Quotes About Children

You can only be as happy as your saddest child.

And when children don't feel respected by the decisions of their parents, their beliefs about how they are valued are crushed. (Dr. Bruce Perry)

In every garden, on every street, we see mothers holding tightly to their children's hands (fifty years later, Théophile Gautier posited that Melling preferred painting women with children, finding them less unsettling and more deserving of respect than women walking alone).

Fun is the cheapest and best medicine in the world for your children as well as for yourself. Give it to them in good large doses. It will not only save you doctors' bills, but it will also help to make your children happier, and will improve their chances in life.

The best legacy a man can leave his children is the memory and influence of a large, broad, finely developed mentality, a well-disciplined, highly cultured mind, a sweet, beautiful character which has enriched everybody who came in contact with it, a refined personality, a magnanimous spirit.

For children love is a feeling; for adults, it is a decision. Children wait to learn if their love is true by seeing how long it lasts; adults make their love true by never wavering from their commitment.

Parents always make their worst mistakes with their oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.

That night Demosthenes published a scathing denunciation of the population limitation laws. People should be allowed to have as many children as they like, and the surplus population should be sent to other worlds, to spread mankind so far across the galaxy that no disaster, no invasion could ever threaten the human race with annihilation. The most noble title any child can have, Demosthenes wrote, is Third.

It is easy to say that you can adopt the whole human race as your children, but it is not the same as living in a home with a child and shaping all you do to help him learn to be happy and whole and good. Don't live your life without ever holding a child in your arms, on your lap, in your home, and feeling a child's arms around you and hearing his voice in your ear and seeing his smile, given to you because you put it into your heart.

I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares.

That was interesting, to find that it wasn't hunger that caused children to become bullies on the street. The bulliness was already in the child, and whatever the stakes were, they would find a way to act as they needed to act. … Intelligence and education, which all these children had, apparently didn't make any important difference in human nature.

Andrew said you were the best person he ever knew. He reached that conclusion before he saw me raise three barbarian children to adulthood. I understand your mother has six. Right. And you're the oldest. Yes. That's too bad. Parents always make their worst mistakes with the oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.

Poke had never shared out so many raisins, because she had never had so many to share. But the little kids wouldn't understand that. They'd think, Poke gave us garbage, and Achilles gave us raisins. That's because they were stupid.

He can have friends. It's parents he can't have.

Valentine went back to class without answering. That night Demosthenes published a scathing denunciation of the population limitation laws. People should be allowed to have as many children as they like, and the surplus population should be sent to other worlds, to spread mankind so far across the galaxy that no danger, no invasion could ever threaten the human race with annihilation. The most noble title any child can have, Demosthenes wrote, is Third.

If you read to your kids, you'll make readers out of them, partly because they'll associate reading with good parent-time.

Parents always make their worst mistakes with the oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.

It was funny. The adults taking all this so seriously, and the children playing along, playing along, believing it too until suddenly the adults went too far, tried too hard, and the children could see through their game.

We do what we must to earn our place in the community, but we live for the hours at home. For each other, for the children. It will never get me written up in the history books.

Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves.

Good-bye, Eros, and all the soldiers on it, the ones who fought for me and the other children, the ones who manipulated us and lied to us for the good of humanity, the ones who conspired to defame me and keep me from returning to Earth, all of you, good and bad, kind and selfish, good-bye to you, I am no longer one of you, neither your pawn nor your savior.

Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves. And

Thus I began to realize that, as it is, Ender's Game disturbs some people because it challenges their assumptions about reality. In fact, the novel's very clarity may make it more challenging, simply because the story's vision of the world is so relentlessly plain. It was important to her, and to others, to believe that children don't actually think or speak the way the children in Ender's Game think and speak.

You can't leave [the children] to God when God has left them to us. - Sister Carlotta