Benjamin Spock

“Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.”

“There are only two things a child will share willingly - communicable diseases and his mother's age.”

“As a peace activist, I am dismayed by the encouragement of aggressiveness and violence by television, movies, and war toys.”

“All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.”

“People have criticized me for seeming to step out of my professional role to become undignifiedly political. I'd say it was belated realization that day care, good schools, health insurance,...”

“Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.”

“Happiness is mostly a by-product of doing what makes us feel fulfilled.”

“On the average, older parents are more flexible, tolerant, understanding, and happy in child care.”

“To win in Vietnam, we will have to exterminate a nation.”

“A surprising number of scientific advances have been made and masterpieces of art created by individuals just on the threshold of adulthood.”

“Every child senses, with all the horse sense that's in him, that any parent is angry inside when children misbehave and they dread more the anger that is rarely or never expressed openly, wo...”

“I'm not a pacifist. I was very much for the war against Hitler and I also supported the intervention in Korea, but in this war we went in there to steal Vietnam.”

“Preschool children are virtuosos of imagination.”

“The child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering.”

“I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam because they were my babies.”

“I think we should bring up our children with much less pressure to compete and get ahead: no comparing one child with another, at home or in school; no grades. Let athletics be primarily for...”