Quotes by Benjamin Spock

• You know more than you think you do.
• When women are encouraged to be competitive, too many of them become disagreeable.
• What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble?
• What good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best after all.
• Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do.
• To win in Vietnam, we will have to exterminate a nation.
• Perhaps a child who is fussed over gets a feeling of destiny; he thinks he is the world for something important, and it gives him drive and confidence.
• The more people have studied different methods of bringing up children the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all.
• The child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering.
• In our country today, very few children are raised to believe that their principal destiny is to serve their family, their country, or God.
• 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.
• I would say that the surest measure of a man's or a woman's maturity is the harmony, style, joy, and dignity he creates in his marriage, and the pleasure and inspiration he provides for his spouse.
• I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam because they were my babies.
• Happiness is mostly a by-product of doing what makes us feel fulfilled.
• 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, wondering how awful it might be.
• 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.
• There are only two things a child will share willingly; communicable diseases and its mother's age.
• Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.