Carl Hiaasen Quotes

Everything is secret. They [child welfare administrators] claim that is for the protection of the children. But it’s for the protection of their own negligence.

Why would I, in a million years, want to do anything even remotely having to do with child molestation on a children's show? See, I take having a kids' show real seriously. I think it's an enormous responsibility.

We're not going to have real security until we invest in our children.

I think those neighborhood signs that say 'slow children playing' are mean.

The child who ran weeping to you with a cut finger is now brought home, smiling gamely, with a broken collarbone and incredible contusions- 'it wasn't Jezebels fault, Dad.'

Do not have your child's hair cut by a real hairdresser in a real hairdressing salon. He is, at this point, far too short to be exposed to contempt.

I saw a sign that said, 'Watch for children.' I was like, 'That sounds like a fair trade - especially if they're crappy kids.'

If you the American citizen leave a child in a hot car and that child was harmed by that you will be charged with negligence even if your action was unintentional.

Although a firm swat could bring a recalcitrant child swiftly into line, the changes were usually external, lasting only as long as the swatter remained in view....Permanent transformation had to be internal....The habits of self discipline, as laborious and frustrating as they were to achieve, offered the only real possibility of keeping children safe from their own excesses as well as the omnipresent dangers of society.

You go back. You search for what made you happy when you were smaller. We are all grown up children, really... So one should go back and search for what was loved and found to be real.

This is a very serious matter, because it is our children who are the prize for this community, they are specifically targeting our children.

A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it.

I was a rebellious child, a rebellious lover, a rebellious couturière - a real devil.

Child pornography is taboo. There are really no such things as snuff films. That's a legend. But movies are like pieces of dreams, and we don't need to go into those dreams. Those dreams are beyond. Child pornography - it's horrible. Human suffering is a horrible thing in real life.

People are constantly telling me, whether they are friends who feel sorry for me, because I can't find a place to live, or real estate agents, "You can't afford an apartment the size you need with this many books. Why don't you just put some of your books in storage?" And I always say the same thing: "What if I told you I had four children? Would you say, 'You just can't afford to house four children. Why don't you just put two of them in storage?'" That's how I feel.

You can write when you're dyslexic, you just can't read it. But I started writing short stories as a child and I found the short story format a real nice one. I love short stories and I love short documentaries or short films of any kind.

Lord that she might be safe. She and my children.

This is the greatest lesson a child can learn. It is the greatest lesson anyone can learn. It has been the greatest lesson I have learned: if you persevere, stick w/it, work @ it, you have a real opportunity to achieve something. Sure, there will be storms along the way. And you might not reach your goal right away. But if you do your best and keep a true compass, you'll get there.

I guess on a base level that's one of the first parental instincts that you have with children in Australia is learn to swim. Not only learn to swim but learn to swim strong.

Little children can learn anything, just as they can learn a foreign language. The mind is so absorbent then. There ought to be a real program to educate teachers who want to teach grade school children about history.

The U.S. has more guns per capita and supplies more guns to the world than any other country. What would be a fistfight without guns turns into dead bodies with them. Families with guns in the house are more likely to shoot themselves accidentally than to shoot any intruder. Women abused by their partners have a five-fold increased risk of being killed when their partner owns a gun. Every three hours, at least one child is wounded or killed by gunfire.

By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.

I want something from Daddy that he is not able to give me. ... It is only that I long for Daddy's real love: not only as his child, but for me - Anne, myself.

We want the world to focus on children whose lives have been devastated by AIDS. The millions of children who are missing their parents; their childhood, their future but most importantly, they are missing YOU. Everyone can make a real difference. Your voice is needed in a global movement that can change their world.

Innately, children seem to have little true realistic anxiety. They will run along the brink of water, climb on the window sill, play with sharp objects and with fire, in short, do everything that is bound to damage them and to worry those in charge of them, that is wholly the result of education; for they cannot be allowed to make the instructive experiences themselves.