Children and the welfare of children is what this site is all about. Children are important and therefore we are
sharing some of our favorite quotes about children. Many are well known and some not as well known but we enjoy and
hope the reader will as well.
Maureen Hawkins:
Before you were conceived, I wanted you.
Before you were born I loved you.
Before you were here
an hour, I would die for you.
This is the miracle of life.
Michael Levine:
Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.
It takes a village to raise a child.
Marilyn French:
To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix
bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons
George Washington Carver:
How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with
the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these
Children are our most valuable natural resource.
If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed
to imitate them.
Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them
feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better?
Louis Pasteur:
When I approach a child, he inspires in me two sentiments; tenderness for what he is, and respect
for what he may become.
Lydia Maria Child:
Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father!
Marian Wright Edelman:
If you as parents cut corners, your children will too. If you lie, they will too. If you spend all
your money on yourselves and tithe no portion of it for charities, colleges, churches, synagogues, and civic causes, your
children won't either. And if parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults
still have not had the courage to snuff out.
If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.
Pamela Glenconner:
Bitter are the tears of a child: Sweeten them.
Deep are the thoughts of a child: Quiet them.
Sharp is
the grief of a child: Take it from him.
Soft is the heart of a child: Do not harden it.
"There is no trust more sacred than the one the world holds with
children. There is no duty more important than ensuring that their rights are respected, that their welfare is protected,
that their lives are free from fear and want and that they can grow up in peace."
-- Kofi Annan
"Children do not constitute anyone's property:
they are neither the property of their parents nor even of society. They belong only to their own future freedom."
-- Mikhail Bakunin
"...in serving the best interests
of children, we serve the best interests of all humanity."
-- Carol Bellamy | |
“When the lives and the rights of children are at stake, there
must be no silent witnesses.”
-- Carol Bellamy
" …And these children that you spit on
as they try to change their worlds
are immune to your consultations.
They're quite aware of what they're going through…"
-- David Bowie "Changes" If our American
way of life fails the child, it fails us all.
-- Pearl S. Buck | |
The
legacy I want to leave is a child-care system that says that no kid is going to be left alone or left unsafe.
--
Marian Wright Edelman
Investing in [children] is not a national
luxury or a national choice. It's a national necessity. If the foundation of your house is crumbling, you don't say
you can't afford to fix it while you're building astronomically expensive fences to protect it from outside enemies.
The issue is not are we going to pay -- it's are we going to pay now, up front, or are we going to pay a whole lot more
later on.
-- Marian Wright Edelman
"For most of recorded history,
parental violence against children and men's violence against wives was explicitly or implicitly condoned. Those who had
the power to prevent and/or punish this violence through religion, law, or custom, openly or tacitly approved it. …..The
reason violence against women and children is finally out in the open is that activists have brought it to global attention."
-- Riane Eisler | |
"No guarantees come with children's liberation.
But neither the promise of great benefits to all nor the prediction of great difficulties ahead can serve as the reason for
granting or denying rights to children. Rights will be granted because without them children are incapacitated, oppressed,
and abused."
-- Richard Farson "Birthrights"
Most of us tend to view childhood as a time of carefree pleasure. Those
of us who have looked at the real condition of children in America, however, see a very different picture--one in which children
are victims of terrible discrimination, prejudice, and abuse. They need protection. But the protection they need most is to
have the protection of civil rights, so that they can be regarded as full persons under the law.
-- Richard
Farson
"Children organizing for
political rights will probably be treated initially with ridicule and derision, and then with misunderstanding and perhaps
eventually violence if the experience of the struggle for women's suffrage is any precedent. Undoubtedly the greatest
obstacle to be overcome is the adult refusal to acknowledge that children suffer political discrimination and exclusion. Adults
do not perceive children as a minority group but as helpless, inexperienced, defenseless young people who need protection.
Adult paternalism seeks to protect and if in this process it curtails freedom, truncates potential and destroys civil liberties
this is taken to be incidental. The belief in the legitimacy of paternalism justifies and cements the existing power relationships
between adults and young people. This attitude must be confronted, challenged and refuted if young people are to secure their
political rights..."
- Bob Franklin "The Rights of Children"
The greatest Glory of a free-born People, Is to transmit that Freedom
to their Children.
-- William Havard
| Have we forgotten about the children,
and thus forsaken the next generation?"
-- Audrey Hepburn |
"...perhaps
that is what ultimately unites us as a world: the fact that, no matter how prosperous a nation, how developed, all share the
plight and embarrassment of having so many suffering children. We are united by our neglect, our abuse, our absence of love.
Have we forgotten about the children, and thus forsaken the next generation?"
-- Audrey Hepburn
"Somebody said to me the other
day, 'You know, it's really senseless, what you're doing. There's always been suffering, there will always
be suffering, and you're just prolonging the suffering of these children [by rescuing them].' My answer is, 'Okay,
then, let's start with your grandchild. Don't buy antibiotics if it gets pneumonia. Don't take it to the hospital
of it has an accident. It's against life-against humanity-to think that way."
-- Audrey Hepburn
There can be no better measure of our governance than the way we treat our children, and no greater failing on our
part than to allow them to be subjected to violence, abuse or exploitation.
-- Jessica Lange | |
"Regardless
of what the law or your teachers have to say about this, you are as human as anyone over the age of 18 or 21, yet, 'minors'
are one of the most oppressed groups of people in the world, and certainly the most discriminated against legally."
-- Grace Llewellyn "The Teenage Liberation Handbook"
"A
child, like all other human beings, has inalienable rights."
-- Lucretia Mott | |
Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home -
so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world ... Such are the places where every man, woman and
child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there,
they have little meaning anywhere.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt | |
"Whether children have first amendment rights
is a vexed legal question, but what is not in question is that they someday will. Constraining them from expressing their
views is no preparation for exercising those rights."
-- Crispin Sartwell
| Can we make a better world for our children? I believe we can, if enough people are concerned
and get involved in changing what is wrong with society.
-- Dr. Benjamin Spock It's up to each of us to help create a better
world for our children.
-- Dr. Benjamin Spock |
| |
"It used to be believed that the parent had unlimited
claims on the child and rights over him. In a truer view of the matter, we are coming to see that the rights are on the side
of the child and the duties on the side of the parent."
-- William G. Sumner, 1840-1910
"Children are a wonderful gift . . . They have an extraordinary
capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are."
-- Archbishop Desmond Tutu |
"Each child should have the fundamental right,
a constitutional right, whether it's a tribal constitutional right, federal or state constitutional right. It's time
we made our constitutions have our children's rights in them so they can engage in those experiences that he or she is
most anxious to explore, because it is having the right to choose that is truly indigenous to the democratic concept."
-- David Wilkins, Lumbee Tribe
