Denis Diderot Quotes

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

Children are very fair minded, they really are.

Repentance is for little children.

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

I got caught stealing when I was a kid from the local bodega right across the street from where we lived. I tried to steal a big bag of Red Hot Dollars. And I swear, I was about 7 years old and the bag was bigger'n me.

Give me a child for the first 7 years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards.

An evil and a reproach to our municipality, for which the laws and ordinances afford no adequate remedy. I allude to the constantly increasing number of vagrants, idle and vicious children of both sexes, who infest our public thoroughfares, hotels, docks, &c.; children who are growing up in ignorance and profligacy, only destined to a life of misery, shame and crime, and ultimately to a felon's doom. Their numbers are almost incredible, and to those whose business and habits do not permit them a searching scrutiny, the degrading and disgusting practices of these almost infants, in the school of vice, prostitution and rowdyism, would certainly be beyond belief… they never see the inside of a schoolroom; and so far as our excellent system of public education is concerned, and which may be truly said to be the foundation stone of our free institutions, is to them an entire nullity. Left in many instances to roam day and night wherever their inclination leads them, a large proportion of these juvenile vagrants are in the daily practice of pilfering wherever opportunity offers, and begging when they cannot steal.

I wasn't stealing cars at like, six. But I've always been bad.

Better a child should be ignorant of a thousand truths than have consecrated in its heart a single lie.

The mischief of children is seldom actuated by malice; that of grown-up people always is.

I really, really love children and I think probably among children is when I feel mostly berated. It's not like I feel like oh, there's some children here. I have to tone it down. I go nuts with children especially when I ain't got none. So when I'm round my mates' children, I jest them kids up first. I swear at them, I get more worked up, I say crazy stuff to them, fill their heads with nonsense and then I leave them.

children are not undeveloped versions of adult people: they are a different race of beings: they are children.

For years I've been interested in a fundamental question concerning what I call the psychology of evil: Why is it that good people do evil deeds? I've been interested in that question since I was a little kid. Growing up in the ghetto in the South Bronx, I had lots of friends who I thought were good kids, but for one reason or another they ended up in serious trouble. They went to jail, they took drugs, or they did terrible things to other people. My whole upbringing was focused on trying to understand what could have made them go wrong.

No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point of view.

A child of three cannot raise its chubby fist to its mouth to remove a piece of carpet which it is through eating, without being made the subject of a psychological seminar of child-welfare experts, and written up, along with five hundred other children of three who have put their hands to their mouths for the same reason.

Children are all criminally insane, and must be destroyed!

It is indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels

Children are wickeder than adults, they have no sense of restraint.

The crisis of children having children has been eclipsed by the greater crisis of children killing children.

Being a child is in itself a profession.

The dutifulness of children is the foundation of all virtues.

The child in us is always there, you know, and it's the best part of us, the winged part that travels farthest.

The discussion of the game of marbles seems to have led us into rather deep waters. But in the eyes of children the history of the game of marbles has quite as much importance as the history of religion or of forms of government. It Is a history, moreover, that is magnificently spontaneous; and it was therefore perhaps not entirely useless to seek to throw light on the child's judgment of moral value by a preliminary study of the social behaviour of children amongst themselves.

Be a child again. Flirt. Giggle. Dip your cookies in your milk. Take a nap. Say you're sorry if you hurt someone. Chase a butterfly. Be a child again.