Parental Quotes - Page 2

• Many toxic parents compare one sibling unfavorably with another to make the target child feel that he's not doing enough to gain parental affection. This motivates the child to do whatever the parents want in order to regain their favor. This divide-and-conquer technique is often unleashed against children who become a little too independent, threatening the balance of the family system.

  Susan Forward

  Children, Sibling, Independent

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• When fast food is not a treat but a dietary staple, the children surf the internet all day in dark corners of the room and are bombarded with latest gadgets. Things replace parental standards.

  Diane Abbott

  Children, Dark, Bombarded By

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• I know parental embarrassment usually stops somewhere at fifteen, but he just kept on giving me good reasons.

  Deb Caletti

  Giving, Fifteen, Reason

  Deb Caletti (2012). “Stay”, p.35, Simon and Schuster

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• Depriving a parent of parental status is as devastating as a criminal conviction.

  Ruth Bader Ginsburg

  Parent, Criminals, Conviction

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• There are good days and there are bad days, and this is one of them.

  Lawrence Welk

  Funny Life, Good Day, Bad Day

  "Emmy, Vol. 9", published by Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, 1987.

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• Being made to feel like an irrelevant child was probably an asset. Benign negligence is not a bad parental attitude or at least a cross between a benevolent dictator and benign negligence - you should just let kids crack on with it.

  Clare Balding

  Attitude, Children, Kids

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• If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

  Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  Children, Home, Might

  Letty Cottin Pogrebin (1983). “Family politics: love and power on an intimate frontier”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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• The potential possibilities of any child are the most intriguing and stimulating in all creation.

  Ray Lyman Wilbur

  Christian, Children, Compassion

  United States. Department of the Interior, Ray Lyman Wilbur, William Atherton DuPuy (1932). “Conservation in the Department of the Interior”, p.166

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• A new species develops if a population which has become geographically isolated from its parental species acquires during this period of isolation characters which promote or guarantee reproductive isolation when the external barriers break down.

  Ernst Mayr

  Character, Science, Population

  Ernst Mayr (1988). “Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist”, p.442, Harvard University Press

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• Who can describe the transports of a beam truly parental on beholding a daughter shoot up like some fair and modest flower, and acquire, day after day, fresh beauty and growing sweetness, so as to fill every eye with pleasure and every heart with admiration?

  George Fordyce

  Daughter, Flower, Heart

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• Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, inpregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children.

  David Hume

  Nature, Children, Science

  David Hume (1874). “A Treatise on Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects; and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion”, p.452

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• The Truth that is to be Realized may be summarized simply as the Realization that no matter what is arising, no matter how many others are present, there is only One Being. This is precisely different from the childish but common religious notion that even when you are alone there is always Someone Else present, Who will look out for you if you do the right thing. True freedom is not a matter of striking a deal with an All-Powerful Parental Deity; no such God exists. True freedom is in the Realization that there is only God and You are That One.

  Adi Da

  Love, Religious, Truth

  "The Parental Deity and the One to Be Realized" by Adi Da, February 7, 1983.

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• They say that childhood forms us, that those early influences are the key to everything. Is the peace of the soul so easily won? Simply the inevitable result of a happy childhood. What makes childhood happy? Parental harmony? Good health? Security? Might not a happy childhood be the worst possible preparation for life? Like leading a lamb to the slaughter.

  Josephine Hart

  Keys, Childhood, Soul

  Josephine Hart (1991). “Damage: a novel”, Alfred A. Knopf

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• The land is where our roots are. The children must be taught to feel and live in harmony with the Earth.

  Maria Montessori

  Children, Land, Roots

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• there is such a rebound from parental influence that it generally seems that the child makes use of the directions given by the parent only to avoid the prescribed path.

  Margaret Fuller

  Children, Parent, Use

  Margaret Fuller (1869). “Life Without and Life Within: Or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems”, p.31

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• I don't pretend to any exemption from the general lot of parental delusion-I mean that like most other parents I see my child through an atmosphere which illuminates, magnifies, and at the same time refines the object to a degree that amounts to a delusion.

  Sara Coleridge

  Children, Mean, Parent

  Sara Coleridge Coleridge (1874). “Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge”, p.70

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• Between the combination of Judeo-Christian religious 'be good be good be good' and Capitalist 'something's wrong with you, buy this' and the parental upbringing, which is 'you're wrong, you're not thin enough, you're not smart enough' I mean, hello! We don't have a shot.

  Eve Ensler

  Christian, Religious, Smart

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• Parental anxieties: A timeline. Pre-1800s: Potato famine, death of entire villages. 1900s: Trying to keep dad's job through depression so entire family does not starve or have to sell off children to agribusiness. 2000: Infringement of Parenthood on sense of Personhood.

  Sandra Tsing Loh

  Jobs, Dad, Children

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• So much does the moral health depend upon the moral atmosphere that is breathed, and so great is the influence daily exercised by parents over their children by living a life before their eyes, that perhaps the best system of parental instruction might be summed up in these two words: 'Improve thyself.'

  Samuel Smiles

  Children, Character, Eye

  Samuel Smiles (1859). “Self-help; with illustrations of character and conduct”, p.295

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• It is the institutions of society, not parental genes, that bestow the blessings of ownership of productive capital.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Blessing, Politics

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• Let's be frank: if there are hardened terrorists [Australian] who are fighting overseas, we don't want to see those people come back to our shores. But if we could stop youngsters, teenagers from falling into the snares of ISIL or Jabhat al-Nusra or other terrorist organisations through parental intervention and other strategies then, we hope to be able to rescue them before they commit these crimes.

  George Brandis

  Teenager, Fall, Fighting

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• Sociologists and historians have avoided looking for the family sources of wars and social violence. Whenever a group produces murderers, the early parental relationship must have been abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous.

  Lloyd deMause

  War, Lying, Historical

  "The Emotional Life of Nations". Book by Lloyd deMause, 2002.

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• Even the humblest mammal's strong sexual, parental, and social instincts give rise to 'do unto others as yourself' and 'love thy neighbor as thyself'.

  Charles Darwin

  Love, Strong, Giving

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• Beware of the manipulativeness of rich students who were neglected by their parents. They love to turn the campus into hysterical psychodramas of sexual transgression, followed by assertions of parental authority and concern. And don't look for sexual enlightenment from academe, which spews out mountains of books but never looks at life directly.

  Camille Paglia

  Book, Parent, Enlightenment

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.50, Vintage

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• I won the parental lottery. Most of the kids I grew up with either came from really fractured homes, or really violent ones. I went home to a very traditional, good Irish Catholic family.

  Dennis Lehane

  Home, Kids, Catholic

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