Terry Pratchett Quotes

Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. and the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.

What interests me is what children go through while growing up.

I think that unless you grew up in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, you're sheltered.

Education, like neurosis, begins at home.

The first six years of a child's life, it is like a tape recorder is on. Everything it sees, smells, touches, experiences in any way, whatever it hears, is being downloaded into the brain before the consciousness of the child is even made apparent.

I think much of what you learn as a kid comes before age seven.

The child is not an empty being who owes whatever he knows to us who have filled him up with it. No, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was.

Kids grasp what you teach them, from crawling to walking, for everything they look up to their parents.

I wish my parents had raised me in Manhattan because I think it's the greatest thing you can do for a kid is to raise them in New York City. I can see this with my own children.

Children are forced to live very rapidly in order to live at all. They are given only a few years in which to learn hundreds of thousands of things about life and the planet and themselves.

Reading a story should be a fabulous, wonderful thing. The most important thing that parents can do for kids is to read with them and to let their kids see them reading books for their own pleasure.

For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on.

Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius.

Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable, inasmuch as he has the fountain of reason in him not yet regulated.

The character of a child is formed largely during the first twelve years of his life. He spends 16 times as many waking hours in the home as in the school, and 126 times as many hours in the home as in the church. Each child is, to a great degree, what he is because of the ever-constant influence of home environment and the careful or neglectful training of parents. Home is the best place for the child to learn self-control, to learn that he must submerge himself for the good of another. It is the best place in which to develop obedience, which nature and society will later demand.

Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.

Farm animals are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined and, despite having been bred as domestic slaves, they are individual beings in their own right. As such, they deserve our respect. And our help. Who will plead for them if we are silent? Thousands of people who say they ‘love’ animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been treated so with little respect and kindness just to make more meat.

When I was twenty-one, a friend gave me a book called Diet for a New America by John Robbins, which exposed the brutal practices of American factory farms. That, coupled with a lecture from Leonardo DiCaprio (when he was nineteen and I was twenty-one) about how such animals are kept and processed, made me lose my desire for factory farm pork and beef right there.

Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on earth.

That best academy, a mother's knee.

I want to get back to education. When I was in college I paid attention to child psychology portions of our psychology classes. I watch other people work with babies. And I saw the baby as developing like a computer and it intrigued me in my life. I wanted to do that.

The question isn't so much "Are you parenting the right way?" as it is: "Are you the adult that you want your child to grow up to be?"

If you grow up in a home where actions don't lead to predictable consequences, you don't develop strategies to control your impulses.

Inside me, I think that an animal goes through a lot of pain in the whole cycle of death in the slaughterhouse; just living to be killed. That whole situation is really messed up for animals, growing up in those little cooped-up pens. I just don't think its worth eating that animal. I think animals should be free. There's so much other food out there that doesn't have to involve you in that cycle of pain and death.