A Quote by Brian Sutton-Smith

I keep trying to understand the phenomenon of why adults are so literal when children are so imaginative. Toys are a caricature of reality.

Brian Sutton-Smith

Quote Topics

Adults Caricature Children Imaginative Keep Keep Trying Literal Phenomenon Reality Toys Trying Understand Why

Quote Author

Brian Sutton-Smith
American - Psychologist

Adults trying to protect children from reality, right? And adults always trying to fill children with fantasy - the tooth fairy, Santa, make-believe games, etc. But kids are really smart, I think they know from an early age about death, this void and hole they are immediately traveling toward.

Shane Warren Jones

In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults.

Thomas Szasz

In great countries, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents want to make them into adults. In vile countries, the children are always wanting to be adults and the parents want to keep them children.

John Ruskin

If there is a species which is more maltreated than children, then it must be their toys, which they handle in an incredibly off-hand manner. Toys are thus the end point in that long chain in which all the conditions of despotic high-handedness are in play which enchain beings one to another, from one species to another --cruel divinities to their sacrificial victims, from masters to slaves, from adults to children, and from children to their objects.

Jean Baudrillard

Of course we need children! Adults need children in their lives to listen to and care for, to keep their imagination fresh and their hearts young and to make the future a reality for which they are willing to work.

Margaret Mead

Adultism leads to a phenomenon of little adults, who are young people who are treated as adults-in-the-making. A non-discriminatory perspective would be to treat children and youth as whole and complete people right now.

Adam Fletcher

Children tend to be rather better observers of adults' characters than adults are of children's, because children are so dependent on adults that it is very much in their interest to discover the weaknesses of their elders.

Allan Bloom

They [the Hardscrabbles]never enjoyed it when adults playfully lied to them. The adults always think they're being amusing and imaginative, just like children. But kids never lie playfully. They lie as if their lives depended on it.

Ellen Potter

The new concept of the child as equal and the new integration of children into adult life has helped bring about a gradual but certain erosion of these boundaries that once separated the world of children from the word of adults, boundaries that allowed adults to treat children differently than they treated other adults because they understood that children are different.

Marie Winn

Research has shown that children who play often both solitarily and socially become more creative and imaginative than those whose exposure to play and toys is limited.

Brian Sutton-Smith

I still collect toys. Toys are a reflection of society. They are the tools that society uses to teach and enculturate children into the adult world. Toys are not innocent.

Chris Burden

Adamson feels that drug developers are unreasonably concerned about rare events. The reality is children tolerate phase I therapy new agents being tested to find the best dosage and possible side-effects as well as or better than adults, ... Once the initial studies are done that is, phase I trials in adults study should begin in children.

Peter Adamson

There are great parents of small children - they keep their little hair in bows - but those parents are not always good parents of young adults. As soon as their children get up to some size, it's "Shut up, sit down, you talk too much, keep your distance, I'll send you to Europe!" My mom was a terrible parent of small children but a great parent of young adults. She'd talk to me as if I had some sense.

Maya Angelou

Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.

Malcolm X

Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand.