Dr. Stacey Patton sums this up perfectly:
“Generations of scholars and activists have examined race, gender, class and sexuality as categories of oppression. They have not extended the same courtesy to the category of childhood, to the oppressions and sufferings of children. But the fact is you can’t reproduce any order of societal oppression based on race, gender, class or sexuality without first destroying each generation of young people as soon as they enter the world.” ~ Dr. Stacey Patton
“If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.” ~ Pearl S. Buck
“No wonder you are all sad. They’ve stolen your childhood and replaced it with homework and grades. They don’t let you dream anymore, they crush it with the pressure to be mediocre yet pretend they want greatness from you. That is so wrong.” ~ Billy Joe Armstrong (vocalist and guitarist of green day)
“I would rather live in a society which treated children as adults than one which treated adults as children.” ~ Lizard
“We spend the first year of a child’s life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There’s something wrong there.” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
“In the early years of a child’s life, parents teach him to walk and talk, and later require him to sit still and keep his mouth shut.” ~ Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, [Austrian poet and actor, 1801 - 1862]
“Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?” ~ Samuel Johnson
“Your life, time, and brain should belong to you, not to an institution.” ~ Grace Llewellyn
“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.” ~ Jim Morrison
"We are “told that children and adolescents are mentally inferior due to their underdeveloped brains, and this inferiority renders them incapable of behaving rationally or responsibly; in the past, precisely the same claims were advanced against women and black people.” ~ Sam Godwin
“Each time a person stands up for an idea, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” ~ Robert F. Kennedy
“There is no justification in human nature for treating children, from birth, with any less respect or equality than that accorded to older people. Children are people, fully and without qualification.” ~ Daniel Greenberg
“Many pass on the cruelty to which they were subjected as children so they can continue to idealize their parents.” ~ Alice Miller
“Often a child’s very gifts (his great intensity of feeling, depth of experience, curiosity, intelligence, quickness—and his ability to be critical) will confront his parents with conflicts that they have long sought to keep at bay by means of rules and regulations.” ~ Alice Miller