Katharine Lee Bates Quotes

Children are the brightest treasures we bring forth into this world, but too large a percentage of the population continues to treat them as inconveniences and nuisances, when they're not treating them as possessions or toys.

It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you.

One of the most painful things in the Western States and Territories is the extinction of childhood. I have never seen any children - only debased imitations of men and women, cankered by greed and selfishness, and asserting and gaining complete independence of their parents at ten years old.

We do nothing for children between the ages of zero and five. And we seem to be quite happy to have children growing up in not just poverty, which wouldn't be so bad, but isolation, lack of people around them, lack of support, lack of ability to go out and play in the dirt.

It stands to reason that unloved and unwanted children are going to get into crime.

This statement of fact is an eloquent comment on the apathy with which many people regard the mental and physical health of the rising generation…A woman will lavish love and care, and attention on her pet cat or ‘prize’ poodle, and yet draw her skirts aside from the starving children in the gutter. The mew of the cat and the howl of the dog, to say nothing of the squeal of the ‘tortured rabbit’- that figment of anti-vivisectionist imagination- are far more potent to loosen the purse-strings of the sentimentalists than the wail of children.

Those who are not hard-hearted enough to murder themselves leave it to others, to parish nurses who leave the babies to starve.

I have spent a lot of time listening to people who are serving life sentences and getting to know them and the circumstances of their lives. I have never met anyone serving a long prison sentence who had anything close to what I could call a childhood; instead, the upbringings always - always - involve extreme situations of poverty and abuse.

What kind of society have we become when children in a great city cannot rely on mothers or fathers for a bowl of cereal in the morning and a brown bag with a sandwich and apple in it for lunch?

America, in all its institutions, whether it be the family or government, has forgotten and neglected its children.

If your parents ignored you, or if they are just not emotionally available, or if they yell a lot, that is a type of trauma.

They say that abandonment is a wound that never heals. I say only that an abandoned child never forgets.

If you don't show care and love for your children and leave the mothers to take care of all their needs, if they grow up, they will also not consider you.

My mother never breast fed me, she told me she only liked me as a friend.

My happiest memory of childhood was my first birthday in reform school. This teacher took an interest in me. In fact, he gave me the first birthday presents I ever got: a box of Cracker Jacks and a can of ABC shoe polish.

It's dangerous to be a child star, but it's dangerous to be a child in the ghetto, or to be a child at school being bullied.

If we are to save our children then we must become people they will look up to. Children need heroes now more than ever because the poor children of this nation live with monsters every day. Monsters deprive them of heat in the winter, they don't fix their sinks and toilets, they let garbage pile up in their hallways, they kick them out of their homes, they beat them, shoot them, stab them-sometimes to death-they rape their bodies and their minds. Sometimes they lurk under the stairs. They scuttle around in the dark; you hear them in the walls gnawing, squeaking, occasionally biting a little finger.

And if I could get the mayors, and the governors, and the president to look into the eyes of the five-year-olds of this nation, dressed in old raggedy clothes, whose zippers are broken but whose dreams are still alive, they would know what I know-that children need people to fight for them. To stand with them on the most dangerous streets, in the dirtiest hallways, in their darkest hours.

We perhaps protect our pets better than our children.

The capacity of children to become self-sufficient and successful adults is compromised not only by monetary poverty, but by poverty of experience, influence, and expectation

You don’t play around with the lives of children.

I saw all the moral decay you could, beginning at 2 years old. But I also got to see how the other half lived.

I didn't have much of a childhood, but that's O.K. I have a livelihood.

I had a very rocky, difficult, emotional childhood with my parents.

It's crazy how people just don't care sometimes about the kids they have.