George Bernard Shaw Quotes About Children
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The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it soundslike.It isimpossible foran Englishmanto openhis mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.
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Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.
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But a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it does not matter which as far as one's knowledge of her is concerned: the broomstick is there and the sun is there; and whether the child is beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning.
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The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.
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Affection between adults - if they are really adult in mind and not merely grown up children - and creatures so relatively selfish and cruel as children necessarily are without knowing it or meaning it, cannot be called natural.
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Hollywood keeps before its child audiences a string of glorified young heroes, everyone of whom is an unhesitating and violent Anarchist. His one answer to everything that annoys him or disparages his country or his parents or his young lady or his personal code of manly conduct is to give the offender a "sock" in the jaw.... My observation leads me to believe that it is not the virtuous people who are good at socking jaws.
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There may be some doubt as to who are the best people to have charge of children, but there can be no doubt that parents are the worst.
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A book is like a child: it is easier to bring it into the world than to control it when it is launched there.
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Being a mother means that your heart is no longer yours; it wanders wherever your children do
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Let wife and child perish, and lay bricks for your last crust, rather than part with an iota of your [copy]rights.
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That is the injustice of a woman's lot. A woman has to bring up her children; and that means to restrain them, to deny them things they want, to set them tasks, to punish them when they do wrong, to do all the unpleasant things. And then the father, who has nothing to do but pet them and spoil them, comes in when all her work is done and steals their affection from her.
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Always strive to find out what to do by thinking, without asking anybody. If you continually do this, you will soon act like a grown-up woman. For want of doing this, a very great number of grown-up people act like children.
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The one point on which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the existing law is the saddling of the right to a child with the obligation to become the servant of a man.
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I loathe the mess of mean superstitions and misunderstood prophecies which is still rammed down the throats of children under the name of Christianity.
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Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
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The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's character.
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Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.
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If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot: because they have never seen one anywhere else.
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Every child has a right to its own bent. . . . It has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a right to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it were its own father.
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A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
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What right has any human being to talk of bringing up a child? You do not bring up a tree or a plant. It brings itself up. You have to give it a fair chance by tilling the soil.
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I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
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If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.
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Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.
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I like flowers, I also like children, but I do not chop their heads off and keep them in bowls of water around the house.
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Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.
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If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.
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The best bought-up children are those who have seen thier parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the first duty of a parent.
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Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.
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I must have been an insufferable child; all children are.
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