Quotes by Philosophers - Page 231

Dating a wo/man with a kid is the new adoption.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most parents are not really ‘supportive’ because they want their kid(s) to succeed; they ‘support’ their kid(s) as an attempt to avoid appearing to have bred a failure, or, failures … in the eyes of their peers and/or neighbours.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Dating a wo/man with a child is adoption … without the paperwork.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When coming to making kids: Size doesn’t count, it’s sperm count that counts.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We first become salesmen as children in the confession booths of our parents.
Criss Jami
God speaks of his children shining best in ways that only he can provide. The heavens lift one as a golden child while the flesh lowers one to a child with gold.
Criss Jami
It would be better to have no school at all than the schools we now have. Encouraged, instead of frightened, children could learn several languages before reaching age of four, at that age engaging in the invention of their own languages. Play'd be play instead of being, as now, release of repressed anger.
John Cage
Why is it that children, taught the names of the months and the fact that there are twelve of them, don't ask why the ninth is called the seventh (September), the tenth called the eight (October), the eleventh called the ninth (November), the twelfth called the tenth (December)?
John Cage
Grandchildren are their grandparents' toys.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A culture of vultures steeped and born of violence shall choke on the blood of its offspring.
T.F. Hodge
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sorting out what's good and bad is the province of ethics. It is also what keeps priests, pundits, and parents busy. Unfortunately, what keeps children and philosophers busy is asking the priests, pundits and parents, "Why?
Thomas Cathcart
If you want kids, choose your girlfriend like your future child has the deciding vote.
Stefan Molyneux
The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons, but children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.
G.K. Chesterton
Children are the most reasonable about discipline. When they tell you not to do something, it's always because they know why.
Criss Jami
Education -- whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people, or even oneself -- consists in creating motives. To show what is beneficial, what is obligatory, what is good -- that is the task of education. Education concerns itself with the motives for effective action. For no action is ever carried out in the absence of motives capable of supplying the indispensable amount of energy for its execution.
Simone Weil
Can you be a little baby? The baby howls all day, yet its throat never gets hoarse - harmony at its height! The baby makes fists all day, yet its fingers never get cramped - virtue is all it holds to. The baby stares all day without blinking its eyes - it has no preferences in the world of externals.
Zhuangzi
In infancy, our blood is strong and our energy is plentiful. Mind and body, thought and action are one. Everything we do is in harmony with the natural order. The infant is not affected by things that happen around him. Virtue and ethics cannot restrain his will. Naked and free of social conventions, he follows the natural path of the heart.
Liezi
We have to HIDE from each other because we think that we are the only ones BROKEN. We think we're the only ones whose original selves we ground up and smashed under the jack-booted heel of cultural lies and superstition, patriotism, war lust, war hunger, and a denial of AGGRESSION AGAINST CHILDREN THAT IS THE FOUNDATION OF CULTURE. Culture is everything that is NOT TRUE. If it's true, it's called 'math' or 'science' or 'facts'. Culture is the Stockholm syndrome we have with the historical lies that are convenient to the rules. We love the lies, because we don't think we can be loved if we don't.
Stefan Molyneux
He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly – yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, it is like a series of shocks to freeze his motor, to undercut the power of his consciousness. “Don’t ask so many questions, children should be seen and not heard!” – “Who are you to think? It’s so, because I say so!” – “Don’t argue, obey!” – “Don’t try to understand, believe!” – “Don’t struggle, compromise!” – “Your heart is more important than your mind!” – “Who are you to know? Your parents know best!” – “Who are you to know? The bureaucrats know best!” – “Who are you to object? All values are relative!” – “Who are you to want to escape a thug’s bullet? That’s only a personal prejudice!”Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival – yet that was what they did to their children.
Ayn Rand
Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.
Jean Baudrillard
A child has an ingrained fancy for coal, not for the gross materialistic reason that it builds up fires by which we cook and are warmed, but for the infinitely nobler and more abstract reason that it blacks his fingers.
G.K. Chesterton
A child develops best when, like a young plant, he is left undisturbed in the same soil. Too much travel, too much variety of impressions, are not good for the young, and cause them as they grow up to become incapable of enduring fruitful monotony.
Bertrand Russell
It is childish to eat primarily or only to please your tongue.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Because most of us recognize that we will fight to protect our children, we cannot be absolute pacifists.
Nel Noddings
Disciplining a child is easier than disciplining a grown person, and forgiving a child’s insolence is easier than forgiving a grown person's impudence.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Children think around corners.
Jacob M. Held
Generally it appears the case that, when faced with all life's problems, the baby, he wants to cry about everything, the child wants to question everything, the teenager wants to rebel against everything, the young adult wants to solve everything, the middle-aged adult wants to protect everything, and the elder wants to accept everything.
Criss Jami
Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.
Albert Camus
Both men and women who have children as a rule regulate their lives largely with reference to them, and children cause perfectly ordinary men and women to act unselfishly in certain ways, of which perhaps life insurance is the most definite and measurable.
Bertrand Russell
Truly, nothing more resembles God's eyes than the eyes of a child; they see the world for the first time, and create it. Before this, the world is chaos. All creatures - animals, trees, men, stones; everything:forms, colors, voices, smells, lightning flashes - flow unexplained in front of the child's eyes (no, not in front of them, inside them), and he cannot fasten them down, cannot establish order. The child's world is made not of clay, to last, but of clouds. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
The affection of parents makes infants feel safe in this dangerous world, and gives them boldness in experimentation and in exploration of their environments.
Bertrand Russell
The heterosexual emotions of young children can find a natural, wholesome and innocent outlet with other children; in this form they are a part of play, and like all play, they afford a preparation for adult activities.
Bertrand Russell
Rebuke without love is abuse. But, a love that would never rebuke? I dare to admit that that, too, would be a kind of abuse.
Criss Jami
To bear children into this world is like carrying wood to a burning house.
Peter Wessel Zapffe
Motherhood has taught me that love is the best gift you can ever give to your children.
Gift Gugu Mona
It's amazing to be a woman because even without children of your own, you can still be an excellent mother.
Gift Gugu Mona
We need to protect and care for our children because when society fails to protect its children, there will be no one else to learn from.
Gift Gugu Mona
Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event
Gaston Bachelard
The perception of other people and the intersubjective world is problematic only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. He has no awares of himself or of others as private subjectives, nor does he suspect that all of us, himself included, are limited to one certain point of view of the world. That is why he subjects neither his thoughts, in which he believes as they present themselves, to any sort of criticism. He has no knowledge of points of view. For him men are empty heads turned towards one single, self-evident world where everything takes place, even dreams, which are, he thinks, in his room, and even thinking, since it is not distinct from words.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.
Guy Debord
The move towards the extension of personhood to children is already underway, and is utterly, completely and totally unstoppable!
Stefan Molyneux
It’s the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don’t say a word, they don’t hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly.
Jean-Paul Sartre
A rebel adult often seems like a glorious savior, whereas a rebel child often seems like a little devil.
Criss Jami
No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.
Plato
When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.
Bertrand Russell
A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A wise man is a student though he is a teacher.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The right thing done at the wrong timewill not bring about the right results.
Matshona Dhliwayo
One who has great wisdom has great power.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The greater a man’s folly, the greater his enslavement. The wiser a man is, the greater his freedom.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Wisdom is a sharp chisel to carve out your future.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In a group of intelligent men expect only one to be wise.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The shrewd may gain temporarily, but the wise gain permanently.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You cannot force a dry well to yield water.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The roots of the strongest tree grow deep.
Matshona Dhliwayo
He who illumines one has begun illumining the world.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To be wise for one day is better than to be intelligent for a hundred.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The greater your wisdom, the shorter the distance to success.
Matshona Dhliwayo