All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values a...nd dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Navajo infants get so attached to cradleboard that they cry to be tied into it. Kikuyu infants in Kenya get handed around several ..."mothers," all wives to one man. . . . Mothers in rural Guatemala keep their infants quiet, in dark huts. Middle-class American mothers talk a blue streak at them. Israeli kibbutz mothers give them over to a communal caretaker . . . Japanese mothers sleep with them. . . . All these tactics are compatible with normal health--physical and mental--and development in infancy. So one lesson for parents so far seems to be: Let a hundred flowers bloom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We know that babies develop as well in nonmaternal as in maternal care, as long as the care is of good quality. The issue is not w...ho gives the care but the quality of that care,... The guilt trip is, in my view, a hangover of another era and of unacknowledged tactics to keep women in their proper place--at home full-time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Perhaps anxious politicians may prove that only seventeen white men and five negroes were concerned in the late enterprise; but th...eir very anxiety to prove this might suggest to themselves that all is not told. Why do they still dodge the truth? They are so anxious because of a dim consciousness of the fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the free inhabitants of the United States would have rejoiced if it had succeeded. They at most only criticise the tactics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Consider what stuff history is made of,--that for the most part it is merely a story agreed on by posterity. Who will tell us even... how many Russians were engaged in the battle of Chernaya, the other day? Yet, no doubt, Mr. Scriblerus, the historian, will fix on a definite number for the schoolboys to commit to their excellent memories. What, then, of the number of Persians at Salamis? The historian whom I read knew as much about the position of the parties and their tactics in the last-mentioned affair as they who describe a recent battle in an article for the press nowadays before the particulars have arrived. I believe that, if I were to live the life of mankind over again myself (which I would not be hired to do), with the Universal History in my hands, I should not be able to tell what was what.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »