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"It is not difficult for an unwise mother quite unintentionally to centre the heterosexual feelings of a young son upon herself, and it is true that, if this is done, the evil consequences pointed out by Freud will probably ensue. This is, however, much less likely to occur if the mother's sexual life is satisfying to her, for in that case she will not look to her child for a type of emotional satisfaction which ought to be sought only from adults. The parental impulse in its purity is an impulse to care for the young, not to demand affection from them, and if a woman is happy in her sexual life she will abstain spontaneously from all improper demands for emotional response from her child."
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"Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child."
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Personal Development

"It's so awful, attacking your child. It's the worse thing I know, to shout loudly at this 50 lb. being with his huge trusting brown eyes. It's like bitch-slapping E.T."
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Personal Development

"Most parents are not really 'supportive' because they want their kid(s) to succeed; they 'support' their kid(s) as an attempt to avoid appearing to have bred a failure, or, failures - in the eyes of their peers and/or neighbours."
Author Name
Personal Development

"My parents wanted me to solace them for sorrows they denied having had."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience."
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Personal Development

"Nature attunes children to receive the coded messages that parents issue how to live a joyful and virtuous life."
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Personal Development

"Spanking a child is about the parent not the child. The child will learn more from positive correction than physical manipulation."
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Personal Development

"The best way to encourage your children is to let them know you are praying for them."
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Personal Development

"Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John."
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Personal Development

"A child learns to be guilty when he is punished and scolded for damaging material objects."
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Personal Development
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"Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness."
Social

"I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of all the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race-I am ashamed to belong to such a species."
Emotion

"Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom."
Time

"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd."
Fact

"The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile."
Happiness

"I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex."
Food

"In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards."
Man

"The instinct is not completely satisfied unless a man's whole being, mental quite as much as physical, enters into the relation. Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give; unconsciously, if not consciously, they feel this and the resulting disappointment inclines them towards envy, oppression, and cruelty."
Affection

"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear."
Fear

"The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard chiefly I think because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses."
Justice
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