Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Milton R. Sapirstein

American Clinical Psychiatrist, Writer and Researcher in Psychiatry

"It is not enough for parents to understand children. they must accord children the privilege of understanding them."

"The ideal mother, like the ideal marriage, is a fiction."

"It is impossible for any woman to love her children twenty-four hours a day."

"Education, like neurosis, begins at home."

"To observe people in conflict is a necessary part of a child's education. It helps him to understand and accept his own occasional hostilities and to realize that differing opinions need not imply an absence of love."

"There is nobody as enslaved as the fanatic, the person in whom one impulse, one value, has assumed ascendancy over all others."

"Our unconscious is like a vast subterranean factory with intricate machinery that is never idle, where work goes on day and night from the time we are born until the moment of our death."

"Bringing up a family should be an adventure, not an anxious discipline in which everybody is constantly graded for performance."

"Outstanding beauty, like outstanding gifts of any kind, tends to get in the way of normal emotional development, and thus of that particular success in life which we call happiness."

"Society is a kind of parent to its members. If it, and they, are to thrive, its values must be clear, coherent and generally acceptable."