“No social problem is as universal as the oppression of the child ... No slave was ever so much the property of his master as the child is of his parent ... Never were the rights of man ever so disregarded as in the case of the child.”
► Maria Montessori (1870–1952) in Il bambino in famiglio (1936), which was published in English as The Child in the Family. She was an Italian physician, educator and humanitarian, best known for the Montessori Method of child education.
“Where after all, do human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”
► Eleanor Roosevelt, the first chairperson of the UN Human Rights Commission. She was also the United States delegate to the United Nations General Assembly from 1946-1952.
“I should like to tell all those clamouring for a more rigorous approach and tighter reins [in child discipline] what an old lady once told me. She was a young mother in the days when people still believed in the idea of "Spare the rod and spoil the child" — or rather, she didn't really believe in it, but one day when her little boy did something naughty, she decided he had to have a good hiding, the first one of his life. She told him to go out and find a suitably supple stick or rod for her to use. The little boy was away for a long time. He eventually came back in tears and announced: "I can't find a rod, but here's a stone you can throw at me." At which point his mother also burst into tears, because it had suddenly dawned on her how her little boy must have regarded what was about to happen. He must have thought: "My mum wants to hurt me, and she can do that just as well by throwing a stone at me." ”
► Astrid Lindgren (1907–2002), a notable Swedish children's writer, in her acceptance speech when collecting the German Booksellers' Peace Prize in Frankfurt in 1978.
“In just a few years time, we should be looking back with shame and bewilderment at the fact that in the early years of the second millennium, governments and individual adults were still justifying — even promoting — hitting and deliberately hurting babies and children as lawful and legitimate.”
► Peter Newell, an advocate for children's rights — in the UK and internationally — and a member of the Editorial Board of the UN Secretary-General's Study on Violence against Children (2006).