Stefan Molyneux Quotes

We are still barely conscious of how harmful it is to treat children in a degrading manner. Treating them with respect and recognizing the consequences of their being humiliated are by no means intellectual matters; otherwise, their importance would long since have been generally recognized.

Certainly, words can be as abusive as any blow. . . . When a three-year-old yells, "You're so stupid! What a dummy!" it doesn't carry the same weight as when a mother yells those words to a child. . . . Even if you don't physically abuse young children, you can still drive them nuts with your words.

When I was a kid, my mother's parenting style teetered between benign neglect and intense bouts of violence.

We ought to regard the breaking of a child's spirit as a sin against humanity.

Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?

There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped.

Our children are the only people on whom we can safely take revenge for what was done to us.

Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.

Re raising kids: Love, without discipline, isn't.

For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood.

One improvement I have learned from my childhood experience with my father: I do not threaten punishment in the morning. That was awful. Late into the night I would lie awake tossing and wondering what he was going to do to me. Usually he did nothing. A quiet, impressive 'talking to' was all I got.

We produce destructive people by the way we are treating them in childhood.

I believe the things that happened to me as a child scarred me terribly, and I wish somebody would have helped me with some of the things that happened.

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

As a father now, I wouldn't do what my dad did, because it left me feeling emotionally unstable as a kid. But he didn't do the things he did out of selfishness or malice.

A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.

There's no way I'm going to put this kid in the movies, because of the rejection. It's so hard as an adult, so why set her up to feel that bad as a child?

Screaming at children over their grades, especially to the point of the child's tears, is child abuse, pure and simple. It's not funny and it's not good parenting. It is a crushing, scarring, disastrous experience for the child. It isn't the least bit funny.

Thank you for your very detailed letter regarding Scientology. We haven't yet found a way to attack these jackals who feed on children and young adults who are too emotionally weak to stand by themselves when they reach the age of consent. It's too bad there isn't a 20th Century Charles Dickens to write about the terrible destruction of these 20th Century Fagins who make themselves rich while they destroy the psyche of so many.

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

If you are in a toxic relationship, that poisons you everywhere else in your life.

Violence is violence. Trauma is trauma. And we are taught to downplay it, even think about it as child's play.

The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.