All Quotes

"I said...how, and why, young children, were sooner allured by love, than driven by beating, to attain good learning."

"Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter."

"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models."

"Every time a child says "I don’t believe in fairies" there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead."

"For children are the glory of marriage, the treasure of parents, the wealth of family life. They develop within their parents an entire cluster of virtues, such as paternal love and maternal affection, devotion and self-denial, care for the future, involvement in society, the art of nurturing. With their parents, children place restraints upon ambition, reconcile the contrasts, soften the differences, bring their souls ever closer together, provide them with a common interest that lies outside of them, and opens their eyes and hearts to their surroundings and for their posterity. As with living mirrors they show their parents their own virtues and faults, force them to reform themselves, mitigating their criticisms, and teaching them how hard it is to govern a person."

"Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me. Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams — day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing — are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization. A prominent educator tells me that fairy tales are of untold value in developing imagination in the young. I believe it."

"Not a day passes, but I get a letter from a child. They come sometimes singly, sometimes in batches of 50 or 100. Entire classes, where school teachers have read my stories, have written to me. I answer every one personally. When I was a child I know how, if I had received a real letter from an author whose book I'd read, I would have been the happiest boy alive. And if I am to do any good in this world my highest ambition will be to make children happy."

"If you have kids you’re a slave to your genes. Just a conduit from past to future, from the primeval ocean to galactic empire."

"Children should above all be taught self-reliance, love for all men, altruism, mutual charity, and more than anything else, to think and reason for themselves... Aim at creating free men and women, free intellectually, free morally, unprejudiced in all respects, and above all things, unselfish."

"There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone."

"We wore a web in childhood, A web of sunny air; We dug a spring in infancy Of water pure and fair. We sowed in youth a mustard seed; We cut an almond rod. We now are grown up to riper age: Are they withered in the sod?"

"Children become, while little, our delights, When they grow bigger, they begin to fright's."

"The first duty towards children is to make them happy. If you have not made them so, you have wronged them. No other good they may get can make up for that."

"Scripture points out this difference between believers and unbelievers; the latter, as old slaves of their incurable perversity, cannot endure the rod; but the former, like children of noble birth, profit by repentance and correction."

"Frances Sternhagen - Mrs. Sally Cushing"

"We've got a 23-year-old boy. I threw him out of the house last year. A shaggy-haired Maoist. I don't know where he is. Presumably, building bombs in basements as an expression of universal brotherhood."

"I'm middle class. Among us middle class, love doesn't triumph over all - responsibility does."

"Stockard Channing - E.R. Nurse"

"Now what in hell am I going to tell this boy Schaefer's parents? That a substitute nurse assassinated him because she couldn't tell the doctors from the patients on the floor? My God! The incompetence in this hospital is absolutely radiant... I mean, where do you train your nurses, Mrs. Christie, Dachau!?"

"You're greedy, unfeeling, inept, indifferent, self-inflating, and unconscionably profitable. Besides that, I have nothing against you. I'm sure you play a hell of a game of golf."

"Within a week, my father had closed his Beacon Hill practice and set out to start a mission in the Mexican Mountains. I turned in my SDS card and my crash helmet, and I followed him. It was a disaster, at least for me. My father had received the revelation, not I. He stood gaunt on a mountain slope and preached the Apocalypse to solemnly amused Indians. I masturbated a great deal. We lived in a grass wickiup, ate raw rabbit and crushed piñon nuts. It was hideous. Within two months, I was back in Boston. A hollow shell, disenchanted with everything, and dizzy with dengue. I turned to austerity, combed my hair tight, entered nursing school. I became haggard, driven - had shamelessly incestuous dreams about my father. I took up with some of the senior staff there. One of them a portly psychiatrist, explained I was generated by an unresolved lust for my father. I cracked up. One day, they found me walking to work naked and screaming obscenities. There was talk of institutionalizing me. So I packed a bag and went back to join my father in the Sierra Madre Mountains. I've been there ever since. That's three years. My father is, of course, as mad as a hatter. I watch over him, and have been curiously content. You see, Doctor, I believe in everything."

"Mr. Blacktree disapproves of my miniskirt, the only thing I had to come to the city with. Back at the tribe, I wear ankle-length buckskin."

"You're a very tired, very damaged man. You've had a hideous marriage, I assume a few tacky affairs along the way. You're understandably reluctant to get involved again. On top of that, here I am with this preposterous idea you throw everything up and go off with me to some barren mountains in Mexico. Utterly mad, I know. On the other hand, you obviously find this world as desolate as I do. You did try to kill yourself last night. So that's it, Herb. Either me and the mountains or - a bottle of potassium."

"This is Dr. Ives. He's in the Nephrology Lab. I was in there a little while ago, and he was suddenly taken ill, and I thought I'd better get him over here right away. He had at that time perhaps an hour to live. Prompt treatment would have saved his life. As a staff doctor, he was seen without preliminaries... His vital signs were taken, an electrocardiogram... which revealed occasional ventricular premature contractions. An intern took his history... and then he was promptly... simply... forgotten to death."

"I am the fool for Christ, and Paraclete of Caborca."

"Mislaid. Mislaid among the broken wrists, the chest pains, the scalp lacerations, the man whose fingers were crushed in a taxi door, the infant with a skin rash, the child swiped by a car, the old lady mugged in the subway, the derelict beaten by sailors, the teenage suicide, the paranoids, drunks, asthmatics, the rapes, the septic abortions, the overdosed addicts, the fractures, infarcts, hemorrhages, concussions, boils, abrasions, the colonic cancers, the cardiac arrests - the whole wounded madhouse of our times."

"Mrs. Cushing: Dr. Spezio, may I see you for a moment, Doctor, if you don't mind? Doctor is this your handwriting, if you don't mind? Am I supposed to read this? Was that a sprain? Was that a broken wrist? I can't read that scribbling. I mean I have to bill these people. I know you doctors are the ministering angels and I'm the bitch from the accounting department, but I've a job to do too. I mean, if you don't mind, Doctor."

"Behind the lab coat beats the heart of a man who's been pushed to the edge."

"Madness, Murder and Malpractice."

"Watch them operate!"

"I may be crazy, but I think I've operated on the wrong patient."

"George C. Scott - Dr. Herbert "Herb" Bock"

"Diana Rigg - Miss Barbara Drummond"

"Robert Walden - Dr. Brubaker"

"Barnard Hughes - Edmund Drummond (and an uncredited role as Dr. Mallory, the OB/GYN who discovers he's got the wrong patient.)"

"Richard A. Dysart - Dr. Welbeck"

"Stephen Elliott - Dr. John Sundstrom"

"Andrew Duncan - William "Willie" Mead"

"Donald Harron - Dr. Milton Mead"

"Nancy Marchand - Mrs. Christie, Head of Nurses"

"Jordan Charney - Hitchcock, Hospital Administration"

"Roberts Blossom - Guernsey"

"Lenny Baker - Dr. Howard Schaefer"

"Richard Hamilton - Dr. Ronald Casey"

"Arthur Junaluska - Mr. Blacktree"

"Kate Harrington - Nurse Dunne"

"Katherine Helmond - Mrs. Marilyn Mead"

"David Hooks - Dr. Joe Einhorn"

"Four hundred years ago, we would have been burnt for this film. Now, I'm suggesting that we've made an advance."

"If I like chocolate it won't surprise you that I have a few chocolates in my fridge, but if you find out I've got 16 warehouses full of chocolate, you'd think I was insane. All these rich guys are insane, obsessive compulsive twits obsessed with money — money is all they think about — they're all nuts."