Children, taught either years beneath their intelligence or miles wide of relevance to it, or both: their intelligence becomes hopelessly bewildered, drawn off its centers, bored, or atrophied.
-James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

When childhood dies, its corpses are called the matures and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay.
-Brian W. Aldiss

Most of the people who will walk behind me will be children so make the beat keep time with short steps.
-Hans Christian Andersen

This is the reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth and are more certain that they are their own.
-Aristotle, (attributed)

Only those who look with the eyes of children can lose themselves in the object of their wonder.
-Eberhard Arnold

Toys tossed on the floor
Hand prints on the wall
Slamming of the door
And footsteps down the hall Boxes made into towers
Covers turned into tents
Voices get a lil' louder
Guide lines get a lil' bent Boxes now go untouched
Covers in a folded pile
Silence never was so much
Guide lines never been n' awhile Did we waste our time a way
We once had back then
Never taking time to play
To 'oft we walked right past them Now they're grown and gone
The house stands still and neat
Only memories left to carry on
Oh, how our hearts do often weep Would we change time if we could
Would we play a bigger part
Did we get to wrapped up in the world
For now we're left with just
Memories of the heart.
-Gloria Babb, MEMORIES OF THE HEART

When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.
-James Barrie

There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the mature world.
-Jean Baudrillard

In a world that holds books and babies and canyon trails, why should one condemn oneself to live day-in, day-out with people one does not like, and sell oneself to chaperone and correct them?
[Journal entry, May 20, 1913 during her brief career as a boarding-school teacher]
-Ruth Benedict, "An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict," by Margaret Mead, 1959.

There is nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.
-Erma Bombeck

The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who've forgotten their own childhood.
-Orson Scott Card

There are only two lasting bequests we can can hope to give our children. One of these is roots; the other, wings.
-William Hodding Carter, Jr.

The child must know that he is a miracle, that since the beginning of the world there hasn't been, and until the end of the world there will not be, another child like him.
-Pau (Pablo) Casals

"Of all nature's gifts to the human race, what is sweeter to a man than his children?"
-Marcus Tullius Cicero

"The foundation of every state is the education of its youth."
-Diogenes

Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - "which is the mostest? which is the leastest?" They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: the heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.
-Richard Buckminster Fuller

"You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth."
-Kahlil Gibran

Before puberty the child's personality has not yet formed and it is easier to guide its life and make it acquire specific habits of order, discipline, and work...
-Antonio Gramsci, Letter, to his brother; in "Letters from Prison," no. 162, by Gramsci; tr. by Raymond Rosenthal, 1993, August 25, 1930

Alas, regardless of their doom,
the little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond to-day.
-Thomas Gray

"Children are not soul-less, unguided creatures made for matures to manipulate like chattel. They are spirited beings, complete at every given moment and age. They have differentiated minds, specialized abilites and unique gifts that give testimony to themselves and their Creator. Children look to us for guidance. And they see us as symbols of love and hate, truth and deceit, selflessness and selfishness, and good and evil.....Children are not our subordinates. They are our co-conspiriators - breathing the same pneuma as us and contributing to a world far beyond present comprehension. Ultimately, in our webs of relationships, it is the children who will write, rewrite, and edit our scripts of life."
-Anthony Gregorc, Partial quote from poster, CHILDWISE, ©1986

Make a memory with your children,
Spend some time to show you care;
Toys and trinkets can't replace those
Precious moments that you share.
Money doesn't buy real pleasure,
It doesn't matter where you live;
Children need your own attention,
Something only you can give.
Childhood's days pass all too quickly,
Happy memories all too few;
Plan to do that special something,
Take the time to go or do.
Make a memory with your children,
Take the time in busy days;
Have some fun while they are growing,
Show your love in gentle ways.
-Elaine Hardt, "Make a Memory" ©1977

"All women should know how to take care of children. Most of them will have a husband some day."
-Franklin P. Jones

Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.
-R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, Ch. 3

You can't cheat kids. If you cheat them when they're children they'll make you pay when they're sixteen or seventeen by revolting against you or hating you or all those so-called teenage problems. I think that's finally when they're old enough to stand up to you and say, 'What a hypocrite you've been all this time. You've never given me what I really wanted, which is you'.
-John Lennon

"Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist."
-Michael Levine

A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.
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-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead;
And when she was good,
She was very, very good
But when she was bad she was horrid.
The story goes that Longfellow denied writing this, but according to The Great American Baby Almanac he finally admitted writing it saying "When I recall my juvenile poems and prose sketches, I wish that they were forgotten entirely. They however cling to one's skirt with a terrible grasp."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

My mother loved children--she would have given anything if I had been one.
-Groucho Marx

What guides us is children's response, their joy in learning to dance, to sing, to live together. It should be a guide to the whole world.
-Yehudi Menuhin

In early infancy, the baby tends to experience herself andher mother as one, a union. If the mother responds attentively and empathetically to the infant, a life-sustaining function is provided which is felt to be part of thebaby‘s self.
-Andrew P. Morrison, The Culture of Shame (Northvale, New Jersey:Jason Aronson,Inc. 1998), 63

When I approach a child
He inspires in me two sentiments:
Tenderness for what he is,
And respect for what he may become.
Chaque enfant réveille en moi
Tendresse et respect;
Tendresse pour ce qu'il est,
Respect pour ce qu'il deviendra.
-Louis Pasteur

...."There are many other facets to the current collapse of childhood. I have touched on the issue only briefly, but one thing is clear, our schools have deteriorated because they must deal with damaged goods. Most responsible for this damage is hospital childbirth; second comes television. Next comes day care, which fosters television and is a result of hospital childbirth. Premature schooling runs fourth. (A fifth must wait a bit for discussion.) And as our damaged children grow up and become the parents and teachers, damage will be the norm, the way of life. We will habituate to damage. Nothing else will be known. How can you miss something you can't even recognize, something you never had?"
-Joseph Chilton Pearce, Childhood's End

"Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them."
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince, 1943

There are only two things a child will share willingly; communicable diseases and its mother's age.
-Benjamin Spock, “Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care”, first published in 1945

The smile that flickers on baby's lips when he sleeps— does anybody know where it was born? Yes, there is a rumor that a young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born in the dream of a dew-washed morning.
-Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, 1912

I think that children have a power to imagine that is almost magical when compared to the mature imagination, and this is something irrevocable that a child loses when he or she becomes bound by logic. We the matures continue to have our children’s power of imagination only in our dreams... Of course it’s awfully necessary that children not run their entire lives on the basis of such thinking; they do need to learn how to think logically. But the world will soon teach that to them -and in overabundance. I think we should do everything we can to make it possible for children to hang onto the power to imagine in the almost magical sense for as long as possible.
-Joseph Weizenbaum

"One hundred years from now, it will not matter what my bank account was, how big my house was, or what kind of car I drove. But the world may be a little better, because I was important in the life of a child."
-Forest Witcraft

Oh happy we, the first-born heirs of nature,
For whom the Heavenly Sun delays his light!
He by the sweets of every mortal creature
Tempers eternal beauty to our sight;
And by the glow upon love's earthly feature
Maketh the path of our departure bright.
-George E. Woodberry, Immortal Love (last verse), 1900

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses
A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art.
-William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, 1807