[A]dults are just obsolete children, and the hell with them. (Theodor
Seuss Geisel)
-Dr. Seuss
A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only
to be right but also to be wrong.
-Thomas Szasz
A child is a gift that parents give to themselves, forever expecting the
child to be grateful.
-Robert Brault
A child, like your stomach, doesn't need all you can afford to give it.
-Frank
A. Clark
A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an
occasional animal, and the common cold.
-Ogden Nash
A happy childhood is the worst possible preparation for life.
-Kinky
Friedman
A hungry child knows no politics.
-Ronald Reagan
A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still
young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes
and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.
-H.L.
Mencken
A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and
by car forever after.
-Peter de Vries
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil
conscience of their parents.
-H.L. Mencken
A suspicious parent makes an artful child.
-Richard Haliburton
A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands
are empty.
-Unattributed
Adorable children are considered to be the general property of the human
race. Rude children belong to their mothers.
-Judith Martin
Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It
is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period
to a minimum.
-Thomas Szasz
All children are morbid: it's their one saving grace.
-Truman
Capote
All children should be aptitude-tested at an early age and, if their
main or only aptitude is for marketing, drowned.
-David Canzi
All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in
fact, barely presentable.
-Fran Lebowitz
All good qualities in a child are the result of environment, while all
the bad ones are the result of poor heredity on the side of the other
parent.
-Elinor Goulding Smith
All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young
children.
-Robert A. Heinlein
All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I
wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.
-Dorothy
Parker
Although today there are many trial marriages... there is no such thing
as a trial child.
-Gail Sheehy
Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will
choose your rest home.
-Phyllis Diller
American children grow up to be valuable citizens. Bangladeshi children
grow up to be part of the world population problem. They just aren't
giving birth to any Marky Marks or Howard Sterns in Dhaka.
-P.J.
O'Rourke
An altruist is one who would be sincerely sorry to see his neighbor's
children devoured by wolves.
-H.L. Mencken
Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying.
-Fran
Lebowitz
Before I got married, I had six theories about bringing up children;
now, I have six children and no theories.
-John Wilmot
But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it
paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their
parents.
-Joseph Heller
Catholics believe life begins at conception. Protestants believe life
begins at birth. Jews believe life begins when the children leave home
and the dog dies.
-Unattributed
Childhood is a promise that is never kept.
-Ken Hill
Childhood is short and maturity is forever. (From the comic strip Calvin
and Hobbes)
-Bill Watterson
Childhood used to end with the discovery that there is no Santa Claus.
Nowadays, it often ends when the child gets his first adult, the way
Hemingway got his first rhino, with the difference that the rhino was
charging Hemingway, whereas the adult is usually running away from the
child.
-James Thurber
Children and dogs are as necessary to the welfare of the country as Wall
Street and the railroads.
-Harry S. Truman
Children are a great comfort in your old age- and they help you reach it
faster, too.
-Lionel Kauffmann
Children are all foreigners.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.
-H.H.
Munro Saki
Children are God's spies.
-Elizabeth Bowen
Children are the true connoisseurs. What's precious to them has no
price- only value.
-Bel Kaufman
Children are the universal scapegoats for any political agenda.
-Unattributed
Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.
-Salman
Rushdie
Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, and that's what parents
were created for.
-Ogden Nash
Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them;
rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
-Oscar Wilde
Children don't drop out of high school when they are 16, they do so in
the first grade and wait 10 years to make it official.
-Bob
Keeshan (Captain Kangaroo)
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but
they have never failed to imitate them.
-James Baldwin
Children haven't changed. Childhood has.
-Barbara Oehlberg
Children make the most desirable opponents in Scrabble as they are both
easy to beat and fun to cheat.
-Fran Lebowitz
Children should be like waffles- you should be able to throw the first
one away.
-Mary Alice Messenger
Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their
food and tyrannize their teachers.
-Socrates
Choosing to have a child that you can't take care of is like farting in
an elevator. Sure, you got it out, but now it's everyone else's problem.
-Richard
Jeni
Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel
hopefully is better than to arrive.
-Stephen Fry
Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's
beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from
drowning them at birth.
-Robert A. Heinlein
Do not allow children to mix drinks. It is unseemly and they use too
much vermouth.
-Steve Allen
Do not breed. Nothing gives less pleasure than childbearing. Pregnancies
are damaging to health, spoil the figure, wither the charms, and it's
the cloud of uncertainty forever hanging over these events that darkens
a husband's mood.
-Marquis de Sade
Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.
-Robert
A. Heinlein
Do not videotape your child in the bathtub. Do not name your child after
a Scandinavian deity or any aspect of the weather.
-Daniel Menaker
Don't bother discussing sex with small children. They rarely have
anything to add.
-Fran Lebowitz
Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections,
children tend to be sticky. One can only assume that this has something
to do with not smoking enough.
-Fran Lebowitz
Every child comes with the message that God is not yet tired of man.
-Rabindranath
Tagore
Every generation, Western civilization is invaded by barbarians; we call
them "children."
-Hannah Arendt
Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
-P.J.
O'Rourke
Everyone has been a child. All can understand through muffled memory how
childhood was. But none has been old except those who are that now.
-Bert
Kruger Smith
Experts say you should never hit your child in anger. When is a good
time? When you're feeling festive?
-Roseanne
Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will
make threatening him with it much more effective.
-P.J. O'Rourke
Familiarity breeds contempt- and children.
-Mark Twain (Samuel
Clemens)
Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children,
practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians. (at 1992
GOP Convention)
-Rev. Pat Robertson
Grandchildren are our reward for not having strangled our children.
-Unattributed
Grandchildren don't make a man feel old; it's the knowledge that he's
married to a grandmother.
-G. Norman Collie
Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome
for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
-Antoine
de Saint-Exupéry
Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being
asked to change or improve the world?
-Hannah Arendt
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they
are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
-Francis
Bacon
Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come
back home.
-Bill Cosby
Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the
exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.
-P.J. O'Rourke
I believe the children are like our future: nasty, brutish and short.
(From The Onion)
-Unattributed
I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where
they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of
their character.
-Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I have certainly seen more men destroyed by the desire to have a wife
and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by
drink or harlots.
-William Butler Yeats
I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out
what they want and then advise them to do it.
-Harry S. Truman
I live in a tough neighborhood. They got a children's zoo. Last week,
four kids escaped.
-Rodney Dangerfield
I never met anyone who didn't have a very smart child. What happens to
these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?
-Fran
Lebowitz
I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each
of their rooms: Checkout Time is 18 years.
-Erma Bombeck
I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home.
-Robert
Orben
I want to have children and I know my time is running out: I want to
have them while my parents are still young enough to take care of them.
-Rita
Rudner
If a child looks like his father, that's heredity. If he looks like a
neighbor, that's environment.
-Unattributed
If thine enemy offend thee, give his child a drum.
-Unattributed
If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.
-Bette
Davis
If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them
things.
-Norman Douglas
If you want your children to keep their feet on the ground, put some
responsibility on their shoulders.
-Abigail Van Buren
If your children ever find out how lame you really are, they'll murder
you in your sleep.
-Frank Zappa
In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake
of the children. In New York they tried to work things out for the sake
of the apartment.
-David Sedaris
It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you
have car windows.
-Erma Bombeck
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point
out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a
half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
-Neil Gaiman
It kills you to see [your children] grow up. But I guess it would kill
you quicker if they didn't.
-Barbara Kingsolver
It takes a village to raise a child. The village is Washington. You are
the child.
-P.J. O'Rourke
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
-Tom Robbins
It's no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as
children.
-Kingsley Amis
Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.
-Clarence
Darrow
Kids are not nice, innocent, flower-loving little rainbow children. Kids
are all little bastards; they don't have any kind of social tact or
etiquette.
-Matt Stone
Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and
aggravation later in life.
-Robert Byrne
Lies are like children: they're hard work, but it's worth it because the
future depends on them.
-Pam Davis
Literature is mostly about having sex and not having children. Life is
the other way around.
-David Lodge
Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs
than of their children.
-William Penn
Midlife crisis is that moment when you realize your children and your
clothes are about the same age.
-Bill Tammeus
My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless,
destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.
-Evelyn Waugh
My father was frightened of his father, I was frightened of my father,
and I am damned well going to see to it that my children are frightened
of me.
-King George V
My husband and I are either going to buy a dog or have a child. We can't
decide whether to ruin our carpet or ruin our lives.
-Rita Rudner
Never raise your hand to children; it leaves your midsection unprotected.
-Robert
Orben
No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can
expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.
-Margaret
Mead
Noble fathers have noble children.
-Euripides
Nothing you do for children is ever wasted.
-Garrison Keillor
Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave
When they think that their
children are naive.
-Ogden Nash
Once you have children, it forever changes the way you bore other people.
-Bruce
Eric Kaplan
One of the first things schoolchildren in Texas learn is how to compose
a simple declarative sentence without the word "shit" in it.
-Unattributed
Parents are the bones upon which children sharpen their teeth.
-Peter
Ustinov
Parents must remember, what we do in private, our children will do in
public, and what we do in moderation, our children do in excess.
-Carey
Casey
Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to
ignore.
-Ogden Nash
People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.
(From the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes)
-Bill Watterson
Setting a good example for children takes all the fun out of middle age.
-William
Feather
She was an atheist and I was an agnostic. We didn't know what religion
not to bring our children up in.
-Woody Allen
Some children have the most disagreeable way of getting grown-up.
-Lewis
Carroll
Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the
child as it is to the caterpillar.
-Bradley Millar
The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
-Oscar
Wilde
The children are our future. And that is why, ultimately, we're screwed.
-Scott
Adams
The difference between broccoli and nose pickings is you have to tell
your children to eat broccoli.
-Unattributed
The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to
have any.
-Katherine Whitehorn
The first half of our lives are ruined by our parents and the second
half by our children.
-Clarence Darrow
The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be
a credit to them.
-Bertrand Russell
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love
their mother.
-Theodore Hesburgh
The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to
get along without them.
-Frank A. Clark
The most important thing to teach your children is that the sun does not
rise and set. It is the Earth that revolves around the sun. Then teach
them the concepts of North, South, East and West, and that they relate
to where they happen to be on the planet's surface at that time.
Everything else will follow.
-Buckminster Fuller
The old- like children- talk to themselves, for they have reached that
hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it
in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's
beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secret are one's own.
-Eugene
O'Neill
The real killer was when you married the wrong person but had the right
children.
-Ann Beatty
The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they
have a common enemy.
-Sam Levenson
The secret of dealing successfully with a child is not to be its parent.
-Mel
Lazarus
The trouble with children is that they are not returnable.
-Quentin
Crisp
There are only two things a child will share willingly- communicable
diseases and his mother's age.
-Dr. Benjamin Spock
There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the
United States of America.
-Otto von Bismarck
There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children and
children love hamsters.
-Alice Thomas Ellis
There is no such thing as other people's children.
-Hillary Rodham
Clinton
This is the reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than
fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth and are more
certain that they are their own.
-Aristotle
Too often we give our children answers to remember rather than problems
to solve.
-Roger Lewin
We childproof our homes, but they keep getting in.
-Unattributed
We had a quicksand box in our back yard. I was an only child, eventually.
-Steven
Wright
We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood
until we have stopped saying "It got lost," and say, "I lost it."
-Sydney
J. Harris
We spend half our lives trying to escape our parents and the other half
trying to escape our children.
-Migaela Iosof
We spend the first year of children's lives teaching them how to walk
and talk, and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit
down.
-Neil deGrasse Tyson
We worry about what a child will be tomorrow, yet we forget that he is
someone today.
-Stacia Tauscher
What is done to our children will be done to our society.
-Karl
Menninger
When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter
society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread
children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.
-Brian
Aldiss
When mothers talk about the depression of the empty nest, they're not
mourning the passing of all those wet towels on the floor, or the music
that numbs your teeth, or even the bottle of capless shampoo dribbling
down the shower drain. They're upset because they've gone from
supervisor of a child's life to a spectator. It's like being the vice
president of the United States.
-Erma Bombeck
When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that
someone in the house is happy to see you.
-Nora Ephron
Why does this same God tell me how to raise my children when he had to
drown his?
-Robert G. Ingersoll
You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for
instance.
-Franklin P. Jones
You know children are growing up when they start asking questions that
have answers.
-John Plomp
You never get over being a child, long as you have a mother to go to.
-Sarah
Orne Jewett
You're not a good parent, if at some point you are not an embarrassment
to your children.
-Malcolm S. Forbes
Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.
-John
Updike
Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
-George
Bernard Shaw
Categories: Children, Kids, Quotes of the day
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