Benjamin Spock Quotes

Happiness is mostly a by-product of doing what makes us feel fulfilled.

- Benjamin Spock

People have criticized me for seeming to step out of my professional role to become undignifiedly political. I'd say it was belated realization that day care, good schools, health insurance, and nuclear disarmament are even more important aspects of pediatrics than measles vaccine or vitamin D.

- Benjamin Spock

On the average, older parents are more flexible, tolerant, understanding, and happy in child care.

- Benjamin Spock

There are only two things a child will share willingly; communicable diseases and its mother's age.

- Benjamin Spock

I think we should bring up our children with much less pressure to compete and get ahead: no comparing one child with another, at home or in school; no grades. Let athletics be primarily for fun, and let them be organized by children and youths themselves.

- Benjamin Spock

I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam because they were my babies.

- Benjamin Spock

Every child senses, with all the horse sense that's in him, that any parent is angry inside when children misbehave and they dread more the anger that is rarely or never expressed openly, wondering how awful it might be.

- Benjamin Spock

When women are encouraged to be competitive, too many of them become disagreeable.

- Benjamin Spock

As a peace activist, I am dismayed by the encouragement of aggressiveness and violence by television, movies, and war toys.

- Benjamin Spock

To win in Vietnam, we will have to exterminate a nation.

- Benjamin Spock

All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.

- Benjamin Spock

The child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering.

- Benjamin Spock

We all end up at least somewhat like our parents, especially in the way we deal with our children.

- Benjamin Spock

I'm not a pacifist. I was very much for the war against Hitler and I also supported the intervention in Korea, but in this war we went in there to steal Vietnam.

- Benjamin Spock

Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.

- Benjamin Spock

Perhaps a child who is fussed over gets a feeling of destiny; he thinks he is in the world for something important, and it gives him drive and confidence.

- Benjamin Spock

What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble?

- Benjamin Spock

A surprising number of scientific advances have been made and masterpieces of art created by individuals just on the threshold of adulthood.

- Benjamin Spock

I would say that the surest measure of a man's or a woman's maturity is the harmony, style, joy, and dignity he creates in his marriage, and the pleasure and inspiration he provides for his spouse.

- Benjamin Spock

The more people have studied different methods of bringing up children the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all.

- Benjamin Spock

In our country today, very few children are raised to believe that their principal destiny is to serve their family, their country, or God.

- Benjamin Spock

Preschool children are virtuosos of imagination.

- Benjamin Spock

Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do.

- Benjamin Spock