Tom Noddy Quotes

At 20 years old, I was better at playing with toys than I was as a kid.

Childhood is all about innocence. Being constantly surrounded by cameras and shutterbugs, makes children lose that innocence. It's terrifying and worrying, to say the least.

For me it is important that children be children. My parents felt exactly the same about me.

A child should be a child for as long as possible.

I would sing around the house, and I would always play on things just because instruments were always there, but I didn't show any genius as a child. I wasn't a prodigy or anything like that.

It's a mistake to try to use play to deliberately foster developmental progress.

As a father, my job is to protect, and keep things away from interfering with her imagination because that's her voice.

Children are our future and if we use them in battle, we are destroying the future. We must reclaim them, every one of them, one at a time.

My ideal goal is to "mature" into childhood. That would be genuine maturity.

We do live in an unsafe world. That's the truth. I'm dealing with that now, with my seven-year-old. He's grappling with the fact that the world is unsafe, and that there are people who do harmful things. I don't think there's anything wrong with presenting that idea. We can't lie to our children and pretend that the world is perfect, and everybody's happy, and everybody's out there to do good. It's just part of a bigger conversation.

Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.

CHILDHOOD: The rapidly shrinking interval between infancy and first arrest on a drug or weapons charge.

All kids draw some kind of cartoon characters. They just grow out of them, and I didn't

It is among children only, and as children only, that you will find medicine for your healing and true wisdom for your teaching.

The child does not begin to fall until she becomes seriously interested in walking, until she actually begins walking. Falling is thus more an indication of learning than a sign of failure.

I went through the usual stages: imp, rascal, scalawag, whippersnapper. And, of course, after that it's just a small step to full-blown sociopath.

It is only grown-ups who want children to be children; children themselves always want to be real people.

Teach the child to respect that which is not respectable and you teach the child the first requirement of slavery: submission to unjust authority. Children are persons. They are small persons whose perfect souls have not yet been ground through the meat grinder of slavery.

Children are the brightest treasures we bring forth into this world, but too large a percentage of the population continues to treat them as inconveniences and nuisances, when they're not treating them as possessions or toys.

Childhood has it's own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.

[Children are] like talking animals. Their consciousness is so different from ours that they constitute a different species. They don't have to be particularly interesting children; just the fact that they are children is sufficient. They don't know what anything is, so they have to make it up. No matter how dull they are, they still have to figure things out for themselves.

I'd say that kids working on sets, even if it's Bambi, need to be allowed to be kids, even if they're working, not become little adults - that to me can be distorting to kids as an experience.

Eleven would have been the best time. Eleven is just about the best age for almost everything.

Most kids don't believe in fairy tales very long. Once they hit six or seven they put away "Cinderella" and her shoe fetish, "The Three Little Pigs" with their violation of building codes, "Miss Muffet" and her well‐shaped tuffet—all forgotten or discounted.And maybe that's the way it has to be. To survive in the world, you have to give up the fantasies, the make‐believe.