Topic

Parents

Parents in this collection are described primarily through what they fail to do. Churchill on saving-being-fine-especially-when-your-parents-did-it is the most succinct statement of inherited advantage. Shaw on parentage being the only important profession without a fitness test is the institutional critique: we regulate everything except the relationship that matters most. Balzac on the mother who is really a mother never being free is the biographical observation: effective parenting is incompatible with personal liberty, and the trade-off is not always acknowledged. Plato on parents bequeathing the spirit of reverence rather than riches is the philosophical inheritance argument: the most valuable thing that can pass between generations is an attitude toward what matters. Howe on schools preventing the insanasylum from filling is the dark comedy of parenting as a profession that requires periodic relief. What the collection argues is that parenthood is the most consequential role most people will ever occupy, and the most consistently underestimated.

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Saving is a fine thing. Especially when your parents have done it for you.

Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children

A mother who is really a mother is never free

Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence

We never know the love of a parent till we become parents ourselves

That he delights in the misery of others no man will confess, and yet what other motive can make a father cruel?

Recovering from the death of your mother is not about forgetting, it's about feeling entitled to remember.

My wife is the kind of girl who will not go anywhere without her mother, and her mother will go anywhere

God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.

Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves have poisoned the fountain

There is no friendship, no love, like that of the parent for the child

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children

If there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylums would be filled with mothers

Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together

Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.

How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child's board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted

Parents hold their children's hands for just a little while .. their hearts forever

Most mothers are instinctive philosophers