Previous Quotes of the Month for 2014
January
"The law of love could be best understood and learned through little children."
- Mahatma Gandhi
February
"We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought."
- Bertrand Russell
March
"Once you've been launched into parenthood, you'll need all your best skills, self-control, good judgment and patience. But at the same time there is nothing like the thrill and exhilaration that come from watching that bright, cheerful, inquisitive, creative, eccentric and even goofy child you have raised flourish and shine. That's what keeps you going, and what, in the end, makes it all worthwhile."
- Lawrence Balter
April
"School kids don't know the world is a million times bigger than school's version of it."
- Sandra Dodd
May
"Children cannot bounce off the walls if we take away the walls."
- Erin Kenny
June
"I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free."
- John Gatto
July
"Children who are respected learn respect. Children who are cared for learn to care for those weaker than themselves. Children who are loved for what they are cannot learn intolerance. In an environment such as this, they will develop their own ideals, which can be nothing other than humane, since they grew out of the experience of love."
- Alice Miller
August
"There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children."
- Nelson Mandela
September
"We learn to do something by doing it. There is no other way."
- John Holt
October
On living with chimpanzees:
"I learned the importance of contact, affection and play. Reassurance. And the importance of distracting rather than punishing when the infant is too small to understand, and then gradually teaching rules. That was the great thing about being out in the wild, he could spill his food - it didn't matter because it was the forest floor. I see so many parents upset when the child spills his milk and wants to make patterns with it on the table. He's not doing something wrong, it's important investigation and exploration."
- Jane Goodall,
from an interview on Mommy Greenest
November
"Creativity is intelligence having fun."
- Albert Einstein
More Quotes of the MonthDecember
"I'm always amazed when adults say that children 'just did that to get attention'. Naturally children who need attention will do all kinds of things to get it. Why not just give it to them?"
- Lawrence J. Cohen,
Playful Parenting