This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The school system can’t make up for family failure. The total education of our children is a cooperative effort requiring community solidarity. Apathetic parents who foster a permissive home atmosphere create a problem for everyone." - John Hansgate
"Our children give us the opportunity to become the parents we always wished we’d had." - Louise Hart
"While your parents and teachers are, for the most part, well-meaning people, they are nevertheless more interested in your finding ways to please them than in your finding ways to please yourself. And so, in the process of socialization, almost all people in almost all societies lose their way because they are coaxed or coerced away from their own Guidance System." - Ester and Jerry Hicks
"The toddler must say "no" in order to find out who she is. The adolescent says "no" to assert who she is not." - Louise J. Kaplan
"Children first conceive morality as rules for pleasing their parents – only with the fullness of time comes a grasp of the idea of conscientious choice." - Michael Levin
"Why should we be willing to go by faith? We do all things in this world by faith in the word of others. by faith only we know our position in the word of others. by faith only we know our position in the world, our circumstances, our rights and privileges, our fortunes, our parents, our brothers and sisters, our age, our mortality. Why should Religion be an exception?" - John Henry Newman, aka Cardinal Newman and Blessed John Henry Newman
"There are many things children accept as “grown-up things” over which they have no control and for which they have no responsibility – for instance, weddings, having babies, buying houses, and driving cars. Parents who are separating really need to help their children put divorce on that grown-up list, so that children do not see themselves as the cause of their parents’ decision to live apart." - Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers
"Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life." - Muriel Spark, fully Dame Muriel Sarah Camberg Spark
"[Responsibility to yourself] means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short, simply to avoid conflict and confrontation. And this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be “different”; not to be continuously available to others when we need time for ourselves and our work; to be able to demand of others – parents, friends, roommates, teachers, lovers, husbands, children – that they respect our sense of purpose and our integrity as persons." - Adrienne Rich, fully Adrienne Cecil Rich
"Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parents. It may assent to them, but it brings them out into the open." - Alfred North Whitehead
"How true Daddy’s words were when he said: “All children must look after their own upbringing.” Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands." - Anne Frank, fully Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank
"Teachers, who educate children, deserve more honor than parents who merely give them birth; for the latter provided mere life, while the former ensure a good life." - Aristotle NULL
"Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents, for these only gave life, those the art of living well." - Aristotle NULL
"From good parents comes a good son." - Aristotle NULL
"Teachers, who educate children, deserve more honor than parents, who merely gave them birth; for the latter provided mere life, while the former ensure a good life." - Aristotle NULL
"Anything which parents have not learned from experience they can now learn from their children." - Author Unknown NULL
"There is no excuse for deceiving children. And when, as must happen in conventional families, they find that their parents have lied, they lose confidence in them and feel justified in lying to them." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"In death, there are no rulers above and no subjects below. The course of the four seasons is unknown; our life is eternal. Even a king among men can experience no greater happiness than is ours… If I could restore your body to you, renew your bones and your flesh and take you back to your parents, your wife, and children and old friends, would you not gladly accept my offers?… Why should I throw away a happiness greater than a king’s to once again thrust myself into the troubles and anxieties of mankind?" - Chuang Tzu, also spelled Chuang-tsze, Chuang Chou, Zhuangzi, Zhuang Tze, Zhuang Zhou, Chuang Tsu, Chouang-Dsi, Chuang Tse, or Chuangtze
"There are three degrees of filial piety. The highest is being a credit to our parents, the second is not disgracing them; the lowest is being able simply to support them." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"Where parents do too much for their children, the children will not do much for themselves." - Elbert Green Hubbard
"I have no sympathy with the old idea that children owe such immense gratitude to their parents that they can never fulfill their obligations to them. I think the obligation is all on the other side. Parents can never do too much for their children to repay them for the injustice of having brought them into the world, unless they have insured them high moral and intellectual gifts, fine physical health, and enough money and education to render life something more than one careless struggle for necessaries." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"Education is the learning how... to distinguish that of things some are in our power, but others are not; in our power are will and all acts which depend on the will; things not in our power are the body, the parts of the body, possessions, parents, brothers, children, country, and, generally, all with whom we live in society." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL
"The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; It should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together. In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists." - Eric Hoffer
"The joys of parents are secret; and so are their griefs and fears. They cannot utter the one; nor they will not utter the other. Children sweeten labors; but they make misfortunes more bitter. They increase the cares of life; but they mitigate the remembrance of death. The perpetuity by generation is common to beasts; but memory, merit, and noble works are proper to men." - Francis Bacon
"Happy are the families where the government of parents is the reign of affection, and obedience of the children the submission of love." - Francis Bacon
"The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears; they cannot utter the one, nor they will not utter the other. children sweeten labors, but they make misfortunes more bitter; increase the cares of life, but they mitigate the remembrance of death." - Francis Bacon
"Parents who expect gratitude from their children (there are even some who insist on it) are like usurers who gladly risk their capital if only they receive interest." - Franz Kafka
"The relation of love between husband and wife is in itself not objective, because even if their feeling is their substantial unity, still this unity has no objectivity. Such objectivity parents first acquire in their children, in whom they can see objectified the entirety of their union." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parents first duty." - George Bernard Shaw
"Let parents who hate their offspring rear them to hate labor, and to inherit riches; an before long they will be stung by every vice, racked by its poison, and damned by its penalty." - Henry Ward Beecher
"So it is that men sigh on, not knowing what the soul wants, but only that it needs something. Our yearnings are homesickness for heaven. Our sighings are sighings for God, just as children that cry themselves asleep away from home, and sob in their slumber, not knowing that they sob for their parents. The soul's inarticulate moanings are the affections yearning for the Infinite, and having no one to tell them what it is that ails them." - Henry Ward Beecher
"We never know the love of our parents for us till we have become parents." - Henry Ward Beecher
"It is the function of parents to see that their children habitually experience the true consequences of their conduct." - Herbert Spencer
"Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken in the hearing of little children tends toward the formation of character. Let parents always bear this in mind." - Hosea Ballou
"When you have your own children you will understand your obligation to your parents." - Japanese Proverbs
"The end... of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection." - John Milton
"I do not believe that children should have to pay for the shortcoming and inequities of the society into which they were born. I do not think that children should have to pay for the real or supposed sins of their parents. And I think it would be shortsighted of a society to produce, by its neglect, a group of future citizens very likely to be unproductive and characterized by bitterness ands alienation." - John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner
"Of all hardness of heart there is none so inexcusable as that of parents toward their children. An obstinate, inflexible, unforgiving temper is odious upon all occasions; but here it is unnatural." - Joseph Addison
"My parents never bound us to any church but taught us that the love of goodness was the love of God, the cheerful doing of duty made life happy, and that the love of one’s neighbor in its widest sense was the best help for oneself. Their lives showed us how lovely this simple faith was, how much honor, gratitude and affection it brought them, and what a sweet memory they left behind." - Louisa May Alcott
"It is not so much what our parents say that determines our world view as it is the unique world they create for us by their behavior." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"The time and the quality of the time that their parents devote to them indicate to children the degree to which they are valued by their parents." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"Just because a child’s parents are poor or uneducated is no reason to deprive the child of basic human rights to health care, education, proper nutrition. Clearly we ignore the needs of black children, poor children, and handicapped children in the country." - Marian Wright Edelman
"Parents have become so convinced that educators know what is best for children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts." - Marian Wright Edelman
"Education takes place in the whole community. It is in the malls, the highways, the media, and their parents’ lifestyles that give young people their clearest ideas of what reality is about" - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely if ever, do they forgive them." - Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
"No matter how idealistic our hopes... we eventually learn that spirituality is not about leaving life's problems behind, but about continually confronting them with honesty and courage. It is about ending our feeling of separation from others by healing our relationships with parents, co-workers, and friends. it is about bringing heightened awareness and compassion to our family life, careers, and community service." - Ronald S. Miller