Great Throughts Treasury

"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

"Our children are growing up now in an ethically polluted nation where substance is being sacrificed daily for shadow." - Marian Wright Edelman

"Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree." - Marian Wright Edelman

"If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much." - Marian Wright Edelman

"Children have but little charity for each other’s defects." -

"God sends children for another purpose than merely to keep up the race - to enlarge our hearts, to make us unselfish, and full of kindly sympathies and affections; to give our souls higher aims, and to call out all our faculties to extended enterprise and exertion; to bring round our fireside bright faces and happy smiles, and loving, tender hearts. My soul blesses the Great Father every day, that He has gladdened the earth with little children." - Mary Howitt

"It is television’s primary damage that it provides ten million children with the same fantasy, ready-made and on a platter." -

"He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much: Who has gained the respect of intelligent men, and the love of little children: Who has filled his niche and accomplished his task: Who has left the world better than he has found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem or a rescued soul: Who has never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it: Who has looked for the best in others and given the best he had: Whose life was an inspiration: whose memory is a benediction." - Bessie Anderson Stanley, fully Elizabeth-Anne "Bessie" Anderson Stanley

"Cherish your vision and your dreams as they are the children of your soul; the blue prints of your ultimate achievements." - Napoleon Hill

"There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children." - Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

"Go out and get interested in the human problems that are everywhere around us. Help to improve the human lot. This service of love is perhaps the healthiest attitude in this world. It puts one into the main stream of the human race, where the profound problems re, and as one participates and gets involved and learns to know people and they him, one is loving and being loved and life becomes good - very good. Love is never a soft, genial attitude, indeed it is far from it. For example, when you really love the poor and underprivileged, you will get and fight for better conditions for all men. The fight is often against prejudice and entrenched greed, and it is no easy struggle to overcome these. But love is tough and never gives up as long as one of God’s children is the victim of injustice and mistreatment." - Norman Vincent Peale

"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

"If you contact God within yourself, you will know that He is in everyone, that He has become the children of all races. Then you cannot be an enemy to anyone. If the whole world could love with that universal love, there would be no more need for men to arm themselves against one another." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

"A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after." - Peter De Vries

"The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults." - Peter De Vries

"Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults." - Peter De Vries

"As soft wax is apt to take the stamp of the seal, so are the minds of young children to receive the instruction imprinted on them." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL

"Teach your children how to forgive." - Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL

"On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances." -

"If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life." -

"Children are aliens and we treat them as such." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear under different names in every system of thought, whether they are called cause, operation and effect; or more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or theologically, the Father, the Spirit and the Son; but we will call the Knower, the Doer and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and the love of beauty. These three are equal. The poets are thus liberating gods. They are free and they make free." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Nature never rhymes her children, nor makes two men alike." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Sorrow makes us all children again - destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Success is to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"See your children as gifts." - Robin Sharma

"I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged." -

"The best security for old age: respect your children." - Sholem Asch, born Szalom Asz, also written Shalom Asch

"It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers. If you look at the results which science has brought in its train, you will find them to consist almost wholly in elements of mischief. See how much belongs to the word 'Explosion' alone, of which the ancients knew nothing. " - Arthur Eddington, fully Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington

"The first and finest lesson that parents can teach their children is faith and courage." - Smiley Blanton

"Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers." - Socrates NULL

"Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life." - Sophocles NULL

"There are few successful adults who were not at first successful children." - Stuart Alexander Chase

"A fact does not become a truth until people are willing to act upon it; the fact that war is now a losing proposition for everybody will not flower into an effective truth until we are prepared to make as many sacrifices for our children's future peace as for their present comforts." -

"Parents should live for their children, but not through them; the parents whose satisfactions are wholly reflections of their children's achievements are as much monsters as the parents who neglect their offspring. Nothing can deform a personality so much as the burden of a love that is utterly self-sacrificing." -

"We shall not cease from exploration and the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. We started and know the place for the first time. Through the unknown remembered gate where the earth left to discover is that which was the beginning. At the source of the longest river, the voice of the hidden waterfall and the children in the apple tree. Not known, because not looked for. But heart, half heard in the stillness between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now always a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything. And all shall beware and all manner of things shall beware when the tongues of flames are enfolded into the crown not of fire, and the fire and the rose are one." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot

"No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers... Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Didn’t the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?" - Tecumseh, aka Tecumtha or Tekamthi NULL

"No tribe has a right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers… sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?" - Tecumseh, aka Tecumtha or Tekamthi NULL

"What is an offering to God? Charity to His children." - Midrash or The Midrash NULL

"The world is only saved by the breath of the school children." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL

"There is no mediator between God’s children and God." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL

"The greatest honor I can give my children is love for our people, loyalty to self." - Theodor Herzl, born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl

"For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly makes all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"In the past we have admitted the right of the individual to injure the future of the Republic for his own present profit. In fact there has been a good deal of a demand for unrestricted individualism, for the right of the individual to injure the future of all of us for his own temporary and immediate profit. The time has come for a change. As a people we have the right and the duty, second to moral law, of requiring and doing justice, to protect ourselves and our children against the wasteful development of our natural resources, whether that waste is caused by the actual destruction of such resources or by making them impossible of development hereafter." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Children increase the Cares of Life; but mitigate the Remembrance of Death." - Thomas Fuller

"Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults." - Thomas Szasz, fully Thomas Stephen Szasz