Children

Here you'll find wonderfully inspiring quotes on children made by remarkable African-Americans.

Always end the name of your child with a vowel, so that when you yell the name will carry.
Bill Cosby

As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak: she gave me a younger brother named Russell, who taught me what was meant by survival of the fittest.
Bill Cosby

Children don't vote but adults who do must stand up and vote for them.
Marian Wright Edelman

Children show me in their playful smiles the divine in everyone. This simple goodness shines straight from their hearts and only asks to be lived.
Michael Jackson

Children today know more about sex than I or my father did.
Bill Cosby

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
Maya Angelou

Even though your kids will consistently do the exact opposite of what you're telling them to do, you have to keep loving them just as much.
Bill Cosby

Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
Toni Morrison, Conversations with American Writers

Having a child is surely the most beautifully irrational act that two people in love can commit.
Bill Cosby

I believe that children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside.
Whitney Houston, Greatest Love of All

I don't care what my children choose to do professionally, just as long as within their choices they understand they've got to give something back.
Marian Wright Edelman

I know that I will never find my father in any other man who comes into my life, because it is a void in my life that can only be filled by him.
Halle Berry

I think if we are actually going to accept our generation's responsibility, that's going to mean that we give our children no less retirement security than we inherited from our parents.
Carol Moseley Braun

If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.
Marian Wright Edelman

If you as parents cut corners, your children will too. If you lie, they will too. If you spend all your money on yourselves and tithe no portion of it for charities, colleges, churches, synagogues, and civic causes, your children won't either. And if parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out.
Marian Wright Edelman

If you love your children, if you love your country, if you love the God of love, clear your hands from slaves, burden not your children or your country with them.
Richard Allen

In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.
June Jordan

Investing in [children] is not a national luxury or a national choice. It's a national necessity. If the foundation of your house is crumbling, you don't say you can't afford to fix it while you're building astronomically expensive fences to protect it from outside enemies. The issue is not are we going to pay -- it's are we going to pay now, up front, or are we going to pay a whole lot more later on.
Marian Wright Edelman

My childhood should have taught me lessons for my own fatherhood, but it didn't because parenting can only be learned by people who have no children.
Bill Cosby

My eleven year old daughter mopes around the house all day waiting for her breasts to grow.
Bill Cosby

Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.
June Jordan

Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.
Bill Cosby

Sex education may be a good idea in the schools, but I don't believe the kids should be given homework.
Bill Cosby

The courts cannot garnish a father's salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.
June Jordan

The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.
Bill Cosby

The legacy I want to leave is a child-care system that says that no kid is going to be left alone or left unsafe.
Marian Wright Edelman

The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'
Alice Walker

The old notion that children are the private property of parents dies very slowly. In reality, no parent raises a child alone. How many of us nice middle-class folk could make it without our mortgage reduction? That's a government subsidy of families, yet we resent putting money directly into public housing. We take our deduction for dependent care yet resent putting money directly into child care. Common sense and necessity are beginning to erode old notions of the private invasion of family life, because so many families are in trouble.
Marian Wright Edelman, Psychology Today

There's a Mother's Day and there's a Father's Day, but there's no Children's Day. It would mean a lot. World peace.
Michael Jackson

To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.
June Jordan

You said, 'Suffer the little children to come unto me, and harm them not.' Did you forget? Did you forget about the children? Yes. You forgot. You let them go wanting, sitting on road shoulders, crying next to their dead mothers. I've seen them charred, lame, halt. You forgot, Lord. You forgot how and when to be God?That's why I changed the little black girl's eyes for her?I did what You could not do. I looked at that ugly little black girl and I loved her. I played You.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Your children need your presence more than your presents.
Jesse Jackson