Women’s Liberation is just a lot of foolishness. It’s the men who are discriminated against. They can’t bear children. And no-one’s likely to do anything about that. Golda Meir, cited Newsweek 23rd October 1972
To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation – is that good for the world? Christopher Hitchens
I don’t think it’s moral at all to lie to children. When I meet people in holy orders I feel I am meeting someone who is paid to lie to children. I don’t think that’s a moral calling or occupation to tell children that they should be terrified of Hell ... This is wicked. It’s ruined the childhood of millions of children down the generations. Christopher Hitchens, Freedom from Religion Foundation 2007
A clutch of hysterical sinister virgins who have already betrayed their charge in the children of their own church. For shame! Christopher Hitchens, with Stephen Fry v The Catholic Church, debate 2009
We have no way to quantify the damage done by telling tens of millions of children that masturbation will make them blind, or that impure thoughts will lead to an eternity of torment, or that members of other faiths including members of their own families will burn, or that venereal disease will result from kisses. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great pp55-56
But we can be sure that religion has always hoped to practice upon the unformed and undefended minds of the young, and has gone to great lengths to make sure of this privilege by making alliances with secular powers in the material world. ibid. p217
Mark what happens if the child should stray to another faith, let alone another cult even in early adolescence. ibid. p220
Maimonides also argued that circumcision would be a means of enforcing ethnic solidarity, and he laid particular stress on the need to perform the operation on babies rather than on those who had reached the age of reason. ibid. p225
In more recent times, some pseudo-secular arguments have been adduced for male circumcision. It has been argued that the process is more hygienic ... Medicine has exploded these claims. ibid. pp225-226
A mutilation of a powerless infant with the aim of ruining its future sex life. ibid. p226
And it is permitted in New York in 2006! If religion and its arrogance were not involved, no healthy society would permit this primitive amputation, or allow any surgery to be practised on the genitalia without the full and informed consent of the person concerned. ibid. p226
‘Child abuse’ is really a silly and pathetic euphemism for what has been going on: we are talking about the systematic rape and torture of children, positively aided and abetted by a hierarchy which knowingly moved the grossest offenders to parishes where they would be safer. ibid. p228
One can only shudder to think what was happening in the centuries where the church was above all criticism ibid. p228
Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood. Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher. Elbert Hubbard
When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think. Bertrand Russell
I’m more interested in arousing enthusiasm in kids than in teaching the facts. The facts may change, but that enthusiasm for exploring the world will remain with them the rest of their lives. Seymour Simon
If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had better not teach them that they are God’s rifles, or we will have to stand firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no glory, no special rights, no intrinsic and inalienable merit. If you insist on teaching your children false-hoods – that the Earth is flat, that ‘Man’ is not a product of evolution by natural selection – then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity. Our future well-being – the well-being of all of us on the planet – depends on the education of our descendants. Daniel C Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense this, and who don’t wish to subject themselves to further moulding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won’t be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave – that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn’t like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, here idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed – yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive. Doris Lessing
An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certification for teachers, and less money for art. All of these responses come from the place where we want to make the child into the best adult possible, not in the ancient Greek sense of virtuous and wise, but in the sense of one who is an efficient part of the machinery of society. But on all these counts, soul is neglected. Thomas Moore
To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination. Jiddu Krishnamurti, Education & the Significance of Life
Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words. Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
The Babar the Elephant book is sitting in front of me. I pick it up and start reading it. I remember reading it as a small Boy and enjoying it and imagining that I was friends with Babar, his constant Companion during all of his adventures. He went to the moon, I went with him. He fought Tomb Raiders in Egypt, I fought alongside him. He rescued his elephant girlfriend from Ivory Hunters on the Savanna, I coordinated the getaway. I loved that goddamn Elephant and I loved being his friend. In a childhood full of unhappiness and rage, Babar is one of the few pleasant memories that I have. Me and Babar, kicking some motherfucking ass. James Frey
I don’t know what your childhood was like, but we didn’t have much money. We’d go to a movie on a Saturday night, then on Wednesday night my parents would walk us over to the library. It was such a big deal, to go in and get my own book. Robert Redford
Reports of two strange children appearing from nowhere. They speak an alien language and their skin is green. Ancient X Files s2e6: Vampire Killers & Green Children Mystery, History 2012
A series of strange events said to have taken place in a small English village back in the twelfth century. ibid.
The account is quite definite about the colour of the children’s skin ... The Green Children of Woolpit. ibid.
According to the chronicles, one of the children died at a young age, the other, the girl, lost her green colour and went on to marry one of the local villagers. ibid.
A second contemporary account of the green children’s appearance ... also mentions their strange language. ibid.
Her joyousness and animal spirits radiated from her whole countenance and rendered every movement elastic and full of life and vigour. It was delightful and cheerful to behold her. Her dear face now rises. Charles Darwin, personal notebook, re Annie
There is no good father, that’s the rule. Don’t lay the blame on men but on the bond of paternity, which is rotten. To beget children, nothing better; to have them, what iniquity! Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots, 1964
Goodnight children – everywhere. Uncle Mac, Children’s Hour, BBC radio
A little child, a limber elf,
Singing, dancing to itself,
A fairy thing with red round cheeks,
That always finds, and never seeks,
Makes such a vision to the sight
As fills a father’s eyes with light. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 1772-1834, Christabel