John Hamilton Quotes

There may be illegitimate parents but there are no illegitimate children.

There are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents.

In vain are Schools, Accademics and universities instituted, if loose Principles and licentious habits are impressed upon Children in their earliest years…How is it possible that Children can have any just Sense of the sacred Obligations of Morality and Religion if, from their earliest Infancy, they learn that their Mothers live in habitual Infidelity to their fathers, and their fathers in as constant Infidelity to their Mothers.

If parents would have their children blessed at church and school, let them beware they give their children no corrupt examples at home by any carelessness, profaneness or ungodliness. Otherwise, parents will do them more harm at home than both pastors and schoolmasters can do them good abroad.

Every big leaguer and his wife should teach their children to pray, God bless Mommy, God bless Daddy, and God bless Babe Ruth.

Dear parents, teach your children to pray. Pray with them.

At some point, some of these people are going to wake up to find that the great secular assault they see on their children was, in fact, a bogeyman created to hide their own bad parenting. If they can't convince their own kids of the appropriateness of their religion and values, then the religion, the values, or the convincing, must not have been very good.

God commanded, saying, Honor thy father and mother: and, He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death

I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the organized masses. It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race.

Rules rooting in sweeping moral judgment don’t generally work in family law for the same reason that they don’t work for families. Kids love and need the parents they have, not necessarily the parents we love.

Children learn a lot from what their parents say. But they learn a lot more from what their parents do.

[The apparent extensive sinning] is not more evils in this kind, nor nothing near so many by proportion, as in other places; but they are here more discovered and seen, and made publick by due search, inquisition, and due punishment; for the churches looke narrowly to their members, and the magistrates over all, more strictly than in other places.

I don’t want the Government to teach my kids’ family values.

If any think it severe that the child should be punished for the inequity of the father, let them understand that the sacraments appertain only to the faithful and to their seed.

A parent who is high is unavailable to attend to the needs of a child.

We don’t want a village to raise a child. We want a family.

If you bungle raising your children, nothing else matters in life.

How few are there, who, having a family, children, and relations, do not spend more on the maintenance and education of these than on their own pleasures

A child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is a fresh will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce ... he is their own creative contribution to creation.

They [Mormons] are, we believe, some kind-hearted people who think that what they are pleased to call the principles of American society militate against any interference with polygamy, because it is a religious custom. And this argument is supposed to be strengthened by the fact that the Mormon marriages are purely voluntary, and therefore concern only the men and women who make them. There is no similarity, it is said, between polygamy and such religious customs as those of the Thugs, which are enforced very much against the will of those chiefly interested. But this argument wholly overlooks a vital point in the case. Marriages do not merely concern the parents. They concern the offspring of the marriage, and it is for this very reason that the state interferes and enforces monogamy. The state is bound to protect the interests of its future citizens; and to treat polygamous marriages as if they concerned no one but those who voluntarily make the contract is to ignore a plain duty. All civilized modern countries consider that, in the interest of their future citizens, it is necessary to break up organized concubinage; they cannot in the nature of things treat it as a question of religion.

Sadly, there is no law against being an idiotic parent.

… the idea that children have rights they can claim against their parents, rather than obligations, seems to strike at the heart of the most valued social institution of all, the family.

The state doesn’t own your children. The parents do.

Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, … family is the most important. And we are called to recognize and honor how critical every father is to that foundation.

My husband is a good father, concerned about his children.