Anna Letitia Barbauld Quotes

If what you preach and what you do are inconsistent, your children will spot hypocrisy faster than anybody and do the opposite.

Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality.

It is no use to preach to [children] if you do not act decently yourself.

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

There's a great deal of difference between thinking reflectively about moral issues and achieving higher standards of ethical behavior.

If parents instill a sense of civic-mindedness - and there is no better way to do that than by example - their children will probably follow.

The child becomes largely what it is taught; hence we must watch what we teach it, and how we live before it.

When you undermine faith in a system, your child may not necessarily see the difference between the politician who is no longer respected and the policeman, the teacher, the parent.

It seems obvious that moral stages must primarily be the products of the child's interaction with others rather than the direct unfolding of biological or neurological structures.

What's wrong with our children? Adults telling children to be honest while lying and cheating. Adults telling children to not be violent while marketing and glorifying violence... I believe that adult hypocrisy is the biggest problem children face in America.

The moral faculties are generally esteemed, and with justice, as of higher value than the intellectual powers. But we should always bear in mind that the activity of the mind in vividly recalling past impressions is one of the fundamental though secondary bases of conscience. This fact affords the strongest argument for educating and stimulating in all possible ways the intellectual faculties of every human being.

You can't teach children to be good. The best you can do for your child is to live a good life yourself. What a parent knows and believes, the child will lean on.

The child is a realist in every domain of thought, and it is therefore natural that in the moral sphere he should lay more stress on the external, tangible element than on the hidden motive.

We fail our children if we say, 'Don't do as I do, but do as I say'.

I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?

If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.

A fig-tree looking on a fig-tree becometh fruitful," says the Arabian proverb. And so it is with children; their first great instructor is example.

The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil.

Children lack morality, but they also lack fake morality.

Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.

Fine blunderers in ethics we are, so generally conveying to children the basic impression that pleasantness must be wrong, and right doing unpleasant!

A good example brings about so much good, but hypocrisy brings about so much evil.

Ethics, as has been well said, are the finest fruits of humanity, but they are not its roots

We must become the people we want our children to be.