Michael Sandel Quotes

There's nothing unique about me as a parent. I am a parent. My kids are kids. We do the best we can do.

Individual wishes are driving the possible emergence of eugenics, not the state, because people want children for whom they can be ambitious.

Renegade scientists and totalitarian loonies are not the folks most likely to abuse genetic engineering. You and I are--not because we are bad but because we want to do good. In a world dominated by competition, parents understandably want to give their kids every advantage. ... The most likely way for eugenics to enter into our lives is through the front door as nervous parents ... will fall over one another to be first to give Junior a better set of genes.

I have five children. There were four boys. The fifth, I got weak, and a girl came.

The other effect that I worry about is the effect on the parent, that the moral teaching of humility and of the limits to our control that parenthood teaches- - that that will be lost and that we will begin to think of children more as consumer goods than as gifts that we can't fully control and for which we aren't fully responsible.

Don't be a pal to your son. Be his father. What child needs a 40-year-old for a friend?

Whether or not you have children yourself, you are a parent to the next generation. If we can only stop thinking of children as individual property and think of them as the next generation, then we can realize we all have a role to play.

You’re not supposed to dislike your own child. You were supposed to like them no matter what, even if they were not what you wanted.

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.

Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.

We wondered why when a child laughed, he belonged to Daddy, and when he had a sagging diaper that smelled like a landfill, 'He wants his mother.'

You can't cheat kids. If you cheat them when they're children they'll make you pay when they're sixteen or seventeen by revolting against you or hating you or all those so-called teenage problems. I think that's finally when they're old enough to stand up to you and say, 'What a hypocrite you've been all this time. You've never given me what I really wanted, which is you.

The child’s parents are not his makers but his guardians.

Are parents always more ambitious for their children than they are for themselves?

Fathers and mothers are too absorbed in business and housekeeping to study their children, and cherish that sweet and natural confidence which is a child's surest safeguard, and a parent's subtlest power.

Ashton jumped in and said, 'I want you to know that I don't take coming into childrens lives lightly'. That was within the first couple of weeks of our relationship, before he had met the girls. they are my priority and I've always be sensitive to their feelings, but as the parent you can't allow your children to dictate what's right for you.

I expect that [trying to do the best] of my players today and of my kids. My wife says I shouldn't expect that of my children, but I don't think that's asking too much.

A lot of mothers will do anything for their children, except let them be themselves.

When a child enters the world through you, it alters everything on a psychic, psychological and purely practical level.

Kids and violent TV, violent TV and violence, violence and kids. The only people missing from this discussion are the parents. Where are we? Gone. Abdicated.

You bring up your children to be self-reliant and independent and they double-cross you and become self-reliant and independent.

The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we're talking about motherhood we're always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care.

Isn't it interesting how men 'leave' their families, but women 'abandon' their children?

We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents.

I'm not saying to be happy you must be married. Nor am I saying that to be happy you need children. I'm saying that if you opt for children - be you man or woman - you have to take care of them.