Grace Abbott Quotes

No adult can bear a child’s burden or grow up in his stead.

And whatever people might say about the time having come when young people must arrange their future for themselves, she could not believe it any more than she could believe that loaded pistols could ever be the best toys for five-year-old children.

Being a child is in itself a profession.

All children, except one, grow up.

You've got to keep the child alive; you can't create without it.

Children are the future, because mankind is moving more and more towards infancy.

Younger and younger, our children are seeing the sippy-cup as half empty.

I'm a guy who is married to an actress, who has three children, and lives in Tribeca. Where do you draw the line on what I am allowed to discuss?

When one has children one has no privacy. They take it for granted that what is yours is theirs, personal things and the secrets of your heart, as well as possessions.

A poor child who receives high-quality early childhood development is 40 percent less likely to need special education, twice as likely to attend college and dramatically more likely to survive childhood.

Children surviving childhood is my obsessive theme and my life's concern.

If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget. Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition, they're suffering from childhood.

For no phase of life, whether public or private, whether in business or in the home, whether one is working on what concerns oneself alone or dealing with another, can be without its moral duty; on the discharge of such duties depends all that is morally right, and on their neglect all that is morally wrong in life.

In all times and in all places--in Constantinople, northwestern Zambia, Victorian England, Sparta, Arabia, . . . medieval France,Babylonia, . . . Carthage, Mahenjo-Daro, Patagonia, Kyushu, . . . Dresden--the time span between childhood and adulthood, however fleeting or prolonged, has been associated with the acquisition of virtue as it is differently defined in each society. A child may be good and morally obedient, but only in the process of arriving at womanhood or manhood does a human being become capable of virtue--that is, the qualities of mind and body that realize society's ideals.

There are children born to be children, and others who must mark time till they can take their natural places as adults.

In fact, a child is not even considered a human being.

Why did children seem to be so often spontaneous, joy-filled and concentrated while adults seemed controlled, anxiety-filled and diffused? It was the Goddam sense of having a self.

For most people, political activity is a secondary activity - that is to say, they have something else to do beside attending to these arrangements. But the activity is one which every member of the group who is not a child nor a lunatic has some part and some responsibility.

I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares.

Do not feed children on maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature... Do not terrify them in early life with the fear of an after-world. Never was a child made more noble and good by the fear of a hell.

To take nature and natural play away from children may be tantamount to withholding oxygen.

I'm not writing to make anyone's children feel safe.

I wasn't used to children and they were getting on my nerves. Worse, it appeared that I was a child, too. I hadn't known that before; I thought I was just short.

Welcome to adulthood." Cob said. "Every child finds a day when the realize that adults can be weak and wrong just like everyone else. After that day, you are an adult. Like it or not.