This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"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
"The present... is everywhere at once the child of the past, and the parent of the future." - John Stuart Blackie
"Will is the child of desire, and passes out of the dominion of its parent only to come under that of habit." - John Stuart Mill
"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent [mother] of all others." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"There are those who find the “chief good” in virtue. Well, that is a noble doctrine. But the very virtue they talk of is the parent and preserver of friendship, and without it friendship cannot possibly exist." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"My opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eye fixed." - Plato NULL
"Among the greatest gifts a parent can give a child - even greater than a hovering, solicitous protection - are the wisdom, the character, the standards that will help him safely to make his own decisions and provide his own protection." - Richard L. Evans, fully Richard Louis Evans
"Americans are like a rich parent who wishes he knew how to give his child the hardships that made him rich." - Robert Frost
"Everything is dear to its parent." - Sophocles NULL
"An ounce of parent is worth a pound of clergy." - Spanish Proverbs
"Consideration is the Parent of Wisdom." - Thomas Fuller
"Idleness is the parent of all psychology." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Behind almost every great man there stands either a good parent or a good teacher." - Gilbert Arthur Highet
"Institutions can never conserve without betraying the movements from which they proceed. The institution is static, whereas its parent movement has been dynamic; it confines men within its limits, while the movement had liberated them from the bondage of institutions; it looks to the past, [although] the movement had pointed forward. Though in content the institution resembles the dynamic epoch whence it proceeded, in spirit it is like the [state] before the revolution. So the Christian church, after the early period, often seemed more closely related in attitude to the Jewish synagogue and the Roman state than to the age of Christ and his apostles; its creed was often more like a system of philosophy than like the living gospel." - Richard Niebuhr, fully Helmut Richard Niebuhr
"Knowledge is the parent of love; wisdom, love itself." - J. C. Hare (1795-1855) and A. W. Hare
"The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society." - James Fenimore Cooper
"For, as I have suggested, disruption of the unity of the self is not limited to the cases that come to physicians and institutions for treatment. They accompany every disturbance of normal relations of husband and wife, parent and child, group and group, class and class, nation and nation. Emotional responses are so total as compared with the partial nature of intellectual responses, of ideas and abstract conceptions, that their consequences are more pervasive and enduring. I can, accordingly, think of nothing of greater practical importance than the psychic effects of human relationships, normal and abnormal, should be the object of continues study, including among the consequences the indirect somatic effects." - John Dewey
"Within even the most social group there are many relations that are not as yet social. A large number of human relationships in any social group are still upon the machine-like plane. Individuals use one another so as to get desired results, without reference to the emotional and intellectual disposition and consent of those used. Such uses express physical superiority of position, skill, technical ability, and command of tools, mechanical or fiscal. So far as the relations of parent and child, teacher and pupil, employer and employee, governor and governed, remain upon this level, they form no true social group, no matter how closely their respective activities touch one another. Giving and taking of orders modifies actions and results, but does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a communication of interests." - John Dewey
"Too many kids struggle and fail needlessly simply because the way in which they learn is incompatible with the way they’re being taught. Schools are filled with kids who give up on themselves, are convinced they’re "losers", and conclude they’re just dumb. It’s tragic. It’s also painful—painful for the student, teacher and parent who may be unaware that the "wiring" of that child’s brain simply is not in synch with the demands and expectations of the situations at hand. " - Mel Levine, formally Melvin D Levine
"Language is simply alive, like an organism. We all tell each other this, in fact, when we speak of living languages, and I think we mean something more than an abstract metaphor. We mean alive. Words are the cells of language, moving the great body, on legs. Language grows and evolves, leaving fossils behind. The individual words are like different species of animals. Mutations occur. Words fuse, and then mate. Hybrid words and wild varieties or compound words are the progeny. Some mixed words are dominated by one parent while the other is recessive. The way a word is used this year is its phenotype, but it has deeply immutable meanings, often hidden, which is its genotype.... The separate languages of the Indo-European family were at one time, perhaps five thousand years ago, maybe much longer, a single language. The separation of the speakers by migrations had effects on language comparable to the speciation observed by Darwin on various islands of the Galapagos. Languages became different species, retaining enough resemblance to an original ancestor so that the family resemblance can still be seen. " - Lewis Thomas
"Language is simply alive, like an organism. We all tell each other this, in fact, when we speak of living languages, and I think we mean something more than an abstract metaphor. We mean alive. Words are the cells of language, moving the great body, on legs. Language grows and evolves, leaving fossils behind. The individual words are like different species of animals. Mutations occur. Words fuse, and then mate. Hybrid words and wild varieties or compound words are the progeny. Some mixed words are dominated by one parent while the other is recessive. The way a word is used this year is its phenotype, but it has deeply immutable meanings, often hidden, which is its genotype." - Lewis Thomas
"The best training any parent can give a child is to train the child to train himself." - Adolph P. Gouthey
"Hopefulness is the heartbeat of the relationship between a parent and child. Each time a child overcomes the next challenge of his life, his triumph encourages new growth in his parents. In this sense a child is parent to his mother and father. " - Louise J. Kaplan
"A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all other virtues." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"The old notion that children are the private property of parents dies very slowly. In reality, no parent raises a child alone. How many of us nice middle-class folk could make it without our mortgage reduction? That's a government subsidy of families, yet we resent putting money directly into public housing. We take our deduction for dependent care yet resent putting money directly into child care. Common sense and necessity are beginning to erode old notions of the private invasion of family life, because so many families are in trouble. " - Marian Wright Edelman
"Society is a chain of obligations, and its links must support each other; The branch cannot but wither, that is cut from the parent vine." - Martin Tupper, fully Martin Farquhar Tupper
"When children know their mothers believe in them, they develop self-confidence. On the other hand, if a parent repeatedly tells a child that he's shy, he's stupid, he's mean or he's going to grow up to be a bank robber, he'll probably develop that quality or bring that vision to pass. " - Mary Kay Ash, fully Mary Kathlyn Wagner Ash
"The most tragic thing in the world and in life... is love. Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion; love is consolation in desolation; it is the sole medicine against death, for it is death's brother." - Miguel de Unamuno, fully Miguel de Unamuno y Jogo
"Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion." - Miguel de Unamuno, fully Miguel de Unamuno y Jogo
"It's a wise parent who allows her children to give up the things of childhood in their own time." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"People suffer under the illusion of autonomy if they think they have changed their script, but in reality have changed only the set- ting, characters, costumes, etc., not the essence of the drama. For example, a person who is Parent programmed to be an evangelist may join the drug scene and then with religious zeal evangelize others into following. Choosing the setting for evangelizing may give the person the illusion of freedom when actually the enslavement to parental instructions has only been disguised." - Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward
"Man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct . The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal." - Nikola Tesla
"God knows that a mother needs fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul. But because I happen to be a parent of almost fiercely maternal nature, I praise casualness . It seems to me the rarest of virtues. It is useful enough when children are small. It is important to the point of necessity when they are adolescents." - Phyllis McGinley
"Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent. " - Plato NULL
"It is far from easy to determine whether she [Nature] has proved to him a kind parent or a merciless stepmother. " - Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL
"Nature makes us buy her presents at the price of so many sufferings that it is doubtful whether she deserves most the name of parent or stepmother." - Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL
"Some factors that increase the risk of substance abuse in adolescents deserve emphasis. Casual attitudes towards marijuana and minors' access to cigarettes raise the likelihood that teenagers will make a sad progression to more serious drug use and earlier sexual activity. Dropping out of school puts the child at greater risk, as does having a parent who is an abuser of alcohol or drugs." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"When I wrote It Takes a Village ten years ago, our daughter Chelsea, a lively teen, was engaged with school, church, ballet, and friends. Now that Chelsea is grown up, I look back and see more clearly than ever how much we benefited from the village every step of the way and how much better off she is for having not just two parents, but other caring adults in her corner. And I have yet to meet a parent who didn't feel the same way." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"Rashness is the faithful, but unhappy parent of misfortune." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
"I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel... Once the emotions have been aroused " - Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
"As the shell, the pith and the kernel of the fruit are all produced form one parent seed of the tree, so from the one Lord is produced the whole of creation, animate and inanimate, spiritual and material." - Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
"Not a single one of my ancestors was too unattractive to find at least one copulation partner, or too selfish a parent to nurture at least one child through to adulthood." - Richard Dawkins
"Perseverance gives power to weakness, and opens to poverty the world's wealth. It spreads fertility over the barren landscape, and buds the choicest flowers and fruits spring up and flourish in the desert abode of thorns and briars." - Samuel Griswold Goodrich, better known by pseudonymn Peter Parley
"We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart; But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: It's clever, but is it Art?" - Rudyard Kipling
"Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it." - Russell Baker. fully Russell Wayne Baker
"I believe no amount of business school training or work experience can teach what is ultimately a matter of personal character. Businesses are not dishonest or greedy, people are. Thus, a business, successful or not, is merely a reflection of the character of its leadership." - S. Truett Cathy