This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Marriage is like a war. There are moments of chivalry and gallantry that attend the victorious advances and strategic retreats, the birth or death of children, the momentary conquest of loneliness, the sacrifice that ennobles him who makes it. But mostly there are the long dull sieges, the waiting, the terror and boredom. Women understand this better than men; they are better able to survive attrition." - Helen Hayes
"We should treat our minds as innocent and ingenious children whose guardians we are - be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Many men do not allow their principles to take root, but pull them up every now and then, as children do the flowers they have planted, to see if they are growing." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Living is death; dying is life. We are not what we appear to be. On this side of the grave we are exiles, on that citizens; on this side orphans, on that children; on this side captives, on that freemen; on this side disguised, unknown, on that disclosed and proclaimed as the sons of God." - Henry Ward Beecher
"A fortune is usually the greatest of misfortunes to children. It takes the muscles out of the limbs, the brain out of the head, and virtue out of the heart... In this world, it is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven. By these tendrils we clasp it and climb thitherward. And why do we think that we are separated from them? We never half knew them, nor in this world could." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Living is death; dying is life. On this side of the grave we are exiles, on that, citizens; on this side, orphans; on that, children; on this die, captives; on that, freemen; on this side disguised, unknown; on that, disclosed and proclaimed the sons of God." - 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
"Children should be led to make their own investigations and to draw their own inferences. They should be told as little as possible and induced to discover as much as possible. Humanity has progressed solely by self-instruction… If the subjects be put before him in right order and right form, any pupil of ordinary capacity will surmount his successive difficulties with but little assistance." - Herbert Spencer
"It is the function of parents to see that their children habitually experience the true consequences of their conduct." - Herbert Spencer
"There is no such thing as other people's children." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"Education begins by teaching children to read and ends by making most of them hate reading." - Holbrook Jackson, fully George Holbrook Jackson
"Children are a man's crown." - Homer NULL
"Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown - or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws." - Horace Mann
"A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices." - Horace Mann
"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
"Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within the hearing of little children tends towards the formation of character." - Hosea Ballou
"If gratitude is due from children to their earthly parent, how much more is the gratitude of the great family of men due to our Father in heaven." - Hosea Ballou
"Most want the wealth of this country to be used for human needs--health, work, schools, children, decent housing, a clean environment--rather than for billion-dollar nuclear submarines and four billion-dollar aircraft carriers." - Howard Zinn
"Should we welcome the huge growth of the military budget at the expense of health, education, the needs of children, one fifth of whom grow up in poverty? I suggest that a patriotic American who cares for his or her country might act on behalf of a different vision. Instead of being feared for our military prowess, we should want to be respected for our dedication to human rights." - Howard Zinn
"When you have your own children you will understand your obligation to your parents." - Japanese Proverbs
"Your children need your presence more than your presents." - Jesse Jackson, fully Jesse Louis Jackson
"Whatever parent gives his children good instruction and sets them at the same time a bad example, may be considered bringing them food in one hand and poison in the other." - John Balguy
"People should be free to find or make for themselves the kind of educational experiences they want their children to have." - John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt
"Man is by nature a learning animal. Birds fly, fish swim; man thinks and learns. Therefore, we do not need to “motivate” children into learning, by wheedling, bribing, or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do, and all we need to do, is bring as much of the world as we can into the school and the classroom; give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for; listen respectfully when they feel like talking; and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest." - John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt
"On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony." - John Muir
"[On children] Train them to virtue; habituate them to industry, activity, and spirit. Make them consider every vice as shameful and unmanly. Fire them with ambition to be useful. Make them disdain to be destitute of any useful knowledge. Fix their ambition upon great and solid objects, and their contempt upon little, frivolous, and useless ones." - John Quincy Adams
"To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education." - John Ruskin
"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
"A positive emotional state entrains, or unites, our systems for thought, feeling, and action; shifts our concentration and energy toward support of our intellectual and creative forebrain (old mammalian and neocortex); and allows us to both learn and remember easily. In very young children, the primary caregiver’s emotional state determines the child’s state, and therefore the child’s development in general. Any kind of negative response, any form of fear or anger shifts our attention and energy from verbal-intellectual brain to our oldest survival brain. This shift shortchanges our intellect, cripples our learning and memory, and can lock our neocortex into service of our lower brain." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"Our children’s growth: joyful learning or cultural conditioning? A child’s socialization, which can be characterized as learning in its most complete form, encouraging reflective thought, is instinctual and arises spontaneously on its own. Culture is something quite the opposite: an intellectual, arbitrary conditioning and enhancement of automatic reflexes that must be both induced and enforced." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"For 3,500 years, Jews have been telling themselves, their children, and the rest of the world: Be good. Be kind. Be honest. Be ethical. Be moral. It is the most revolutionary message in human history." - Joseph Jacobs
"Children have more need of models than critics." - Joseph Joubert
"Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatest which does not bow before children." - Kahlil Gibran
"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and through they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth." - Kahlil Gibran
"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself." - Kahlil Gibran
"What's done to children, they will do to society." - Karl Menninger, fully Karl Augustus Menninger
"Children are apt to live up to what you believe of them." - Lady Bird Johnson, fully Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Taylor Johnson
"God helps all the children as they move into a time of life they do not understand and must struggle through with precepts they have picked from the garbage can of older people, clinging with the passion of the lost to odds and ends that will mess them up for all time, or hating the trash so much they will waste their future on the hatred." - Lillian Hellman, fully Lillian Florience "Lily" Hellman
"Seem like God don’t see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams - but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile." - Lorraine Hansberry
"Today the children of our public schools are taught more of the history, heroes, legends, and sagas of the wold world than of the land of their birth, while they are furnished with little material on the people and institutions that are truly American." - Luther Standing Bear, aka Ota Kte or Mochunozhin
"Learning from their children is the best opportunity most people have to assure themselves of meaningful old age." - 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
"The dutifulness of children is the foundation of all virtues." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"The first bond of society is marriage; the next, our children; then the whole family and all things in common." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"The male form of a female liberationist is a male liberationist - a man who realizes the unfairness of having to work all his life to support a wife and children so that someday his widow may live in comfort, a man who points out that commuting to a job he doesn’t like is just as oppressive as his wife’s imprisonment in a suburb, a man who rejects his exclusion, by society and most women, from participation in childbirth and the engrossing, delightful care of young children - a man, in fact, who wants to relate himself to people and the world around him." - Margaret Mead
"What the world needs is not romantic lovers who are sufficient unto themselves, but husbands and wives who live in communities, relate to other people, carry on useful work and willingly give time and attention to their children." - Margaret Mead
"I believe that the real issue about premarital sex is the risk of producing illegitimate children who from the start are denied the protection every human society has found it necessary to give." - Margaret Mead