Mignon McLaughlin Quotes

Children often have a much stronger concept of morality than adults.

Adults lie to themselves all the time about what is acceptable, but kids know what is right and wrong.

Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.

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.

So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.

Every child must master empathy-based ethics because the rules are changing; the less they apply the less learning them has positive impact

Children are very fair minded, they really are.

I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

It must be a good thing to be good or ivrybody wudden't be pretendin' he was.

Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality.

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

Children have almost an intuitive discernment between the maxims you bring forward for their use, and those by which you direct your own conduct.

If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

I thought children were pure and innocent, and that was inherently better.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions.

Over the last few years, I've been focusing on questions having to do with the self, and questions having to do with morality. I'm very interested in why we do good things, or bad things, and where moral judgments come from.

There is nothing more influential in a child's life than the moral power of quiet example. For children to take morality seriously they must see adults take morality seriously.

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

Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so.

No child asks to get born, so when they are here, they should be shielded from any possible horror.

If you ask anyone, what is morality based on? These are the two factors that always come out: One is reciprocity, … a sense of fairness, and the other one is empathy and compassion.

It is indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels

The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.

Yes, etiquette is hypocritical. Yes, it does inhibit children - if you're lucky. But the idea that it's elitist and irrelevant is like saying language is elitist and irrelevant.