c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I tell Ki that I'm learning about words and stories to help our family. He says he's protecting our family with his knife. Who is right? Which is best, protecting with words or with his knife?"  She is instant, certain, and solemn, and there is no misunderstanding her meaning. "Fight ignorance with words. Fight evil with your knife. Tell you husband, Ki, that he is right.
— Camron Wright, The Rent Collector
She was a nice person, she really was, until someone ignorant decided to force that ignorance in her face, and then she just couldn't hold back.
— Lora Leigh, Dangerous Pleasure
If a faithful account was rendered of man's ideas upon the Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word Gods has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed; that he applies this term when the spring of natural, the source of known causes ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing it to his gods; thus giving a vague definition to an unknown cause, at which either his idleness, or his limited knowledge, obliges him to stop. When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon, the novelty or the extent of which strikes him with wonder, but of which his ignorance precludes him from unravelling the true cause, or which he believes the natural powers with which he is acquainted are inadequate to bring forth; does he, in fact, do any thing more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe?
— Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach, System of Nature
People talk about history and things like slavery, genocide, and religious persecution as horrors that happened in the past because we were ignorant. But nothing's changed. We still hate what we don't understand.
— J. Matthew Nespoli
I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which prove to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them.
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
stupidity: a process, not a state. A human being takes in far more information than he or she can put out. “Stupidity” is a process or strategy by which a human, in response to social denigration of the information she or he puts out, commits him or herself to taking in no more information than she or he can put out. (Not to be confused with ignorance, or lack of data.) Since such a situation is impossible to achieve because of the nature of mind/perception itself in its relation to the functioning body, a continuing downward spiral of functionality and/or informative dissemination results,’ and he understood why! ‘The process, however, can be reversed,’ the voice continued, ‘at any time.
— Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Knowledge is Power, Power provides Information; Information leads to Education, Education breeds Wisdom; Wisdom is Liberation. People are not liberated because of lack of knowledge.
— Israelmore Ayivor
Misunderstanding arising from ignorance breeds fear, and fear remains the greatest enemy of peace.
— Lester B. Pearson
A straight face is an ignorant man’s attempt to appear knowledgeable.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Human mind & news Media work on the same principle: Unsatisfied with the past
—  worried about future
I know no such disease of the soul, but ignorance.
— Ben Johnson
Ah, I see. You don't know much about us and the unknown equals the barbaric, the primitive. Although it is you lot who are ignorant.
— Andrew Ashling, The Invisible Chains - Part 2: Bonds of Fear
Is it not ignorance that we share? A lie takes two. The truth we find alone.
— Anthony Marais, The Cure
How much man likes or hates a person or a thing is dependent on how much he knows or does not know about the person or the thing.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
After you've seen behind the facade of a stage set you can't take the play seriously any more. You can't go backwards and regain your ignorance
—  you have to move forward.
The world demands I make good choices on no information, and then blames my maidenhood for my mistakes, as if my maidenhood were responsible for my ignorance. Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion
On the other hand, when you grow up you will discover that some of the people in this world never passed beyond the stage of the cave-man.
— Hendrik Willem van Loon, The Story of Mankind
As she turned left to the gateway, it occurred to her that swimming was only one of a very large number of things she had no idea what to do. Peter had been right to object to her ignorance. "It's not that I'm lazy," she explained to Waif as they arrived in what seemed to be stables, "or stupid. I've just not bothered to look round the edges of Mother's way of doing things, you see.
— Diana Wynne Jones, House of Many Ways
It should be noted, as with so many legends and popularly accepted truths created out of political motivation: There, in fact, is no evidence that the hundreds of murders historically attributed to the werewolves of Gévaudan were actually caused by wolves. As with all witchhunts, the endless battle against ignorance requires one to always keep an open mind and sharp wits when considering such rumors - especially the rumors we choose to enjoy.
— Zeena Schreck, Beatdom #11: The Nature Issue
Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance.
— William Paley (paraphrase), A View of the Evidences of Christianity: In Three Parts
Without love everything can be nothing. Does that make me want to love? No. For me, Ignorance is still better than martyrdom.
— Ira N. Barin
Teach the ignorant as much as you can. Society is to blame for not giving free education: it is responsible for the darkness it creates. the soul in darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who caused the darkness
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
It seems sometimes that people take a deliberately myopic and fill their eyes with things seen microscopically in order not to see macrosopically.
— Marilyn Frye, Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory
And, in fine, of false sciences I thought I knew the worth sufficiently to escape being deceived by the professions of an alchemist, the predictions of an astrologer, the impostures of a magician, or by the artifices and boasting of any of those who profess to know things of which they are ignorant.
— René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy
Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power.
— Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
Look around you, he says, waving a hand at the surrounding tables. Not a one of them even has an inkling of the things that are possible in this world, and what's worse is that none of them would listen if you attempted to enlighten them. They want to believe that magic is nothing but clever deception, because to think it real would keep them up at night, afraid of their own existence.
— Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
The ants are bad" The Bear"the ants?"Tahir"Do not be fooled. They look very small, so harm you don't think of then at all. Then years. Then one day you wake up, and your home has fallen down." Osman.
— Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams
The tram can run over you only if you are on the tram way! The darkness can run over you only if you are on the ignorance way!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
No herd is more herd than the mass of ignorant people!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Ignore ignorance? You might as well withhold medicine from a very sick patient. Not only will the patient get worse, the disease will spread.
— Stifyn Emrys
It is strange the way the ignorant and inexperienced so often and so undeservedly succeed when the informed and the experienced fail. All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
— Mark Twain
Anyone who is ignorant, even a lord and prince, can and should be counted as one of the mob.
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
I can fight with a real problem. But I cannot solve the ignorance. I cannot solve the illusion of your mind.
— Ravindra Shukla, A Maverick Heart: Between Love and Life
I find few things more personally enriching than exploring the parameters of my own ignorance.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
It is what we think we know that keeps us from learning.
— Chester I. Barnard
I do not understand a man who does not want to know all that he can know. Why would anyone choose ignorance? If he chooses ignorance because he is lay, then he is a fool, for the ignorant are put to hard labor digging and hauling stones for masters who tell them they need no knowledge. If a man must labor from dawn to dusk to avoid a blow on the head and to earn a cup of grain, he has no time to gain knowledge and remains a slave to masters. I think, therefore, that is is a worthy vocation to free a man enough that he can learn who he is and what he is capable of, where he came from and what philosophies steer his life.
— Kate Horsley
The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out: 'Swine! Swine! Swine!', and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen.
— George Orwell, 1984
Place a weapon in the hands ofGreed, hatred, especially of ignoranceYou've created innocent deathsThat wasn't neccasary
— R.K. Cowles, Death On a Bicycle
God did not mean us to be ignorant. He left us this marvelous universe to decipher and understand.
— James Targett, The Immersion Book of Steampunk
Ignorance is a virus. Once it starts spreading, it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information--misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?
— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Most people do not actually know how to think for themselves, and unfortunately that prevents them from even knowing it.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
I've nothing against eye make-up and lipstick. But the fact is that we’re actually living on a planet in space. For me that’s an extraordinary thought. It’s mind-boggling just to think about the existence of space at all. But there are girls who can’t see the universe for eye liner.
— Jostein Gaarder, The Orange Girl
It’s ignorant to think you know everything about a person. There’s many different sides to everybodys personality and there’s just different colours to a personality.
— Kelly Clarkson
My brother taught me that there is a difference between being a hater and being ignorant. Being a hater implies you understand the principle in question, while being ignorant implies that you do not understand the principle in question, and therefore, have no right to critique.
— Lionel Suggs
Is everyone who lives in Ignorance like you?" asked Milo."Much worse," he said longingly. "But I don't live here. I'm from a place very far away called Context.
— Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
From time to time ponder whether you are unconsciously saying:'Truth is what I happen to be thinking at this moment.
— Idries Shah, Reflections
Ignorance is of a peculiar nature; once dispelled, it is impossible to reestablish it. It is not originally a thing of itself, but is only the absence of knowledge; and though man may be kept ignorant, he cannot be made ignorant.
— Thomas Paine
I didn't know that there was a thin line between ignorance and arrogance.
— Faraaz Kazi, Truly, Madly, Deeply
It was clear to me that it wouldn't matter what I did - they would never truly appreciate me or learn what I had to offer. They were far beyond fickle - they were insensible, like kittens,predatory little things, distracted by the first bit of string or shiny bauble that rolled across the floor, and nothing I could ever say or do could possibly make any kind of dent in their willful ignorance.
— Jeff Lindsay, Dexter Is Delicious
If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of man serve its own interests.
— Baron D. Holbach
I am very poor - for a know nothing, understand nothing. It is not a calamitous condition until it is realized.
— Rafael Sabatini
...the villagers had decided that 'practical' meant 'extremely magical and full of interesting objects' and had officially subtitled themselves, Winesap: A Pracktical Towne.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland - For a Little While
We are all ignorant once and only when someone or something that knows more than us, comes in.
— Emmanuel Aghado
...But that is a method for cowards; the brave man goes out into the hall, comes back with a stick, and says firmly, "You have just deliberately and cruelly exposed my ignorance before this company; I shall, therefore, beat you soundly with this stick in the presence of them all."This you then do to him or he to you, mutatis mutandis, ceteris paribus; and that is all I have to say on Ignorance.
— Hilaire Belloc
Ignorance is not linear, it's exponential.
— Spuds Crawford
Ignorance is an underrated virtue, my lord.
— Andrew Levkoff, A Mixture of Madness
I don’t care how smart you are. You’ll never understand how little you really know until you’ve had a woman.
— Andrew Levkoff, The Other Alexander
Evolution is a part of nature. The world has strayed away from God, and now interprets its conception for the benefit of blissful ignorance.
— Lionel Suggs
What a refreshing mind you have, young man. There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?
— Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
... in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights", the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
The devil lives in our mistakes, the lord lives in our rights. Who lives in our ignorance, and who wins after all?
— Maya Angelou
Perception is blind to the knowledge that you cannot understand.
— Lionel Suggs
Chance" is just a word expressing ignorance
— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Ignorance is one of the best defense available. Distraction is a remedy.
— Maulik Doshi
The reason God exists is because ignorance is bliss, and God is true bliss.
— Lionel Suggs
The burden of knowledge is lighter than the joy of ignorance.
— Ogwo David Emenike
When I was foolish, I detested sagacity. I ate the fruits of my foolishness and ignorance. I thank God because I was once foolish. It was from my foolishness that I learnt and understood the true savour of sagacity.
— Ogwo David Emenike
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
— James     Baldwin
Your children are not your children.They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you.And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.You may give them your love but not your thoughts,For they have their own thoughts.You may house their bodies but not their souls,For thir souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.The archer sees the make upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness.For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable.
— Kahlil Gibran
What it's like to be a parent: It's one of the hardest things you'll ever do but in exchange it teaches you the meaning of unconditional love.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Wedding
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Pigs in Heaven
Being a mother is an attitude, not a biological relation.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit—Will Travel
Perhaps it takes courage to raise children..
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.
— Benjamin Franklin
(24/7) once you sign on to be a mother, that's the only shift they offer.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
It's impossible to protect your kids against disappointment in life.
— Nicholas Sparks, Message in a Bottle
No one is ever quite ready; everyone is always caught off guard. Parenthood chooses you. And you open your eyes, look at what you've got, say "Oh, my gosh," and recognize that of all the balls there ever were, this is the one you should not drop. It's not a question of choice.
— Marisa de los Santos, Love Walked In
...the love, respect, and confidence of my children was the sweetest reward I could receive for my efforts to be the woman I would have them copy.
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.
— Bette Davis
If you are a parent, open doors to unknown directions to the child so he can explore. Don't make him afraid of the unknown,give him support. 
— Osho
Everything depends on upbringing. 
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
How is it possible that our parents lied to us?""Lets see: Santa, the Tooth Fairy,the Easter bunny,um, God. You're the prettiest kid in school. This wont hurt a bit. Your face will freeze like that...""Everythings going to be alright.
— Brian K. Vaughan, Runaways, Vol. 1: Pride and Joy
Parenthood...It's about guiding the next generation, and forgiving the last.
— Peter Krause
Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Homeland and Other Stories
We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We've come to the point where it's irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven't yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it.
— Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet
Independence isn't doing your own thing
—  it's doing the right thing on your own.
We change our behavior when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing. Consequences give us the pain that motivates us to change.
— Henry Cloud
What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude.
— Brené Brown
I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.Brian Fitzgerald, talking about his children.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
We spend the first 12 months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next 12 months teaching them to sit down and shut up.
— Phyllis Diller
I want my children to have all the things I couldn’t afford. Then I want to move in with them.
— Phyllis Diller
I used to believe my father about everything but then I had children myself & now I see how much stuff you make up just to keep yourself from going crazy.
— Brian Andreas, Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas
That's the news from Lake Woebegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
— Garrison Keillor
While I pressed the tissue to my face, Beck said, “Can I tell you something? There are a lot of empty boxes in your head, Sam.”I looked at him, quizzical. Again, it was a strange enough concept to hold my attention.“There are a lot of empty boxes in there, and you can put things in them.” Beck handed me another tissue for the other side of my face.My trust of Beck at that point was not yet complete; I remember thinking that he was making a very bad joke that I wasn’t getting. My voice sounded wary, even to me. “What kinds of things?”“Sad things,” Beck said. “Do you have a lot of sad things in your head?”“No,” I said.Beck sucked in his lower lip and released it slowly. “Well, I do.”This was shocking. I didn’t ask a question, but I tilted toward him.“And these things would make me cry,” Beck continued. “They used to make me cry all day long.”I remembered thinking this was probably a lie. I could not imagine Beck crying. He was a rock. Even then, his fingers braced against the floor, he looked poised, sure, immutable.“You don’t believe me? Ask Ulrik. He had to deal with it,” Beck said. “And so you know what I did with those sad things? I put them in boxes. I put the sad things in the boxes in my head, and I closed them up and I put tape on them and I stacked them up in the corner and threw a blanket over them.”“Brain tape?” I suggested, with a little smirk. I was eight, after all.Beck smiled, a weird private smile that, at the time, I didn’t understand. Now I knew it was relief at eliciting a joke from me, no matter how pitiful the joke was. “Yes, brain tape. And a brain blanket over the top. Now I don’t have to look at those sad things anymore. I could open those boxes sometime, I guess, if I wanted to, but mostly I just leave them sealed up.”“How did you use the brain tape?”“You have to imagine it. Imagine putting those sad things in the boxes and imagine taping it up with the brain tape. And imagine pushing them into the side of your brain, where you won’t trip over them when you’re thinking normally, and then toss a blanket over the top. Do you have sad things, Sam?”I could see the dusty corner of my brain where the boxes sat. They were all wardrobe boxes, because those were the most interesting sort of boxes — tall enough to make houses with — and there were rolls and rolls of brain tape stacked on top. There were razors lying beside them, waiting to cut the boxes and me back open.“Mom,” I whispered.I wasn’t looking at Beck, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw him swallow.“What else?” he asked, barely loud enough for me to hear. “The water,” I said. I closed my eyes. I could see it, right there, and I had to force out the next word. “My …” My fingers were on my scars.Beck reached out a hand toward my shoulder, hesitant. When I didn’t move away, he put an arm around my back and I leaned against his chest, feeling small and eight and broken.“Me,” I said.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Forever
Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves. 
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
There is no single effort more radical in its potential for saving the world than a transformation of the way we raise our children.
— Marianne Williamson
It's so awful, attacking your child. It's the worse thing I know, to shout loudly at this 50 lb. being with his huge trusting brown eyes. It's like bitch-slapping E.T.
— Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
I didn’t know how I could live with that knowledge, without it eating me up, without it poisoning every happy memory I had of growing up. Without it ruining everything Beck and I had.I didn’t understand how someone could be both God and the devil. How the same person could destroy you and save you. When everything I was, good and bad, was knotted with threads of his making, how was I supposed to know whether to love or hate him?
— Maggie Stiefvater, Forever
It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows
— Erma Bombeck
When a child hits a child, we call it aggression.When a child hits an adult, we call it hostility.When an adult hits an adult, we call it assault.When an adult hits a child, we call it discipline.
— Haim G. Ginott
Even if i'm setting myself up for failure, I think it's worth trying to be a mother who delights in who her children are, in their knock-knock jokes and earnest questions. A mother who spends less time obseessing about what will happen, or what has happened, and more time reveling in what is. A mother who doesn't fret over failings and slights, who realizes her worries and anxieties are just thoughts, the continuous chattering and judgement of a too busy mind. A mother who doesn't worry so much about being bad or good but just recognizes that she's both, and neither. A mother who does her best, and for whom that is good enough, even if, in the end, her best turns out to be, simply, not bad. 
— Ayelet Waldman, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace
You try as a parent. You love beyond reason. You fight beyond endurance. You hope beyond despair.You never think, until the very last moment, that it still might not be enough.
— Lisa Gardner, Live to Tell
We're [parents]) always bluffing, pretending we know best, when most of the time we're just praying we won't screw up too badly.
— Jodi Picoult, House Rules
Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
— P.J. O'Rourke
I would have made a terrible parent. The first time my child didn't do what I wanted, I'd kill him.
— Katharine Hepburn
The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
— Oscar Wilde
Let me say for now that we knew once the Creation was broken, true fathering would be much more lacking than mothering. Don't misunderstand me, both are needed- but an emphasis on fathering is necessary because of the enormity of its absence
— William Paul Young, The Shack
You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.
— Franklin P. Adams
A daughter,' Rowley scooped up the child and held her high. The baby blinked from sleep and crowed with him. 'Any fool can have a son,' he said. 'It takes a man to conceive a daughter.
— Ariana Franklin, The Serpent's Tale
The best parenting advice I ever got was from a labor nurse who told me the following:1. After your baby gets here, the dog will just be a dog.2. The terrible twos last through age three.3. Never ask your child an open-ended question, such as "Do you want to go to bed now?" You won't want to hear the answer, believe me. "Do you want me to carry you upstairs, or do you want to walk upstairs to go to bed?" That way, you get the outcome you want and they feel empowered.
— Jodi Picoult
Would a minute have mattered? No, probably not, although his young son appeared to have a very accurate internal clock. Possibly even 2 minutes would be okay. Three minutes, even. You could go to five minutes, perhaps. But that was just it. If you could go for five minutes, then you'd go to ten, then half an hour, a couple of hours...and not see your son all evening. So that was that. Six o'clock, prompt. Every day. Read to young Sam. No excuses. He'd promised himself that. No excuses. No excuses at all. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses.
— Terry Pratchett, Thud!
Who's crazy: people who trust other people, or people who don't?
— Lenore Skenazy
Parenthood is the opiate of the masses.
— Chuck Palahniuk
Say “no” only when it really matters. Wear a bright red shirt with bright orange shorts? Sure. Put water in the toy tea set? Okay. Sleep with your head at the foot of the bed? Fine. Samuel Johnson said, “All severity that does not tend to increase good, or prevent evil, is idle.
— Gretchen Rubin
Anybody out there who is a parent, if your kids want to paint their bedrooms,as a favor to me, let them do it. It'll be OK.
— Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
We are all, I suppose, beholden to our parents - the question is, how much?
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
This was our language: half-truths, obvious lies, accusations neither one of us would ever make. It was a system eery bit as complicated as Morse code or the dancing of bees. Don't ask, don't tell, stay civil.
— Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Every Other Day
I'll show up at every classroom open house and teacher conference,' she said, now in a voice that was almost frightening in its intensity. 'I'll bake brownies. My child will have new clothes. Her shoes will fit. She'll get her shots, and she'll get her braces. We'll start a college fund next week. I'll tell her I love her every damn day.'If that wasn't a great plan for being a good mother, I couldn't imagine what a better one could be.
— Charlaine Harris, Dead and Gone
The real questions for parents should be: "Are you engaged? Are you paying attention?" If so, plan to make lots of mistakes and bad decisions. Imperfect parenting moments turn into gifts as our children watch us try to figure out what went wrong and how we can do better next time. The mandate is not to be perfect and raise happy children. Perfection doesn't exist, and I've found what makes children happy doesn't always prepare them to be courageous, engaged adults.
— Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
Leave your pride, ego, and narcissism somewhere else. Reactions from those parts of you will reinforce your children's most primitive fears.
— Henry Cloud
... People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds, people who possess strong feelings, even people with great minds and a strong personality, rarely come out of good little boys and girls.
— Lev S. Vygotsky
If we never have headaches through rebuking our children, we shall have plenty of heartaches when they grow up.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them.
— Frank Clark
We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the ris- ing generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of par- ents to children than by those of children to parents. Who has not been the embarrassed guest at family meals where the father or mother treated their grown-up offspring with an incivility which, offered to any other young people, would simply have termi- nated the acquaintance? Dogmatic assertions on mat- ters which the children understand and their elders don't, ruthless interruptions, flat contradictions, ridicule of things the young take seriously some- times of their religion insulting references to their friends, all provide an easy answer to the question "Why are they always out? Why do they like every house better than their home?" Who does not prefer civility to barbarism?
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
No occupation in this world is more trying to soul and body than the care of young children. What patience and wisdom, skill and unlimited love it calls for. God gave the work to mothers and furnished them for it, and they cannot shirk it and be guiltless.
— Isabella MacDonald Alden
If your boundary training consists only of words, you are wasting your breath. But if you 'do' boundaries with your kids, they internalize the experiences, remember them, digest them, and make them part of how they see reality.
— Henry Cloud
If you want to be treated like a mother, act like one.
— Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses
Intensive mothering is the ultimate female Olympics: We are all in powerful competition with each other, in constant danger of being trumped by the mom down the street, or in the magazine we're reading. The competition isn't just over who's a good mother--it's over who's the best. We compete with each other; we compete with ourselves. The best mothers always put their kids' needs before their own, period. The best mothers are the main caregivers. For the best mothers, their kids are the center of the universe. The best mothers always smile. They always understand. They are never tired. They never lose their temper. They never say, "Go to the neighbor's house and play while Mommy has a beer." Their love for their children is boundless, unflagging, flawless, total. Mothers today cannot just respond to their kids' needs, they must predict them--and with the telepathic accuracy of Houdini. They must memorize verbatim the books of all the child-care experts and know which approaches are developmentally appropriate at different ages. They are supposed to treat their two-year-olds with "respect." If mothers screw up and fail to do this on any given day, they should apologize to their kids, because any misstep leads to permanent psychological and/or physical damage. Anyone who questions whether this is the best and the necessary way to raise kids is an insensitive, ignorant brute. This is just common sense, right?
— Susan J. Douglas
If you want to love a parent you have to understand the incredible investment he or she has in you. If you are a parent, and you want to be loved, you have to deserve it.
— Jodi Picoult, Songs of the Humpback Whale
Mothers who know do less. They permit less of what will not bear good fruit eternally. They allow less media in their homes, less distraction, less activity that draws their children away from their home. Mothers who know are willing to live on less and consume less of the world’s goods in order to spend more time with their children—more time eating together, more time working together, more time reading together, more time talking, laughing, singing, and exemplifying. These mothers choose carefully and do not try to choose it all.
— Julie B. Beck
And have your mother put my head on a stake? Do you have any notion what that would do to my handsome good looks?
— Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Princess Ben
As someone very sagely said during the parricide trials of the Menendez Brothers: anytime your kids kill you, you are at least partly to blame.
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
Do not let the endless succession of small things crowd great ideals out of sight and out of mind.
— Charlotte M. Mason
Don't go overboard in praising required behavior: 'We have only done our duty' (Luke 17:10). But do go overboard when your child confesses the truth, repents honestly, takes chances, and loves openly. Praise the developing character in your child as it emerges in active, loving, responsible behavior.
— Henry Cloud
My father liked me, when I wasna being an idiot. And he loved me, too -- enough to beat the daylights out of me when I was being an idiot. Jamie Fraser
— Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
What do we say to a guest who forgets her umbrella? Do we run after her and say "What is the matter with you? Every time you come to visit you forget something. If it's not one thing it's another. Why can't you be like your sister? When she comes to visit, she knows how to behave. You're forty-four years old! Will you never learn? I'm not a slave to pick up after you! I bet you'd forget your head if it weren't attached to your shoulders." That's not what we say to a guest. We say "Here's your umbrella, Alice," without adding "scatterbrain." Parents need to learn to respond to their children as they do to guests.
— Haim G. Ginott, Between Parent and Child: The Bestselling Classic That Revolutionized Parent-Child Communication
Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.
— Phyllis Diller
No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
I gave you life. You’re wasting it.
— Stephenie Meyer
He thought about the story his daughter was living and the role she was playing inside that story. He realized he hadn't provided a better role for his daughter. He hadn't mapped out a story for his family. And so his daughter had chosen another story, a story in which she was wanted, even if she was only being used. In the absence of a family story, she'd chosen a story in which there was risk and adventure, rebellion and independence.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
There are no moments more painful for a parent than those in which you contemplate your child's perfect innocence of some imminent pain, misfortune, or sorrow. That innocence (like every kind of innocence children have) is rooted in their trust of you, one that you will shortly be obliged to betray; whether it is fair or not, whether you can help it or not, you are always the ultimate guarantor or destroyer of that innocence.
— Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs
I want my girls to see their relationship with me as a place of refuge, a place they can retreat to for honesty, unconditional love, and support. I want to teach them and have them trust me, not fear me. I want to preserve the gentle souls that I see in them." -Liz. M.
— Hilary Flower, Adventures in Gentle Discipline: A Parent-to-Parent Guide
Your children need your presence more than your presents.
— Jesse Jackson
You are the reason why he exists on this earth. You don't have the right to abandon him just because he's inconvenient or has trouble in school.
— Michael Crichton, Next
A baby's cry is precisely as serious as it sounds.
— Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept: In Search Of Happiness Lost
Society tried to teach me that children are by nature selfish, out-of-control, and demanding, that their goal is power and that they are always trying to see how much they can get away with, that you can't let children manipulate you or become too dependant, and that disobedience equals disrespect. As a mother, I have come to believe strongly that my child's primary goals are having his needs met, feeling connected to others, and feeling self-worth. His misbehavior is an attempt to get a need met or to feel significance and connection, done in an appropriate way.... my job as a parent is to help my child identify and meet those needs in appropriate ways." - Lisa S.
— Hilary Flower, Adventures in Gentle Discipline: A Parent-to-Parent Guide
My kid, her life. I want for her what she wants for herself.
— Laura Castoro
The degree to which the psychiatric community is complicit with abusive parents in drugging non-compliant children is a war crime across the generations, and there will be a Nuremberg at some point in the future
— Stefan Molyneux
[My dad] didn't do much apart from the traditional winning of bread. He didn't take me to get my hair cut or my teeth cleaned; he didn't make the appointments. He didn't shop for my clothes. He didn't make my breakfast, lunch, or dinner. My mom did all of those things, and nobody ever told her when she did them that it made her a good mother.
— Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs
Misbehavior and punishment are not opposites that cancel each other - on the contrary they breed and reinforce each other.
— Haim G. Ginott
I hope someday she meets just the right man and has babies - a whole passel of babies, more than I could have - so she understands how it kills me now that she won't let me hug her when she's in obvious distress. (The Life You've Imagined)
— Kristina Riggle
Training moments occur when both parents and children do their jobs. The parent's job is to make the rule. The child's job is to break the rule. The parent then corrects and disciplines. The child breaks the rule again, and the parent manages the consequences and empathy that then turn the rule into reality and internal structure for the child.
— Henry Cloud
Ask your child for information in a gentle, nonjudgmental way, with specific, clear questions. Instead of “How was your day?” try “What did you do in math class today?” Instead of “Do you like your teacher?” ask “What do you like about your teacher?” Or “What do you not like so much?” Let her take her time to answer. Try to avoid asking, in the overly bright voice of parents everywhere, “Did you have fun in school today?!” She’ll sense how important it is that the answer be yes.
— Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
So much is asked of parents, and so little is given.
— Virginia Satir
If our children were to grow up truthful they much be taught by those who had a regard for truth; and not just a casual regard, a delicate regard. On this point we were adamant.
— Amy Carmichael, Gold Cord
The guys who fear becoming fathers don't understand that fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man. The end product of child raising is not the child, but the parent.
— Frank Pittman
The French believe that kids feel confident when they're able to do things for themselves, and do those things well. After children have learned to talk, adults don't praise them for saying just anything. They praise them for saying interesting things, and for speaking well.
— Pamela Druckerman, Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting
We tend to take whatever’s worked in our particular set of circumstances (big family, small family, AP, Ezzo, home school, public school) and project that upon everyone else in the world as the ideal.
— Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood
I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won't tell them that people are starving in China or anything like that because it won't change the fact that they are upset.
— Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
we can learn to trust our maternal selves and to have faith in the innate goodness and purity of our children - even when we feel overwhelmed and the kids are pushing all our buttons. we can support one another....we can be understanding of each other and easier on ourselves.
— Katrina Kenison, Mitten Strings for God: Reflections  for Mothers in a Hurry
The raising of a child is the building of a cathedral. You can't cut corners.
— Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King
To gain the spiritual ascendancy over ourselves, and the influences with which we are surrounded, through a rigid course of self-discipline, is our first consideration, it is our first labor, before we can pave the way for our children to grow up without sin unto salvation.
— Brigham Young
I walked a block on rubbery knees, feeling the way I did the time a van clipped my bike and sent me reeling into a line of parked cars. Ella had dropped her cigarette and jumped on the fallen bike, screaming at the top of her lungs as she sped after the car. Bleeding in three places, I watched her go, glad she knew I'd rather have retribution than comfort.
— Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood
It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.
— Joyce Maynard
Much of life, fatherhood included, is the story of knowledge acquired too late: if only I’d known then what I know now, how much smarter, abler, stronger, I would have been. But nothing really prepares you for kids, for the swells of emotion that roll through your chest like the rumble of boulders tumbling downhill, nor for the all-enveloping labor of it, the sheer mulish endurance you need for the six or seven hundred discrete tasks that have to be done each and every day. Such a small person! Not much bigger than a loaf of bread at first, yet it takes so much to keep the whole enterprise going. Logistics, skills, materiel; the only way we really learn is by figuring it out as we go along, and even then it changes on us every day, so we’re always improvising, which is a fancy way of saying that we’re doing things we technically don’t know how to do.
— Ben Fountain
Being a parent is dirty and scary and beautiful and hard and miraculous and exhausting and thankless and joyful and frustrating all at once. It’s everything. (Confessions of a Scary Mommy, Gallery Books 2012).
— Jill Smokler, Confessions of a Scary Mommy: An Honest and Irreverent Look at Motherhood: The Good, The Bad, and the Scary
The reality is that most of us communicate the same way that we grew up. That communication style becomes our normal way of dealing with issues, our blueprint for communication. It’s what we know and pass on to our own children. We either become our childhood or we make a conscious choice to change it.
— Kristen Crockett, The Gift of Past Relationships
It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.
— Anne Lamott, Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son
Most of the time, it felt like my father and I were completely different species. Possibly literally, depending on the day and whether or not I actually qualified as human at the time.
— Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Every Other Day
Remember, you are not managing an inconvenience; You are raising a human being.
— Kittie Frantz
If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle. And if you wanted to change things, you might have to tear down both and start over.
— John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School
what I want you to be - I don't mean physically but morally: you are very well physically - is a firm fellow, a fine firm fellow, with a will of your own, with resolution. with determination. with strength of character that is not to be influenced except on good reason by anybody, or by anything. That's what I want you to be. That's what your father, & your mother might both have been
— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Oh fer Christ's bloody sake Martha I didna' raise ye to be well regarded. To be liked. Any puny weak-waisted slut can be liked. I raised ye to be reckoned with.
— Kathleen Kent, The Wolves of Andover
If a child sees something in a parent that the child aspires to, he or she will copy that parent and be content. If a children feel that a parent is living a life that shows compassion and understanding, patience and love, that child will not have to reach a stage of rebellion against that parent. Why rebel against someone who has listened to you and wants to help you fufill your dreams? A parent who has proven time and again that growth and happiness of his or her children is priority number one does not have to worry about where these children are heading in life. They will be sensitive and productive members of society for as long as they live.
— Alice Ozma, The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared