Badinter Quotes & Sayings

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

From where they stood, they could see the castle. — Frank Yerby

You can spend many nights and even have lasting relationships with women you have nothing in common with other than being happy and horny to see each other. It does not need to be more complicated than that, and it can definitely be accomplished without dating a woman for weeks. A few hours are often enough, and sometimes less than one hour is. — W. Anton

I have kept journals at different times in my life. And a lot of my early notebooks became places where I would just think on the page, trying to parse what I was feeling, to find out what I was thinking. — Tracy K. Smith

Mothers with high ideals for child-rearing must pay the price for those ideals. — Elisabeth Badinter

Those who have taken a rather more pragmatic and individualist position on not having children tend to talk directly in terms of personal fulfillment. They have made a choice to live their lives in a particular way, associating motherhood with burden and loss - of freedom, energy, money, pleasure, intimacy, and even identity. A child is synonymous with sacrifice and frustrating, even repellent, obligations; it is perhaps a threat to the stability and happiness of one's relationships. They refer to themselves as "child-free" rather than childless because they are free of children and therefore of motherhood. — Elisabeth Badinter

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

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

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

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

Upon his tomb the Elvenking then laid Orcrist, the elvish sword that had been taken from Thorin in captivity. It is said in songs that it gleamed ever in the dark if foes approached, and the fortress of the dwarves could not be taken by surprise. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Childless couples, on the other hand, take pleasure in the advantages of being alone: living for each other, doing more things together than parents are able to do, paying more attention to the other person's feelings and desires. They see children as a possible threat to the harmony they are able to take for granted. — Elisabeth Badinter

In between the Queen and the First Lady, Nancy Reagan, sat Tony Richardson, looking very calm. Later on it emerged that this was because, having not been apprised of the placement until he was about to sit down, he had died of fright. To have expired was to be fortunate. — Clive James

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

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

I was so lucky to be working with amazing actors like Shia and Evan and James Buckley and Mads Mikkelsen and Rupert Grint and Til Schweiger and those guys, so you really want to make sure that they, that I don't have to shut off the camera because I'm running out of film or it becomes too expensive. — Fredrik Bond

Even though we live in an unfair world, where some men and nations acquire their wealth in ways that are not always as straightforward as we would like it to be, yet in the midst of it all, it is not impossible to discover principles and secrets for the greatness of nations. — Sunday Adelaja

I love that I never know who I'm going to meet next in New York. Sometimes I imagine all these millions of kids who have come here like jeweled doorknobs marked "turn me." It's an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of city. — Adele Griffin

According to American sociologist Kristin Park, who has reviewed most of the surveys carried out on child-free men and women in the last twenty years, the primary and most frequently cited reason for their decision (in 79 percent of surveys) is freedom. These people prized their emotional and financial autonomy, their freedom of movement, and their ability to take advantage of every opportunity for personal fulfillment. The second reason, mentioned in 62 percent of surveys, is marital happiness. After that came professional and financial considerations, fear of overpopulation, and lack of interest or a dislike of children. — Elisabeth Badinter

For a majority of women it remains difficult to reconcile increasingly burdensome maternal responsibilities with personal fulfillment. — Elisabeth Badinter

Trackers and hunters sworn to deepwood with clan names like Forrester and Woods, branch and bole. — George R R Martin

History is written by the rich, and so the poor get blamed for everything. — Jeffrey D. Sachs

Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition. — Siri Hustvedt

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

Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States
first,murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln. — H.L. Mencken