Childhood Conditioning Quotes

Please clean your plate dear, the Lord above can see ya. Don't you know people are starving in Korea.

Feminism isn't about hating men. It's about challenging the absurd gender distinctions that boys and girls learn from childhood and carry into their adult lives.

Attachment is misery, but from the very beginning the child is taught for attachment. The mother will say to the child, "Love me; I am your mother." The father will say, "Love me; I am your father" - as if someone is a father or a mother so he becomes automatically lovable.

But perhaps that's why we take snaps...to provide false evidence to underpin the false claim that we were happy. Because the thought that we weren't happy at least for some time during our lives is unbearable. Adults order children to smile in the photos, involve them in the lie, so we smile, we feign happiness.

When she was too young to resist, or even to understand, I turned my daughter into a lifelong, rabid Yankees fan.

The message about sex and relationships that she had gotten as a child... was confused, contradictory. Sex was for men, and marriage, like lifeboats, was for women and children.

Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.

As a kid, I wanted to be a boy because I equated that with strength. There's a problem with that. It's only growing into my own womanhood that I realize how warped that is that I was attributing strength to male qualities.

A couple of years ago, my wife, Erica, and I were getting our daughter ready for school and an image of President [Barack] Obama was on one of the morning shows. And I said, oh, look, Carina, there's the president. You can be president one day. And she said, right away, that's for boys. And so right away I said, oh, no, you can be a doctor. You can be a lawyer. You can be anything you want. You can be president.

People seem to think that they can't come up with ideas, and they're wrong. They can and they do, but they just think of it as daydreaming, or wasting time. Kids get told not to make things up, and in my case, nobody told me long enough, or it just didn't stick.

..we are trained as children to get good grades, get a good job, get a good spouse, get children, get ahead. In all this getting we get something else: anxiety and depression.

I think a lot of people, especially women, feel like to be whole, you need to find part of yourself in another person - probably because of the fables we're told as kids.

I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.

As children we were bombarded by competing answers. Church says one thing, school another. Now as adults it's no surprise that if we discuss the nature of it all, we generally spout some combination of the two, depending on our individual inclination and mood.

Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear.

Do you think if it was the fairy tale about a man who lived inside of a whale and it was religion that Jack built a beanstalk today, you would know the difference? Why do you believe in one fairy tale and not the other? Just because adults told you it was true and they scared you into believing it, at pain of death, at pain of burning in hell.

Men are taught from childhood that they are weak and sinners. Teach them that they are all glorious children of immortality, even those who are the weakest in manifestation.

I am much more powerful today than the old programs and mind viruses that I absorbed in my childhood.

My mother thinks I am the best. And I was raised to always believe what my mother tells me.

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them...

Many parents make the mistake of giving love and approval to their children only when their children do something that they want them to do.

As long as parents and teachers in general shall fall under the established rule, it is clear that politics and modes of government will educate and infect us all. They poison our minds, before we can resist, or so much as suspect their malignity. Like the barbarous directors of the Eastern seraglios, they deprive us of our vitality, and fit us for their despicable employment from the cradle.

When you grow up with constantly being told or made to feel that you are less than, then it's very difficult to grow into an adult and to shake that off.

In preindustrial cultures leisure is scarcely a burden or a "problem" because it is built into the ritual and ground plan of life for which people are conditioned in childhood; often they possess a relatively timeless attitude toward events.

I am so superstitious that I think even discussing this subject is dangerous and will probably bring me terrible luck. Having been raised a Catholic, superstition becomes almost part of your DNA. The challenge is to slowly rid yourself of these little delusions.