Elisabeth Badinter Quotes

#1. Bombeck's Rug Rule: an ugly carpet will last for ever.

Erma Bombeck

#2. As far as intellectual training was concerned, my nine years from seven to sixteen were practically wasted.

Mary Augusta Ward

#3. I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark.

Anne Lamott

#4. For a majority of women it remains difficult to reconcile increasingly burdensome maternal responsibilities with personal fulfillment.

Elisabeth Badinter

#5. Be slow to judge for we know little of what has been done and nothing of what has been resisted.

Rudyard Kipling

#6. Sometimes it is not right to wait for the right train. Take any train instead of rotting at the station! In other words, be realistic!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#7. Conservatism is like plaque; even once scraped away, it builds up again to problematic levels, so that what is now permissible can yet again become taboo -

Steve Toltz

#8. There's magic in the water that draws all men away form the land, that leads them over hills, down creeks and streams and rivers to the sea.

Herman Melville

#9. The message is clear: a good mother breast feeds. Significantly, this good mother shares a sociocultural profile with women in other developed countries: she is over thirty, is a high earning professional, does not smoke, takes prenatal classes, and benefits from a long maternity leave.

Elisabeth Badinter

#10. The tyranny of maternal duty is not new, but it has become considerably more pronounced with the rise of naturalism, and it has thus far produced neither a matriarchy nor sexual equality, but rather a regression in women's status.

Elisabeth Badinter

#11. If you will excuse me, your coat lapels are badly twisted downward, where they have been grasped by the pertinacious New York reporters.

David Walton

#12. An unemployed father is always considered more detrimental to the family than an unemployed mother, and at the same time, child psychologists kept coming up with new responsibilities for parents that seemed to fall to the mother alone.

Elisabeth Badinter

#13. Childless people are always expected to explain themselves, although it would never occur to anyone to ask a woman why she became a mother (and to insist on getting good reasons)

Elisabeth Badinter

#14. Motherhood is still the great unknown. For some, it brings incomparable happiness and enriches their identity. Others manage as best they can to reconcile contradictory demands.

Elisabeth Badinter

#15. It's so hard to balance in our minds the knowledge that 'the world' is mundanely 'a planet.' The former is so holy; the latter merely a science project.

Douglas Coupland

#16. Yeah, well all I can say is that a half truth is a still a while lie, ain't it ...

Terry McMillan

#17. The truth is that a woman who chooses not to have children has generally engaged the question of a mother's responsibilities to a degree of seriousness not previously explored when motherhood was simply a natural necessity.

Elisabeth Badinter

#18. Increased responsibility for babies and young children has proved just as restrictive, if not more so, than sexism in the home or in the workplace.

Elisabeth Badinter

#19. The colored race saved to the noble women of New England and the middle States men on whom they lean today for security and safety. Many of my race, the representatives of these men on the field of battle, sleep in the countless graves of the South.

Hiram Rhodes Revels

#20. Mothers with high ideals for child-rearing must pay the price for those ideals.

Elisabeth Badinter

#21. The realities of motherhood are often obscured by a halo of illusions. The future mother tends to fantasize about love and happiness and overlooks the other aspects of child-rearing: the exhaustion, frustration, loneliness, and even depression, with its attendant state of guilt.

Elisabeth Badinter