Lawrence Kohlberg Quotes

Children, even infants, are capable of sympathy. But only after adolescence are we capable of compassion.

Piaget is correct in assuming a culturally universal age development of a sense of justice, involving progressive concern for the needs and feelings of others and elaborated conceptions of reciprocity and equality.

Insofar as each of us has been through the moral stages and has held the viewpoint of each stage, we should be able to put ourselves in the internal framework of a given stage.

If poverty is the mother of all crimes, lack of intelligence is the father.

I have an IQ of about 160, I taught science for about fifteen years.

I think the depth, what children can handle and what they're interested in, is much deeper than I think what people assume. I think it's why sometimes we make things too simple for them.

I think you're a good person or a todd by the age of eight.

There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.

The kids who speak well, are articulate and intelligent, are all readers.

It is crazy. It's our first kid, and all of a sudden, she identifies letters as what they are, and you go, 'This kid is a genius - she's obviously some sort of savant!'

Americans have always had an ambivalent attitude toward intelligence. When they feel threatened, they want a lot of it, and when they don't, they regard the whole thing as somewhat immoral.

Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities.

The truth is, no matter how trying they become, babies two and under don't have the ability to make moral choices, so they can't be bad. That category only exists in the adult mind.

I think that kids have a greater capacity for processing things than we give them credit for.

If there were some recipe that would make all of our children really sane and civic-minded and hugely intelligent, I think we'd probably all do it. But I don't know that there is a recipe for creating that.

How we learn has nothing to do with how brilliant we are.

Severely deprived, neglectful or abusive environments must have negative effects on a great many aspects of development, including intelligence.

Intelligence is not a moral category.

The average citizen in this county has more intelligence and sense in his little finger than the editor of 'The New York Times' has in his whole head.

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.

Intelligence is a separate gift, for the benefit of students, so that they may think of themselves as intellectual and not very intelligent, or intelligent and not very intellectual. One hopes, of course, that they try to bring the two virtues, the two elements, into their lives at the same time.

How we become moral and understand good and bad, and how we overcome our impulse towards violence, is all really important to me, as a person.

The fact that human conscience remains partially infantile throughout life is the core of human tragedy.

It is intelligence that brings order, not discipline.

The Bible improved my ethical IQ. I started to act like a good person. I tried not to gossip, and lie, and covet, and just by pretending I was a good person, I think I actually became a little bit better of a person. I'm not Gandhi or Angelina Jolie, but it was a baby step.