence King (1936–2016) American writer

On her first day of kindergarten, from Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady (1990)

“It is lost, lovely child, somewhere in the ragbag that I laughingly refer to as my memory.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

A Conversation about Dr. Canon's Cure (1982).

Edward Thomson photo
Ralph Waldo Trine photo
Sueton photo

“Twenty-three dagger thrusts went home as he stood there. Caesar did not utter a sound after Casca's blow had drawn a groan from him; though some say that when he saw Marcus Brutus about to deliver the second blow, he reproached him in Greek with: "You, too, my child?"”
Atque ita tribus et viginti plagis confossus est uno modo ad primum ictum gemitu sine voce edito, etsi tradiderunt quidam Marco Bruto irruenti dixisse: και συ τέκνον.

Source: The Twelve Caesars, Julius Caesar, Ch. 82

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Franz Marc photo
Dylan Moran photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Masiela Lusha photo

“My children's books are written on the belief that every child has a talent and a passion. Each story unfolds into an adventure of nurturing that confidence until a passion blooms.”

Masiela Lusha (1985) Albanian actress, writer, author

On her purpose behind her books http://tolucantimes.info/section/inside-this-issue/young-author-makes-her-mark-in-the-world-of-children’s-literature/

François Fénelon photo
Kigeli V of Rwanda photo
Bernard-Henri Lévy photo
George Steiner photo

“To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 4 (pp. 190-191).

George S. Patton IV photo

“Ever since I was a child I never wanted to be anything else but a soldier.”

George S. Patton IV (1923–2004) U.S. Army general

Source: The Fighting Pattons (1997) by Brian M. Sobel, p. 21

Matthew Lewis (writer) photo

“Farewel, thou cruel world! – to morrow
No more thy scorn my heart shall tear: –
The grave will shield the child of sorrow,
And heaven will hear the orphan's prayer.”

Matthew Lewis (writer) (1775–1818) English novelist and dramatist

"The Orphan's Prayer", line 29; cited from Titus Strong (ed.) The Common Reader (Greenfield, Mass.: Denio & Phelps, 1819) p. 174.

Marc Chagall photo

“When I painted Christ's parents I was thinking of my own parents. The bearded man is the Child's father. He is my father.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

Chagall stated this in 1950
as quoted in From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, Matthew B. Hoffman; Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 219
after 1930

Anthony Kennedy photo

“The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn from limb from limb. The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.”

Anthony Kennedy (1936) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Stenberg v. Carhart, 530 U. S. 914 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=99-830 (28 June 2000) (detailing what he deemed a constitutionally protected alternative to partial-birth abortion).

Jair Bolsonaro photo

“The Statute of the Child and Adolescent must to be ripped and thrown into a latrine. It is a stimulus to child vagabondage and rascality.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

About the law for protection of children and adolescents at an event in Araçatuba on 23 August 2018. Bolsonaro diz que ECA deve ser 'rasgado e jogado na latrina' https://oglobo.globo.com/brasil/bolsonaro-diz-que-eca-deve-ser-rasgado-jogado-na-latrina-23006248?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=OGlobo. O Globo (23 August 2018).

Eleanor H. Porter photo
Mai Văn Phấn photo

“The poetic creation is nearly like the amazement state of a child who, in the first time, sees the strange phenomena of nature and finds out the human mysteries and complications… The poet is a selected person (temporarily called as a God-selected person), who is “granted a favour”in the spirit of Jesus Christ, or meets a “good fortune” in Buddhism.”

Mai Văn Phấn (1955) Vietnamese poet

Sáng tạo, tinh thần cho điểm đến - Nhà thơ Ko Hyeong Ryeol thực hiện PV http://maivanphan.vn/MaiVanPhan/32/398/781/1102/Tra-loi-phong-van/Sang-tao--tinh-than-cho-diem-den---Nha-tho-Ko-Hyeong-Ryeol-thuc-hien-PV.aspx

William Wood, 1st Baron Hatherley photo
Thomas Gray photo
Mary Wollstonecraft photo
Dennis Prager photo

“[A] child smacking an adult across the face is not funny. It is, in fact, one of the last things society should tolerate.”

Dennis Prager (1948) American writer, speaker, radio and TV commentator, theologian

Dennis Prager. "The Doritos Ad Was Not Funny" http://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2010/02/16/the_doritos_ad_was_not_funny/page/full at townhall.com, 16 February 2010.
2010s

Jonas Salk photo
Anton Chekhov photo

“Yes, that's how it is, child. He who works, he who is patient is the superior.”

Source: In the Ravine (1900), Ch. 5, pp. 208

William Faulkner photo
Ann Druyan photo
Richard Dawkins photo
Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Anacreon photo

“But when an old man dances,
His locks with age are grey.
But he's a child in mind.”

Anacreon (-570–-485 BC) Greek lyric poet, notable for his drinking songs and hymns

Odes, XXXIX. (XXXVII), 3.

Walter Scott photo
George Wallace photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo
Nikolai Gogol photo
Kailash Satyarthi photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Rāmabhadrācārya photo

“What is to be seen in this fallen world, which is false and filled with vices, is full of disputes and is governed by the sins of deceitful and wicked humans? Only Rama is worth seeing, whose flocks of hair cover his lotus-like face, who is completely blissful, who has the form of a child, and who is the giver of liberation.”

Rāmabhadrācārya (1950) Hindu religious leader

kiṃ dṛṣṭavyaṃ patitajagati vyāptadoṣe'pyasatye
māyācārāvratatanubhṛtāṃ pāparājadvicāre ।
dṛṣṭavyo'sau cikuranikuraiḥ pūrṇavaktrāravindaḥ
pūrṇānando dhṛtaśiśutanuḥ rāmacandro mukundaḥ ॥
[Aneja, Mukta, J. K., Kaul, Abraham, George, 2005, Abilities Redefined – Forty Life Stories Of Courage And Accomplishment, All India Confederation of the Blind, Delhi, India, Shri Ram Bhadracharyaji – A Religious Head With A Vision, http://www.aicb.in/images/success_story.pdf, 25 April 2011, 66–68]
[Nagar, Shanti Lal, The Holy Journey of a Divine Saint: Being the English Rendering of Swarnayatra Abhinandan Granth, Acharya Divakar, Sharma, Siva Kumar, Goyal, Surendra Sharma, Susila, B. R. Publishing Corporation, First, Hardback, New Delhi, India, 2002, 8176462888]

Godfrey Higgins photo

“I was shamed into helping the unborn after 12 years of silence, in 1986. Since then, my only client has been the unborn. I don't work for a movement. I don't work for a party. I don't work for candidates. I work for the unborn, and I don't give a flying flick about what people want to do on paper with bylaws, and all that kind of stuff, because it's just like the Pharisees, who had all their rules about the Sabbath, but they didn't know that the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath! I will stand for the unborn, and I will not relent! I don't know Mr. Clymer, but Howard Phillips has lost ALL of my respect, because he stands for people who want to kill ONE, only ONE, innocent child, and that's all that counts! If you want ONE innocent child, GO with this man, but I'll tell you what- I've got my paperwork filled out. All it lacks is my signature, and my wife's signature, and we're the hell out of here, if you vote to stay with a national party that will put up with ONE dead baby, much less many thousands of dead babies. And you sir [pointing at Jim Clymer] need to repent! Because the blood will be on your hands when you stand before God. You won't be able to argue about procedural votes, and keeping the party together before God! You'll be standing there quaking in your boots, wishing you'd washed yourself in the blood of the Lamb. That's all I've got to say…The only thing that matters to me is doing my job to stop the killing of the unborn.”

Paul deParrie (1949–2006) American activist

The Last Words of Paul deParrie http://www.constitutionpartyoregon.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=111&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
John Marston photo
Robert N. Bellah photo

“ Every individual word in a passage or poetry can no more be said to denote some specific referent than does every brush mark, every line in a painting have its counterpart in reality. The writer or speaker does not communicate his thoughts to us; he communicates a representation for carrying out, this function under the severe discipline of using the only materials he has, sound and gesture. Speech is like painting, a representation made out of given materials -- sound or paint. The function of speech is to stimulate and set up thoughts in us having correspondence with the speaker's desires; he has then communicated with us. But he has not transmitted a copy of his thoughts, a photograph, but only a stream of speech -- a substitute made from the unpromising material of sound. The artist, the sculptor, the caricaturist, the composer are akin in this [fact that they have not transmitted a copy of their thoughts], that they express (make representations of) their thoughts using chosen, limited materials. They make the "best" representations, within these self-imposed constraints. A child who builds models of a house, or a train, using only a few colored bricks, is essentially engaged in the same creative task.* Metaphors can play a most forceful role, by importing ideas through a vehicle language, setting up what are purely linguistic associations (we speak of "heavy burden of taxation," "being in a rut"). The imported concepts are, to some extent, artificial in their contexts, and they are by no means universal among different cultures. For instance, the concepts of cleanliness and washing are used within Christendom to imply "freedom from sin." We Westerners speak of the mind's eye, but this idea is unknown amongst the Chinese. that is, we are looking at it with the eyes of our English-speaking culture. A grammar book may help us to decipher the text more thoroughly, and help us comprehend something of the language structure, but we may never fully understand if we are not bred in the culture and society that has modeled and shaped the language. (p. 74)”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

See Gombrich in reference 348
On Human Communication (1957), Language: Science and Aesthetics

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Joseph Heller photo
Daniel Levitin photo
Amitabh Bachchan photo
Albert Einstein photo

“How it happened that I in particular discovered the relativity theory, it seemed to lie in the following circumstance. The normal adult never bothers his head about space-time problems. Everything there is to be thought about it, in his opinion, has already been done in early childhood. I, on the contrary, developed so slowly that I only began to wonder about space and time when I was already grown up. In consequence I probed deeper into the problem than an ordinary child would have done.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

In Carl Seelig's Albert Einstein: A Documentary Biography (1956), Seelig reports that Einstein said this to James Franck, p. 71 http://books.google.com/books?id=VCbPAAAAMAAJ&q=%22how+it+happened%22#search_anchor.
I sometimes ask myself how did it come that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up. Naturally, I could go deeper into the problem than a child with normal abilities.
Variant translation which appears in Einstein: The Life and Times by Ronald W. Clark (1971), p. 27 http://books.google.com/books?id=6IKVA0lY6MAC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA27#v=onepage&q&f=false
Attributed in posthumous publications