John Taylor Gatto Quotes

Is it important to have a crew behind me? No, it's important to have me behind them. That's how I look at it. You can't just roll with a situation like you're depending on somebody to help you. You're supposed to help the situation, whatever the situation is that you're in.

We must wake ourselves up! Or somebody else will take our place, and bear our cross, and thereby rob us of our crown.

If you don't like how things are, change it! You're not a tree.

You can be like a thermometer, just reflecting the world around you. Or you can be a thermostat, one of those people who sets the temperature.

I would never try to motivate anyone to follow me. I would motivate him to follow certain principles.

If I can be a leader, I will.

My role isn't just receiving.

It's one of the things, certainly for me, anyway: I'm learning to take a bigger role in the things that I'm associated with.

It's a mistake not to give people a chance to learn to depend on themselves while they are young.

I am not a passenger in anything I do. I am and always will be a leader.

In the end, it's not what you do for your children but what you've taught them to do for themselves.

Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that and walk away. But that's hard

I have a bumper sticker that Bowen created that says Regardless of my kids grades, they have an 'A' in my book'. Without play the child that still lives in all of us will always be incomplete. And not only physically, but creatively, intellectually, and spiritually as well.

People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.

A post-9/11, modern take being Batman training people to be the heroes they know they can be on their own.

Women, we tend to become whole people by venturing outside of the home, learning to aspire, to achieve, to deal with conflict - all these qualities that are wrongly called masculine.

Perhaps we have been misguided into taking too much responsibility from our children, leaving them too little room for discovery

I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan't make the mistakes I've made. When I look back upon the girl I was I hate myself. But I never had a chance. I'm going to bring up my daughter so that she's free and can stand on her own feet. I´m not going to bring a child into the world, and love her, and bring her up, just so that some man may want to sleep with her so much that he's willing to provide her with board and lodging for the rest of her life.

It's time to break our ties with anything in us that would rather complain about its situation than go to work to change it.

Accepting responsibility for the actions of others contributes to your own greatness.

Anyone who waits for someone else to make a change automatically becomes the follower.

Self-help is the best help

There's nothing better than being able to give your children wings so they can soar and fly in the direction they want to go in.

You should help a man to take up a burden, but you should not help him put it back down.

The average American is just like the child in the family. You give him some responsibility and he is going to amount to something. He is going to do something. If, on the other hand, you make him completely dependent and pamper him and cater to him too much, you are going to make him soft, spoiled and eventually a very weak individual.