Erik Erikson

Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death. ”

Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom. ”

Man's true taproots are nourished in the sequence of generations, and he loses his taproots in disrupted developmental time, not in abandoned localities. ”

Every adult, whether he is a follower or a leader, a member of a mass or of an elite, was once a child. He was once small. A sense of smallness forms a substratum in his mind, ineradicably. His triumphs will be measured against this smallness; his defeats will substantiate it. ”

Parents must not only have certain ways of guiding by prohibition and permission, they must also be able to represent to the child a deep, almost somatic conviction that there is meaning in what they are doing. ”

Men have always shown a dim knowledge of their better potentialities by paying homage to those purest leaders who taught the simplest and most inclusive rules for an undivided mankind. ”

The psychoanalytic method is essentially a historical method. ”

You see a child play, and it is so close to seeing an artist paint, for in play a child says things without uttering a word. You can see how he solves his problems. You can also see what's wrong. Young children, especially, have enormous creativity, and whatever's in them rises to the surface in free play. ”

There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding, which constitutes a new hope and a new responsibility for all. ”

The only thing that can save us as a species is seeing how we're not thinking about future generations in the way we live. ”