“We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master.”

The chief symptom of adolescence is a state of expectation, a tendency towards creative work, and a need for the strengthening of self-confidence.

The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

In the first three years of life, the foundations of physical and also of psychic health are laid. In these years, the child not only increases in size but passes through great transformations.

To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator.

The development of language is part of the development of the personality, for words are the natural means of expressing thoughts and establishing understanding between people.

The adolescent must never be treated as a child, for that is a stage of life that he has surpassed.

It is fortunate, I think, that nature is not bounded by human reason and by laboratory work and experimentation, for by the laws of pure reason and by microscopic investigation, it might easily have been proved, long before this, that children could not be born.

The child, merely by going on with his life, learns to speak the language belonging to his race. It is like a mental chemistry that takes place in the child.

If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.

No, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was.

This is the age in which language and movement develop. The child must be safeguarded in order that these activities may develop freely.

The ability to see reality in form, in color, in proportion, to be master of the movements of one’s own hand – that is what is necessary.

The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.

The social relations which are the basis of the reproduction of the species are founded upon the continuous union of parents in marriage.

Suddenly, the child becomes very sensitive to the rudeness and humiliations which he had previously suffered with patient indifference.

It would be so simple to allow children, when tired of sitting, to rise, and when tired of writing, to desist, and then their bones would not be twisted.

When I go up there, which is my intention, the Big Judge will say to me, Where are your wounds? and if I say I haven’t any, he will say, Was there nothing to fight for?

I’m going to tell kids the way things really were.

I’m always afraid someone’s going to tap me on the shoulder one day and say, ‘Back to North London’.

If things like that are going to ruffle your feathers, don’t bother doing the job.

When I get there I am not going to be asked, ‘Why weren’t you Moses? Why weren’t you David?’ I am only going to be asked, ‘Why weren’t you Zuscha? Why weren’t you fully you?'”

If you are not going to produce albums then you are not going to produce new fans. It’s impossible.

And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.

Making music is still what keeps a fire going on in me.