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 . . . PAINTING see: "ART" see "ENTERTAINMENT, HOBBIES, & LEISURE ACTIVITIES" for other related links Buy old masters. They fetch a better price than old mistresses. --Lord Beaverbrook (18791964) Canadian-born British newspaper proprietor and Conservative politician. A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. (Opinion of abstract art.) --Al Capp (19091979) American cartoonist. In "National Observer" [1 July 1963]. [Of his portrait, painted by Graham Sutherland:] I look as if I was having a difficult stool. --Winston Churchill (18741965) British Conservative statesman and Prime Minister [19401945, 19511955]. Quoted in _Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters_, ed Rupert Hart-Davis [1978], letter of 20 November 1955. The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot. --Salvadore Dali (19041989) Spanish painter. Preface to Pierre Cabanne _Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp_ [1968]. ^^ Henri Matisse (18691954) French painter. Matisse's painting _Le Bateau_ hung upside down in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for forty-seven days before anyone noticed [October 18 December 4, 1961.] In that period 116,000 people visited the gallery. _Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes_ edited by Clifton Fadiman and Andrι Bernard [2000] ^^ I hate flowers. I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move. --Georgia O'Keeffe (18871986) American artist. _New York Herald Tribune_ [18 April 1954] [Explaining why he still painted when his hands were twisted with arthritis:] The pain passes, but the beauty remains. --Pierre Auguste Renoir (18411919) French painter. I cannot convince myself that a painting is good unless it is popular. If the public dislikes one of my Saturday Evening Post convers, I can't help disliking it myself. --Norman Rockwell (18941978) American painter and illustrator. [On his commission to paint murals for the Four Seasons restaurant:] I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who eats in that room. --Mark Rothko [Marcus Rothkowitz] (19031970) Russian-born American painter. Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend. --John Singer Sargent (18561925) American painter. Quoted in Evan Esar _The Dictionary of Humorous Quotations_ [1949]. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. --Tom Stoppard [Tomas Straussler] (1937 ) Czech-born British playwright. I cannot help it that my pictures do not sell. Nevertheless the time will come when people will see that they are worth more than the price of the paint. --Vincent van Gogh (18531890) Dutch painter. Letter to his brother Theo [20 October 1888.] ----- limn [LIM], transitive verb: 1. To depict by drawing or painting. 2. To portray in words; to describe. Ex.: In telling these people's stories Mr. Butler draws upon the same gifts of empathy and insight, the same ability to limn an entire life in a couple of pages. --Michiko Kakutani, "Earthlings May Endanger Your Peaceful Rationality", New York Times, March 10, 2000 rococo [roh-kuh-KOH], adjective: 1. Ornate or florid in speech, writing, or general style. 2. Pertaining to a style of painting developed simultaneously with the rococo in architecture and decoration, characterized chiefly by smallness of scale, delicacy of color, freedom of brushwork, and the selection of playful subjects as thematic material. noun: 1. A style of architecture and decoration, originating in France about 1720, evolved from Baroque types and distinguished by its elegant refinement in using different materials for a delicate overall effect and by its ornament of shellwork, foliage, etc.  ;void(0)) PAKISTAN . . see "PLACES" for related links [Pakistan is] the sort of place to send your mother-in-law for a month, all expenses paid. --Ian Botham (1955 ) British cricketer and cricket commentator. (In a BBC Radio interview [17 March 1984] The following month he was fined by the Test and County Cricket Board for making the remark.) ;void(0)) PARACHUTE JUMPING . . see "ENTERTAINMENT, HOBBIES, & LEISURE ACTIVITIES" for related links I watched him strap on his harness and helmet, climb into the cockpit and, minutes later, a black dot falls off the wing two thousand feet above our field. At almost the same instant, a white streak behind him flowered out into the delicate wavering mushroom of a parachute -- a few gossamer yards grasping onto air and suspending below them, with invisible threads, a human life, and man who by stitches, cloth, and cord, had made himself a god of the sky for those immortal moments. --Charles Lindbergh (19021974) American aviator. Contemplating his first parachute jump, _The Spirit of St Louis_ [1953]. . . see "HAPPINESS" for related links My idea of paradise is a perfect automobile going thirty miles an hour on a smooth road to a twelfth-century cathedral. --Henry Brooks Adams (18381918) American historian & man of letters. Summarizing his notions of travel in a 1902 letter to a niece. They paved paradise And put up a parking lot. --Joni Mitchell [Roberta Joan Anderson] (1943 ) Canadian-born American singer and songwriter. "Big Yellow Taxi" [1969 song] Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven. --Jean Paul Richter (17631825) German novelist. Earthly paradise is where I am. --Voltaire (Franηois Marie Arouet) (16941778) French writer and philosopher. _Le mondain_ (The Worldly) [1736] ----- Cockaigne (noun) [kκ-'keyn or kah-'keyn] Paradise, utopia, an imaginary land of ease and luxurious living. ;void(0)) PARANOIA . . see "THE MIND" for related links Opposition may become sweet to a man, when he has christened it persecution. --George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans] (18191880) English novelist. The paranoid patient who has a primary tendency to believe himself persecuted draws from this the conclusion that he must necessarily be a very important person and therefore develops a delusion of grandeur. --Sigmund Freud (18561939) Austrian psychiatrist. When you spend all your time worrying that the devil is right behind you, eventually you start seeing him whether he's there or not. --Anita Blake, character in _Obsidian Butterfly_ by Laurell K. Hamilton You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you. --Eric Hoffer (19021983) American longshoreman, philosopher, and author who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1982. In _The Faber Book of Aphorisms_ [1962] ed. W.H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger. Even a paranoid can have enemies. --Henry Alfred Kissinger (1923 ) German-born American diplomat. In _Time_ [24 January 1977]. It seems very strange to me that we have this word [paranoia] which means, in effect, that someone feels he is being persecuted when the people who are persecuting him don't think that he is. But we haven't got a word for the condition in which you are persecuting someone without realizing it, which I would have thought is as serious a condition as the other, and certainly no less common. --R.D. Laing (19271989) Scottish psychiatrist. I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. --Susan Sontag [Susan Rosenblatt] (19332004) American essayist, critic, and novelist.  PARENTING/PARENTS . . see "HOME & FAMILY" for related links It was a saying of his ... that those parents who gave their children a good education deserved more honor than those who merely beget them; for that the latter only enabled their children to live, but the former gave them the power of living well. --Aristotle (384322 B.C.) Greek philosopher. In Diogenes Laertius _Lives of the Eminent Philosophers_, bk V, sec. 11 Virtuous and wise he was, but not severe; He still remember'd that he once was young. --Dr. John Armstrong Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but will never afterwards be quite the same boy. --Sir James Matthew Barrie (18601937) Scottish writer and dramatist. _Peter and Wendy_, ch. 8 "The Mermaids' Lagoon" [1911] - If a boy is not trained to endure and to bear trouble, he will grow up a girl; and a boy that is a girl has all a girl's weakness without any of her regal qualities. A woman made out of a woman is God's noblest work; a woman made out of a man is His meanest. --Henry Ward Beecher (18131887) American Congregational minister; [brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, son of Lyman Beecher.] We never know the love of the parent till we become parents ourselves. When we first bend over the cradle of our own child, God throws back the temple door, and reveals to us the sacredness and mystery of a father's and a mother's love to ourselves. And in later years, when they have gone from us, there is always a certain sorrow, that we cannot tell them we have found it out. --Henry Ward Beecher (18131887) American Congregational minister; [brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, son of Lyman Beecher.] - Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception. --Alan Bennett (1934 ) English actor and playwright. _Getting On" [1972] Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. --Bible "Proverbs" 22:6 TV, which compared to music plays a comparatively small role in the formation of young people's character and taste, is a consensus monsterthe Right monitors its content for sex, the Left for violence, and many other interested sects for many other things. But the music has hardly been touched, and what efforts have been made are both ineffectual and misguided about the nature of the problem. The result is nothing less than parents' loss of control over their children's moral education at a time when no one else is seriously concerned with it. --Allan Bloom (19301992) American writer and educator. _The Closing of the American Mind_ [1987] When my kids are wild and unruly, I use a playpen. When they are finished, I climb out. --Erma Bombeck (19271996) American humorist. Quoted in Robert Kelly _In Celebration of Children_, p. 109 [1992]. 'Yes, they are good boys,' I once heard a kind father say. 'I talk to them very much, but do not like to beat my children the world will beat them.' It was a beautiful thought not elegantly expressed. --Elihu Burritt (18101879) American philanthropist. The first duty toward children is to make them happy. If you have not made them happy, you have wronged them; no other good they may get can make up for that. --Charles Buxton (18231871) English author. When I see the Ten Most Wanted lists I always have this thought: If we'd made them feel wanted earlier, they wouldn't be wanted now. --Eddie Cantor (18821964) American comedian, actor, singer, and songwriter. Speak roughly to your little boy, And beat him when he sneezes: He only does it to annoy, Because he knows it teases. --Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (18321898) English writer and logician. _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ [1865], Ch. 6 - My child arrived just the other day, He came to the world in the usual way. But there were planes to catch, and bills to pay. He learned to walk while I was away. And he was talking 'fore I knew it, and as he grew, He'd say, "I'm gonna be like you, dad. You know I'm gonna be like you." And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon, Little boy blue and the man in the moon. "When you coming home, dad?" "I don't know when, But we'll get together then. You know we'll have a good time then." My son turned ten just the other day. He said, "Thanks for the ball, dad, come on let's play. Can you teach me to throw?" I said, "Not today, I got a lot to do." He said, "That's ok." And he walked away, but his smile never dimmed, Said, "I'm gonna be like him, yeah. You know I'm gonna be like him." And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon, Little boy blue and the man in the moon. "When you coming home, dad?" "I don't know when, But we'll get together then. You know we'll have a good time then." Well, he came from college just the other day, So much like a man I just had to say, "Son, I'm proud of you. Can you sit for a while?" He shook his head, and he said with a smile, "What I'd really like, dad, is to borrow the car keys. See you later. Can I have them please?" And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon, Little boy blue and the man in the moon. "When you coming home, son?" "I don't know when, But we'll get together then, dad. You know we'll have a good time then." I've long since retired and my son's moved away. I called him up just the other day. I said, "I'd like to see you if you don't mind." He said, "I'd love to, dad, if I could find the time. You see, my new job's a hassle, and the kid's got the flu, But it's sure nice talking to you, dad. It's been sure nice talking to you." And as I hung up the phone, it occurred to me, He'd grown up just like me. My boy was just like me. --Harry Chapin (19421981) American singer and songwriter. _Cat's in the Cradle_ [1974] (Lyrics by Harry and Sandra Chapin.) - Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come back home. --Bill Cosby (1937 ) American comedian. The apple does not fall far from the tree. --"Daily Gleaner" (Kingston, Jamaica) [1 June 1911] As a child I was never kissed, never hugged, never had a compliment. --Rodney Dangerfield [Jacob Cohen] (19212004) American comedian. Being serious - speaking of his early life with a philandering father and distant mother. The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children. --Clarence Darrow (18571938) American lawyer. Discipline is a symbol of caring to a child. He needs guidance. If there is love, there is no such thing as being too tough with a child. . . . If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent. --Bette Davis (Ruth Elizabeth Davis) (19081989) American actress. _The Lonely Life_ [1962] Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home. --Phyllis Diller (1917 ) American comedian. ^ Diogenes (?412323 B.C.) Greek philosopher. One day a woman, accompanied by her small son, came to Diogenes, complaining that the boy was rude and ill behaved and asking what she should do to improve his conduct. Diogenes' answer was to strike the mother in the face. --_Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes_ edited by Clifton Fadiman and Andrι Bernard [2000 ed.] ^ The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children. --Edward VIII (18941972) King [1936], afterwards, the Duke of Windsor. In "Look" [5 March 1937]. Men are what their mothers made them. --Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882) American philosopher and poet. _The Conduct of Life_ "Fate" [1860] If you are too busy to spend time with your children then you are busier than God intended you to be. --Rabbi Mendel Epstein, in 1996 The night you were born, I ceased being my father's boy and became my son's father. That night I began a new life. --Henry Gregor Felsen (19161995) American writer. _Letters To A Teen-Age Son_ [1962] How true Daddy's words were when he said: 'All children must look after their own upbringing.' Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands. --Anne Frank (19291945) German-born Jewish diarist. Let thy child's first lesson be Obedience, and the second will be what thou wilt. --Benjamin Franklin (17061790) American politician, inventor, and scientist. _Poor Richard's Almanack_ [1739] Having one child makes you a parent; having two you are a referee. --Sir David Paradine Frost (1939 ) British television host. In "Independent" [16 September 1989]. There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children she didn't know what to do; She gave them some broth without any bread; Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed. --"Gammer Gurton's Garland, or the Nursery Parnassus" [1784] Your children are not your children. They are the 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. --Kahlil Gibran (18831931) Lebanese poet. _The Prophet_ [1923] "On Children" Dispel not, the happy delusions of children. --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (17491832) German poet, novelist, and playwright. When our kids are young, many of us rush out to buy a cute little baby book to record the meaningful events of our young child's life. . . But I've often thought there should be a second book, one with room to record the moral milestones of our child's life. There might be space to record dates she first shared or showed compassion or befriended a new student or thought of sending Grandma a get-well card or told the truth despite its cost. --Fred G. Gosman American author - "The Stern Parent" Father heard his children scream, So he threw them in the stream, Saying, as he drowned the third, "Children should be seen, not heard" --Harry Graham (18741936) British writer and journalist. _Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes_ [1899] - The beauty of 'spacing' children many years apart lies in the fact that parents have time to learn the mistakes that were made with the older ones which permits them to make exactly the opposite mistakes with the younger ones. --Sydney J. Harris (19171986) American journalist. Not to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself with a moral the truth, namely, that the wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones. --Nathaniel Hawthorne (18041864) American novelist and short-story writer. _The House of the Seven Gables_ [1851], preface Touch is the most fundamental sense. A baby experiences it, all over, before he is born and long before he learns to use sight, hearing, or taste, and no human ever ceases to need it. Keep your children short on pocket money but long on hugs. --Robert Heinlein (19071988) American science-fiction writer. _Time Enough for Love_ [1973] An infallible way to make your child miserable is to satisfy all his demands. Passion swells by gratification; and the impossibility of satisfying every one of his demands will oblige you to stop short at last, after he has become a little headstrong. --Henry Home, Lord Kames (16961782) Scottish lawyer, agriculturalist, and philosopher. Don't take up a man's time talking about the smartness of your children; he wants to talk to you about the smartness of his children. --Edgar Watson Howe (18541937) American journalist and author. Your children need your presence more than your presents. --Jesse Jackson (1941 ) American Democratic politician and clergyman. - One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child. --Randall Jarrell (19141965) American poet. In Christina Stead _The Man Who Loved Children_ [1965]. It is not just Mowgli who was raised by a couple of wolves; any child is raised by a couple of grown-ups. Father and Mother may be nearer and dearer than anyone will ever be again still, they are members of a different species. --Randall Jarrell (19141965) American poet. _The Third Book of Criticism_ [1969] - I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning; for that is a sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. Hell get better books afterwards. --Samuel Johnson (17091784) English poet, critic, and lexicographer. In James Boswell _The Life of Samuel Johnson_ "16 April 1779" [1791]. Children must be rendered reasonable, but not reasoners. The first thing to teach them is that it is reasonable for them to obey, and unreasonable for them to dispute. --Joseph Joubert (17541824) French philosopher. The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old. --Jean Kerr (19232003) American writer, [wife of Walter Kerr]. - My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, 'You're tearing up the grass.' 'We're not raising grass,' my dad would reply, 'we're raising boys.' --Harmon Killebrew (1936 ) American Major League baseball player. - The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage. --Barbara Kingsolver (1955 ) American author. _High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never_ [1996] "Civil Disobedience at Breakfast" - To rear a boy under what parents call the "sheltered life system" is, if the boy must go into the world and fend for himself, not wise. Unless he be one in a thousand he has certainly to pass through many unnecessary troubles; and may, possibly, come to extreme grief simply from ignorance of the proper proportions of things. --Rudyard Kipling (18651936) English writer and poet. _Plain Tales from the Hills_ [1888], "Thrown Away" If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too. If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise. If you can dreamand not make dreams your master, If you can thinkand not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same. If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools: If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breath a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!" If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kingsnor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much. If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, Andwhich is moreyou'll be a Man, my son! --Rudyard Kipling (18651936) English writer and poet. "If" [1910] - It is . . . sometimes easier to head an institute for the study of child guidance than it is to turn one brat into a decent human being. --Joseph Wood Krutch (18931970) American critic and naturalist. What the vast majority of American children need is to stop being pampered, stop being indulged, stop being chauffeured, stop being catered to. In the final analysis it is not what you do for your children but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings. --Ann Landers [Esther Pauline Friedman Lederer] (19182002) Advice columnist. _Ann Landers Says Truth Is Stranger. . . _ [1968] Few things are more satisfying than seeing your children have teenagers of their own. --attributed to Doug Larson (19021981) American journalist. The parent who could see his boy as he really is, would shake his head and say: 'Willie is no good; I'll sell him.' --Stephen Butler Leacock (18691944) Canadian humorist. _Essays and Literary Studies_ [1916] "The Lot of the Schoolmaster" - Growing up as John Lennon's son has been a rocky path. All my life I've had people coming up to me saying "I loved your dad." I always have very mixed feelings when I hear this. I know that Dad was an idol to millions who grew up loving his music and his ideals. But to me he wasn't a musician or a peace icon, he was the father I loved and who let me down in so many ways. After the age of five, when my parents separated, I saw him only a handful of times, and when I did he was often remote and intimidating. I grew up longing for more contact with him but felt rejected and unimportant in his life. Dad was a great talent, a remarkable man who stood for peace and love in the world. But at the same time he found it very hard to show any peace and love to his first family my mother and me. In many accounts of Dad's life, Mum and I are either dismissed or at best treated as insignificant bit players, which is sadly something that continues to this day. --Julian Lennon (1963 ) (In Cynthia Lennon's _John_ [2005], "Foreword") - I would not have children much beaten for their faults, because I would not have them think bodily pain the greatest punishment. --John Locke (16321704) English political and educational philosopher. A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (18071882) American poet. "Table-Talk", Driftwood [1857] The hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or, again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things. --Carson Smith McCullers (19171967) American author. The great man is he who does not lose his child's heart. --Mencius (c. 372 BC c. 289 BC) Chinese philosopher. _Works_, bk. IV, pt. II, ch. XII The last step in parental love involves the release of the beloved, the willing cutting of the cord that would otherwise keep the child in a state of emotional dependence. --Lewis Mumford (18951990) American architectural critic, urban planner, and historian. _The Conduct of Life_ [1951], Ch. 9 ^ From the spring/summer 2007 schedule of the E. L. Cord Museum, in Reno, Nevada. Clay Turds For Toddlers. Parent and toddler will explore together the wonderful textures and forms that can be created using clay. This fun and tactile approach will allow you and your tot to discover the many possibilities that can result from squishing, pounding, rolling and building with this muddy material. You will sculpt, fire, and glaze your clay turds during this exciting and developmental opportunity for parent and child. --_New Yorker_ (magazine) [24 December 2007] ^ It takes a village to raise a child. --"Newsday" [3 January 1989] The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. --Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (18441900) German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture. - Children Learn What They Live If a child lives with criticism, He learns to condemn. If a child lives with hostility, He learns to fight. If a child lives with ridicule, He learns to be shy. If a child lives with shame, He learns to feel guilty. If a child lives with tolerance, He learns to be patient. If a child lives with encouragement, He learns confidence. If a child lives with praise, He learns to appreciate. If a child lives with fairness, He learns justice. If a child lives with security, He learns to have faith. If a child lives with approval, He learns to like himself. If a child lives with acceptance and friendship, He learns to find love in the world. --Dorothy Law Nolte (19242005) PhD; parenting expert and author. - If you bungle raising your children I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much. --Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (19291994) Wife of President John F. Kennedy. In Theodore C. Sorenson _Kennedy_ [1965]. Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children. --William Penn (16441718) Quaker leader and advocate of religious freedom who oversaw the founding of the American Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as a refuge for Quakers and other religious minorities of Europe {E.B.}. _Some Fruits of Solitude_ [1693] Parents deserve reproof when they refuse to benefit their children by severe discipline. [Latin: Parentes objurgatione digni sunt, qui nolunt liberos suos severa lege proficere.] --Gaius Petronius Arbiter (?AD 66) Roman writer and senator. The beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken. --Plato (427?347 B.C.) Greek philosopher. _The Republic_ 'Tis education forms the common mind, Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined. --Alexander Pope (16881744) English poet. _Epistles to Several Persons_ "To Lord Cobham", l. 101 [1733] The greatest gifts my parents gave to me. . . were their unconditional love and a set of values. Values that they lived and didn't just lecture about. Values that included an understanding of the simple difference between right and wrong, a belief in God, the importance of hard work and education, self-respect and a belief in America. --Colin L. Powell (1937 ) Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [19891993] and Secretary of State [20012005]. I got a fortune cookie that said, 'To remember is to understand.' I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers being a writer. A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child. --Anna Quindlen (1952 ) American writer. _Thinking Out Loud_ [1994] The world is not always a kind place. That's something all children learn for themselves, whether we want them to or not, but it's something they really need our help to understand. --Fred Rogers (19282003) Host of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" [19682001]. "New York Times" [28 February 2003] To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know. --Jean Jacques Rousseau (17121778) French philosopher and novelist. _Emile; or, Treatise on Education_ [1762] - I'm determined never to be a parent. Modern manners and the break-up of the fine old traditions have simply ruined the business. I shall devote my life and fortune to the endowment of research on the best method of producing human beings decorously and unobtrusively from eggs. All parental responsibility to devolve upon the incubator. --Dorothy L. Sayers (18931957) English writer of detective fiction. _The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club_ [1928], Ch. 3 - [When Isadora Duncan regretted that they could not have a child together, saying, 'Think what a child it would be with my body and your brains':] I know, but suppose the child was so unlucky as to have my body and your brain? --George Bernard Shaw (18561950) Irish dramatist and critic. Quoted in Lewis Copeland and Faye Copeland _10,000 Jokes, Toasts & Stories_ [1939]. 'A fig-tree looking on a fig-tree becometh fruitful,' says the Arabian proverb. And so it is with children; their first great instructor is example. --Samuel Smiles (18121904) Scottish author. All good qualities in a child are the result of environment, while all the bad ones are the result of poor heredity on the side of the other parent. --Elinor Goulding Smith, _The Complete Book of Absolutely Perfect Baby and Child Care_ [1957] The defects of children mirror the defects of their parents. --Herbert Spencer (18201903) English philosopher. _Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical_, ch. III "Moral Education" [1862] And perhaps, after all, it is better that the lad should break his neck than that you should break his spirit. --Robert Louis Stevenson (18501894) Scottish essayist, poet, and novelist. "The Amateur Emigrant" I long to put the experience of fifty years at once into your young lives, to give you at once the key to that treasure chamber every gem of which has cost me tears and struggles and prayers, but you must work for these inward treasures yourselves. --Harriet Beecher Stowe (18111896) American writer and philanthropist. Letter to her twin daughters. Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time. --Talmud (A.D.1st6th cent.) Rabbinical writings. The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home. --William Temple (18811944) English theologian and Archbishop. _The Hope of a New World_ [1940] It is better to keep children to their duty by a sense of honor and by kindness than by fear. --Terence [Publius Terentius Afer] (c. 190159 BC) Roman comic dramatist. If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings. --Brian Tracy Canadian-born American motivational author. I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it. --Harry S. Truman (18841972) American Democratic statesman, President of the U.S. [19451953]. By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong. --Charles Wadsworth (1814?1882) At three years of age the child's whole emotional life plan has been laid down, his emotional disposition set. At that age the parents have already determined for him whether he is to grow into a happy person, wholesome and good-natured, whether he is to be a whining, complaining neurotic, an anger-driven, vindictive, over-bearing slave driver, or one whose every move in life is definitely controlled by fear. --John B. Watson (18781958) American psychologist. _Psychological Care of Infant and Child_ [1928] Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society. --Daniel Webster (17821852) American orator and politician. A mother once asked a clergyman when she should begin the education of her child, which she told him was then four years old. 'Madam,' was the reply, 'you have lost three years already.' --Richard Whately (17871863) English philosopher and theologian. Quoted in Maturin M. Ballou _Notable Thoughts About Women_, p. 267 [1882]. There are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents. --Lιon R. Yankwich (18881975) Rumanian-born American judge. Quoted in "L.A. Times" [9 August 1928]. TOPICAL ^ 15 -- Percentage of Americans who say parents are putting too much pressure on students, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project 59 -- Percentage of Japanese who say parents ... 61 -- Percentage of Indians ... 63 -- Percentage of Chinese ... --"Figuratively Speaking" in _Las Vegas Business Press_ [11 September 2006] ^ "Much Depends on Dinner" By Cameron Stracher in _The Wall Street Journal_ July 29, 2005 The recent death of Gerry Thomas, whom many credit with inventing the TV dinner (think Swanson), draws to a close the kinder, gentler era when happy families gathered around a television set, aluminum trays in hand, enjoying their chopped sirloin beef and sweet green peas in seasoned butter sauce while laughing at the wacky antics of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Today, televisions are a lot bigger (and flatter), the frozen-food industry has grown into a $30 billion business and the chances of getting everyone to sit down for dinner at the same time are a lot slimmer. Instead, we are a nation of take- outers and drive-throughers, eating our meals on the go, dining by ourselves and laughing alone. The family dinner has become an endangered species, the victim of our own ingenuity and productivity. Mealtime in the 1950s: Somehow, everybody managed to show up at the same time. Eventually they may have even talked to one another. These days, fewer than one-third of all children sit down to eat dinner with both parents on any given night. The statistics are worse if both parents are working and the family is Caucasian (Latino families have the highest rate of sharing a meal). The decline in the family dinner has been blamed for the rise in obesity, drug abuse, behavioral problems, promiscuity, poor school performance, illegal file sharing and a host of other ills. A recent study at the Harvard Medical School, for example, concluded that the odds of being overweight were 15% lower among those who ate dinner with their family on "most days" or "every day" compared with those who ate with their family "never" or on "some days." The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University found that teens from families that almost never eat dinner together are 72% more likely to use illegal drugs, cigarettes and alcohol than the average teen and that those who eat dinner with their parents less than three times a week are four times more likely to smoke cigarettes, three times more likely to smoke marijuana and twice as likely to drink as those who eat dinner with their parents at least six times a week. [ . . . ] In my absence from dinner, I am not alone. My evening train is packed with men and women shoveling burritos, couscous or pizza into their mouths, while firing off messages on their BlackBerries. Among my friends, I know few who sit down to eat with their children on the weekends, let alone the weekday. Instead they arrive just in time to plant a kiss on the moist forehead of a drowsy babe, then retire downstairs to the computer. The causes for the incredible disappearing family dinner are many. As women have entered the work force in greater numbers, fewer hands are available to shop and cook. Both parents are working longer hours and commuting farther, which makes it harder to get home in time to share a meal. Children are busier, too, overcommitted to school and sports and other activities, which has made coordinating dinner time more difficult. Finally, the plethora of fast-food choices exemplified by the TV dinner, though partly an effect of our changing style of life, is also a cause: The easier it is to pick up or microwave something on the run, the less likely we are to share our meal with others. [ . . .] As food preparation has become easier, meals quicker and distractions ubiquitous, it's tempting to view the family dinner as simply another choice from columns A, B or C. Just as television has splintered its viewing audience, TV dinners have splintered the dining audience. When anyone can eat alone, few eat together. And that's a shame. Because dinner is like a formal poem, with a fixed meter and time. It can't be hastened by new technology or emailed as an attachment to our kitchens. Instead, it's one of the few opportunities for conversation in a noisy world, a place to take a slower measure of our frenzied days. By missing mealtime, we are missing a substantial part of our children's lives. Sooner than we realize, they will not be at our table. Sooner than that, they will not want to have anything to do with us. Right now my own son's head is filled with baseball statistics that he cannot wait to share. My daughter is obsessed with iTunes, and wants to know what every song means, even when the lyrics go: "I'm your boogie man / I'm your boogie man / Turn me on." Instead of answering their questions, however, weeks pass when I do not know what they are learning in school, who they are playing with, what they do when I'm not around. But I'm trying to mend my ways. So when my son asked me, a few days ago, whether I'd be home early or late, I told him I'd be taking the 5:03. "What do you want for dinner?" I asked. "How about Chinese?" he said. It was a start. Mr. Stracher is publisher of the New York Law School Law Review. ----- martinet [mar-t'n-ET], noun: 1. A strict disciplinarian. 2. One who lays stress on a rigid adherence to the details of forms and methods. end page | PACIFISM & PAIN | PAINTING - PARENTING | PARIS - PASSPORTS | PAST (THE) - PATRIOTISM | PEACE - PERCENTAGES | PEOPLE | PERCEPTIONS - PERSUASION | PESSIMISM - PHILOSOPHY | PHONIES - PHYSICS | PIANO - PLANS | PLACES | PLANTS - POETRY | POISON - POLITICAL PARTIES | POLITICS & POLITICIANS | POLLS - POPES | POPEYE - POTENTIAL | POVERTY | POWER | PRACTICALITY - PRAYER | PREACHERS - PREPARED (BE) | PRESENT (THE) - (THE) PRESS | PRETENTIONS - PRIVACY | PROBLEMS - PROGRESSIVES | PROGRESS - PROPAGANDA | PROPOSALS - PUBLIC (THE) | PUBLIC OPINION - PURPOSE (ON HAVING A) | QUALITIES - QUIPS | QUIRKS - QUOTATIONS | | H | I - J | K - L | M | N - O | P - Q | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The Reviews | |
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