Parents and children seldom act in concert: each child endeavours to appropriate the esteem or fondness of the parents, and the parents, with yet less temptation, betray each other to their children.
(Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), British author, lexicographer. Nekayah, in The History of Rasselas, ch. 26 (1759).)
Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
(Honoré De Balzac (1799-1850), French novelist. Mme. Gaston in a letter to Mme. De l'Estorade, in Letters of Two Brides (Mémoires de Deux Jeunes Mariées), in La Presse (1841-1842), Souverain (1842), included in the Scènes de la Vie Privée in the Comédie humaine (1845, trans. by George Saintsbury, 1971).)
A lifetime [or, eternity] is a child playing, playing checkers; the kingdom belongs to a child.
(Heraclitus (c. 535-475 B.C.), Greek philosopher. quoted in Hippolytus [early third century A.D.], Refutation 9.9.4, Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy, trans. by R.D. McKirahan, Jr., eds. S. Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd, and C.D.C. Reeve, Hackett Publishing Co. (1995).)
The new concept of the child as equal and the new integration of children into adult life has helped bring about a gradual but certain erosion of these boundaries that once separated the world of children from the word of adults, boundaries that allowed adults to treat children differently than they treated other adults because they understood that children are different.
(Marie Winn (20th century), U.S. author. Children Without Childhood, ch. 13 (1981).)
