This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society." - James Fenimore Cooper
"Play for young children is not recreation activity,... It is not leisure-time activity nor escape activity.... Play is thinking time for young children. It is language time. Problem-solving time. It is memory time, planning time, investigating time. It is organization-of-ideas time, when the young child uses his mind and body and his social skills and all his powers in response to the stimuli he has met. " - James L. Hymes, Jr.
"Added man-made failure really hurts young children [under six]. No one has to contrive lessons for these youngsters so that they will learn how to lose—they are losers too much of the time. No one has to put them in their place—they know all too well in their hearts the little place they are in. No one has to cut them down to size—their size is painfully small. At this stage in their development we are wise to stay away from competition, from games and races and contests with winners and losers. It matters too much to each child to come in first—they cannot stand the risk of competition. " - James L. Hymes, Jr.
"One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun." - Jane Goodall, fully Dame Jane Morris Goodall, born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall
"If a child tells a lie, tell him that he has told a lie, but don't call him a liar. If you define him as a liar, you break down his confidence in his own character. " - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
"We have been reminded that cruel and inhuman acts can be derived from distorted theological beliefs, as suicide bombers take the lives of innocent human beings, draped falsely in the cloak of God's will. With horrible brutality, neighbors have massacred neighbors in Europe, Asia, and Africa. In order for us human beings to commit ourselves personally to the inhumanity of war, we find it necessary first to dehumanize our opponents, which is in itself a violation of the beliefs of all religions. Once we characterize our adversaries as beyond the scope of God's mercy and grace, their lives lose all value. We deny personal responsibility when we plant landmines and, days or years later, a stranger to us — often a child – is crippled or killed. From a great distance, we launch bombs or missiles with almost total impunity, and never want to know the number or identity of the victims." - Jimmy Carter, fully James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr.
"In the first movement, our infancy as a species, we felt no separation from the natural world around us. Trees, rocks, and plants surrounded us with a living presence as intimate and pulsing as our own bodies. In that primal intimacy, which anthropologists call "participation mystique," we were as one with our world as a child in the mother's womb. " - Joanna Macy, fully Joanna Rogers Macy
"Everything we do impinges on all beings. The way you are with your child is a political act, and the products you buy and your efforts to recycle are part of it too. So is meditation–just trying to stay aware is a task of tremendous importance. We are trying to be present to ourselves and each other) in a way that can save our planet. Saving life on this planet includes developing a strong, caring connection with future generations; for, in the Dharma of co-arising, we are here to sustain one another over great distances of space and time." - Joanna Macy, fully Joanna Rogers Macy
"The processes of teaching the child that everything cannot be as he wills it are apt to be painful both to him and to his teacher." - Anne Sullivan, fully Johanna "Anne" Mansfield Macy
"A child only pours herself into a little funnel or into a little box when she’s afraid of the world—when she’s been defeated. But when a child is doing something she’s passionately interested in, she grows like a tree—in all directions. This is how children learn, how children grow. They send down a taproot like a tree in dry soil. The tree may be stunted, but it sends out these roots, and suddenly one of these little taproots goes down and strikes a source of water. And the whole tree grows." - John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt
"The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn. " - John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, 4th Baronet, Sir John Lubbock
"When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing." - John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck
"A child miseducated is a child lost. " - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
"The critical faculty has its value in correcting errors, reforming abuses, and demolishing superstitions.—But the constructive faculty is much nobler in itself, and immeasurably more valuable in its results, for the obvious reason that it is a much nobler and better thing to build up than to pull down.—It requires skill and labor to erect a building, but any idle tramp can burn it down.—Only God can form and paint a flower, but any foolish child can pull it to pieces." - John Monroe Gibson
"But for the children of the poorest people we're stripping the curriculum, removing the arts and music, and drilling the children into useful labor. We're not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child." - Jonathan Kozol
"Good teachers don't approach a child of this age with overzealousness or with destructive conscientiousness. They're not drill-masters in the military or floor managers in a production system. They are specialists in opening small packages. They give the string a tug but do it carefully. They don't yet know what's in the box. They don't know if it's breakable." - Jonathan Kozol
"A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel. " - José Martí, fully José Julián Martí Pérez
"To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - this is happiness." - Joseph Priestley
"Make sure you are aware of the dating practices of your child and get to know your child's friends." - Joseph Anthony Califano, Jr.
"For only as we ourselves, as adults, actually move and have our being in the state of love, can we be appropriate models and guides for our children. What we are teaches the child far more than what we say, so we must be what we want our children to become." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home. Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place." - Josephine Hart, Lady Saatchi
"Play is a sacred thing, a divine ordinance, for developing in the child a harmonious and healthy organism, and preparing that organism for the commencement of the work of life." - Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland
"Clinical experience has indicated that where a child has been exposed early in his live to episodes of physical violence, whether he himself is the victim or ... the witness, he will often later demonstrate similar outbursts of uncontrollable rage and violence of his own. Aggression becomes an easy outlet through which the child's frustrations and tensions flow, not just because of a simple matter of learning that can be just as simply unlearned, not just because he is imitating a bad behavior model and can be taught to imitate something more constructive, but because these traumatic experiences have overwhelmed him. His own emotional development is too immature to withstand the crippling inner effects of outer violence. Something happens to the child's character, to his sense of reality, to the development of his controls against impulses that may not later be changed easily but which may lead to reactions that in turn provoke more reactions - one or more of which may be criminal. Then society reacts against him for what he did, but more for what all of us have done - unpleasantly - to one another. Upon him is laid the iniquity of us all." - Karl Menninger, fully Karl Augustus Menninger
"To cease to be loved is for the child practically synonymous with ceasing to live. " - Karl Menninger, fully Karl Augustus Menninger
"We are not sent into this world to walk it in solitude. We are born to love, as we are born to breathe and eat and drink. The babe is hardly separated from his mother’s womb before he stretches out a tiny clasping hand, and from that time forth he will constantly stretch out to touch the world that lies about him and the folk that dwell therein. The purpose of our growth in life is to bring us into unity with the universe into which we are born, to make us aware that we are not lonely individual meteors hurtling blindly through an abysmal dark, but living parts of a living whole. As we grow we learn to love more and more: first ourselves; then the family within the small kingdom of the home; then the school, the wider circle of friends, the home community, the college, and the still wider community of the nation; and finally, the greatest country of all, which has no boundaries this side of Hell, and perhaps not even there. In some this process of enlargement is arrested at an intermediate stage, and then love turns in upon itself and becomes sour. Some have never truly loved anything but themselves - perhaps because their first outreachings were received with coldness and lack of sympathy and then love quickly turns putrid, and becomes greed, and lust, and turns even to self- disgust. Some confine their love to the narrow limits of the family, and then too love decays into sentimentality, or hardens into indifference. The couple that are wrapped up in themselves soon find the parcel uncomfortably tight; the mother who pours out her love on her child till both are smothered in a cocoon of sentiment soon tastes the bitter worm of ingratitude and ruins the very object of her love. There are few more depressing spectacles than the perennial “old grad,” who has never broken the bonds of collegiate enthusiasm or developed beyond the throaty lore of Alma Matriolatry. And the present day provides us with the awful spectacle of what an ingrown love of country can do, what fanatical hatreds and cruelties it can engender, and how again it can destroy the very object of its love." - Kenneth Boulding, fully Kenneth Ewart Boulding
"You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child." - Dōgen, aka Dōgen Kigen, Eihei Dōgen, titled as Dōgen Zenji NULL
"Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right... is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential." - Kofi Annan, fully Kofi Atta Annan
"It is the Child that sees the primordial secret in Nature and it is the child of ourselves we return to. The child within us is simple and daring enough to live the Secret." - Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
"Parents sometimes feel that if they don't criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn't make people want to change; it makes them defensive." - Laurence Steinberg
"Most adults would not dream of belittling, humiliating, or bullying (verbally or physically) another adult. But many of the same adults think nothing of treating their adolescent child like a nonperson. . . . Adolescents deserve the same civility their parents routinely extend to total strangers." - Laurence Steinberg
"Television has changed the American child from an irresistable force to an immovable object. " - Laurence J. Peter, fully Laurence Johnston Peter
"The educating of the parents is really the education of the child children tend to live what is unlived in the parents, so it is vital that parents should be aware of their inferior, their dark side, and should press on getting to know themselves." - Laurens van der Post
"Life begins as a quest of the child for the man and ends as a journey by the man to rediscover the child." - Laurens van der Post
"We can understand and relate to most people better if you look at them – no matter how impressive they may be – as if they are children. For most of us never really grow up or mature all that much – we simply grow taller. Oh, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales." - Leo Rosten, fully Leo Calvin Rosten, pen name Leonard Q. Ross
"I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of of our fossils, radioactive at that." - Lewis Thomas
"No child is born with a really cold heart, and it is only in proportion as we lose that youthful heart that we lose the inner warmth in ourselves." - Lin Yutang
"Give a child the habit of sacredly regarding the truth - of carefully respecting the property of others - of scrupulously abstaining from all acts of improvidence which can involve him in distress, and he will just as likely think of rushing into the element in which he cannot breathe, as of lying or cheating or stealing. " - Lord Brougham, fully Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux
"The best training any parent can give a child is to train the child to train himself." - Adolph P. Gouthey
"Conditional love is love that is turned off and on....Some parents only show their love after a child has done something that pleases them. "I love you, honey, for cleaning your room!" Children who think they need to earn love become people pleasers, or perfectionists. Those who are raised on conditional love never really feel loved." - Louise Hart
"Hopefulness is the heartbeat of the relationship between a parent and child. Each time a child overcomes the next challenge of his life, his triumph encourages new growth in his parents. In this sense a child is parent to his mother and father. " - Louise J. Kaplan
"In every adult human there still lives a helpless child who is afraid of aloneness.... This would be so even if there were a possibility for perfect babies and perfect mothers. " - Louise J. Kaplan
"The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it." - Ludwig Wittgenstein, fully Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
"A child is a beam of sunlight from the Infinite and Eternal, with possibilities of virtue and vice- but as yet unstained." - Lyman Abbott
"When I say that evil has to do with killing, I do not mean to restrict myself to corporeal murder. Evil is that which kills spirit. There are various essential attributes of life -- particularly human life -- such as sentience, mobility, awareness, growth, autonomy, will. It is possible to kill or attempt to kill one of these attributes without actually destroying the body. Thus we may "break" a horse or even a child without harming a hair on its head. Erich Fromm was acutely sensitive to this fact when he broadened the definition of necrophilia to include the desire of certain people to control others-to make them controllable, to foster their dependency, to discourage their capacity to think for themselves, to diminish their unpredectibility and originalty, to keep them in line. Distinguishing it from a "biophilic" person, one who appreciates and fosters the variety of life forms and the uniqueness of the individual, he demonstrated a "necrophilic character type," whose aim it is to avoid the inconvenience of life by transforming others into obedient automatons, robbing them of their humanity. Evil then, for the moment, is the force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity. So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play, or an artist at work, then we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we also escape our self-conscious selves. The Greeks had a word for ultimate self-consciousness which I find illuminating: hubris: pride: pride in the sense of putting oneself in the center of the universe. The strange and terrible thing is that this kind of total self-consciousness invariably ends in self-annihilation." -
"Dont give a child a fish but show him how to fish." - Mao Tse-tung, alternatively Zedong, Ze dong, aka Chairman Mao
"The environment must be rich in motives which lend interest to activity and invite the child to conduct his own experiences." - Maria Montessori
"It is the child who makes the man, and no man exists who was not made by the child he once was." - Maria Montessori