Quotes & Sayings About Infants

I find no change of consequence in grown people, I do not miss the dead. It does not surprise me to hear that this friend or that friend died at such and such a time, because I fully expected that sort of news. But somehow I had made no calculation on the infants. It never occurred to me that infants grow up ... These unexpected changes, from infancy to youth, and from youth to maturity, are by far the most startling things I meet with. — Mark Twain

To bed, to bed; sleep kill those pretty eyes,
And give as soft attachment to thy senses,
As infants empty of all thought. — William Shakespeare

Pedialyte's a super-Gatorade that they give infants when they're dehydrated. It's on all our riders now. Drink a liter of grape Pedialyte and no hangover. The guys from Pantera taught us that trick. — Sully Erna

He told me that a German doctor named Wolff figured it out in the 1800s by studying X-rays of infants' hips as they transitioned from crawling to walking. "A whole new evolution of bone structure takes place to support the mechanical loads associated with walking," said Lang. "Wolff had the great insight that form follows function." Alas, Wolff did not have the great insight that cancer follows gratuitous X-raying with primitive nineteenth-century X-ray machines. — Mary Roach

There is growing consensus that new parents need help
information, advice, practical assistance
and that infants and toddlers need stimulation as well as care and nurture. — Sheila Kamerman

The gremlin mob turned on Root, and when they saw the triple-barreled blaster on his hip, they kept right on turning. Root grabbed the microphone from behind the desk, and hauled it out to the extent of its cable. "Now hear this," he growled, his gravelly tones echoing around the terminal. "This is Commander Root of the LEP. We have a serious situation above ground, and I would appreciate cooperation from all you civilians. First, I would like you all to stop your yapping so I can hear myself think!" Root paused to make certain his wishes were being respected. They were. "Secondly, I would like every single one of you, including those squawling infants, to sit down on the courtesy benches until I have gone on my way. Then you can get back to griping or stuffing your faces. Or whatever else it is civilians do." No one had ever accused Root of political correctness. No one was ever likely to either. — Eoin Colfer

He's fine. He's fine,' he kept saying as the baby became ever more cranky and bewildered; screaming in terror if she tried to put him down.
'Why should he be unhappy?' she wanted to say. 'He has had so few days in this world. Why should the unhappiness start here? — Anne Enright

There's something illiberal about the way infants are thrust into the hands of people who have no idea what they're doing, who can only experiment. — Adam Haslett

The watchful mother tarries nigh, though sleep has closed her infants eyes. — John Keble

it is not dancing toy animals that are an endless source of delight for infants, but rather having control. — Barry Schwartz

Shamefully, human beings are the only mammals to separate mothers from their infants. Dr. John Krystal,
Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobiology at the Yale School
of Medicine, described the impact of maternal separation on
the infant as 'profound', citing the recent discovery that the
autonomic activity (heart rate and other involuntary nervous
system activity) of two-day-old sleeping babies is 176 per
cent higher during maternal separation. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

She wished Felix and Jay were babies again, though they were never babies at the same time, and she wished she could have been a baby with them, too, that they could all lie in a thoughtless baby lump, void of all responsibilities and knowledge, without history, just soft skin and fat, piled on each other like puppies, mother and children, impossibly all infants at the same time. She — Catherine Lacey

From an evolutionary perspective, nothing could be worse for a male than to eliminate his own progeny. It's assumed, therefore, that nature has provided males with a rule of thumb to attack only infants of mothers with whom they have had no recent sex. This may seem foolproof for the males, but it opens the door for a brilliant female counterstrategy. By accepting the advances of many males, a female can buffer herself against infanticide because none of her mates can discard the possibility that her infant is his. In other words, it pays to sleep around. — Frans De Waal

Others work among the spirits that have just arrived in the world of spirits. Again others raise the children who have died in infancy. Swedenborg ensures the parents of these infants that 'All children whether born within or outside of the church, are adopted by the Lord and become Angels'. — Emanuel Swedenborg

Even when adults do feel their safety to be threatened, we may not be able to see this on the surface. Infants will react in a fashion as if they were endangered, if they are disturbed or dropped suddenly, startled by loud noises, flashing light — Abraham Maslow

Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature. (1 Cor. 14:20) — Matt Chandler

One cannot watch chimpanzee infants for long without realizing that they have the same emotional need for affection and reassurance as human children. — Jane Goodall

Many Christians wonder if it is good for children to have them in the regular service. After all, they cannot understand what is going on. But imagine saying that you're not going to have toddlers sit at the table for meals with the family because they do not understand the rituals or manners. Or keeping infants isolated in a nursery with nothing but mobiles and squeaky toys because they cannot understand the dialogue of the rest of the family around them. We know, instinctively, that it's important for our children to acquire language and the ordinary rituals of their family environment in order to become mature. — Michael S. Horton

The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. — Omar Nelson Bradley

But was that not the task you set me? To defend the helpless against the strong?" "Indeed it was Master Weed. But who is to say who is helpless, and who is strong?" ... "If you seek the power to alter fate, you must also bear responsibility for the consequences. For you cannot change the fate of only one being; all fates are intertwined." "I performed the task," I protest. "I did what you bid me do." "You defended the weak from the strong." Larkspur speaks as if from far away. "But who will defend these poor weak infants against you!? — Maryrose Wood

I'm just an innocent racist who likes to flirt with young adult women And I meet emotionally retarded misfits who are kinky about infants' feet, scheming psychopaths, suicidal emos, brain dead skinheads and mestizos posing as white supremacists. — Greg Deane

Was it a friend or foe that spread these lies; Nay, who but infants question in such wise, twas one of my most intimate enemies. — Dante Gabriel Rossetti

It is a strange thing how quickly our bodies die. How fragile a force our presence is. In an instant the soul is gone - leaving an empty, insignificant vessel in its stead. I have read of those sent to the gallows and guillotines of Europe. I have read of the great war of ages past and men slaughtered by the tens of thousands. And we give but fleeting consideration to such deaths, for it is our nature to banish such thoughts. But in doing so, we forget that they were each as alive as we, and the one length of rope - or bullet - or blade, took the whole of their lives in that one, fragile instant. Took their earliest days as swaddled infants, and their grayest unfulfilled futures. When one think of how many souls have suffered this fate in all of history - of the untold murders of untold men, women and children.. it is too much to bear. — Seth Grahame-Smith

When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which we inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort. But burying infants, we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends, and the little infant graves that edge the corners and fencerows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that grief. Some sadnesses are permanent. Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams. — Thomas Lynch

There were twin double beds, each covered with bright-gold spreads that had been tucked under the pillows and then pulled over them, so the pillows looked like the corpses of infants. — Stephen King

She turned to him with wide, shocked eyes. "Why did he..."
His lips twitched. No coarse language in front of the infants limited the ability to discuss the fountain of baby piss that had just arced halfway across the room.
"Twasn't you, darling. It's one of their favorite bath-time games.
"Something about the cool air on their naked...berries," he substituted at the last second....
"Do I have piddle in my hair?" she whispered, her eyes sparkling with laughter above her flushed cheeks.
"Not much," he assured her with a straight face. "You look almost becoming."...
"Decades from now, when our children ask how I fell in love with their mother, I'll say 'twas her sweet, gentle compliments during bath-time, and her fleetness of foot whilst dodging a flow of --- — Erica Ridley

The scientific study of the vital relationship between infants and their mothers was started by upper-class Englishmen who were torn from their families as young boys to be sent off to boarding schools, where they were raised in regimented same-sex settings. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

It is not necessary that faith and repentance should always precede baptism. They are only required from those whose age makes them capable of both. It will be sufficient, then, if, after infants have grown up, they exhibit the power of their baptism. - John Calvin — John Calvin

Almost nobody believes anymore that infants are insensate blobs. It seems both mad and evil to deny experience and feeling to a laughing, gurgling creature. — Paul Bloom

Infants need the most sleep, and, what is more, get it. Stunning them with a soft, padded hammer is the best way to insure their getting it at the right times. — Robert Benchley

how bold these infants are before the throne of God? No one is bolder in the Kingdom of Heaven: Lord, you granted us life, they say to God, and just as we beheld it, you took it back from us. And they beg and plead so boldly that the Lord immediately puts them in the ranks of the angels. And therefore,' said the saint, 'you, too, woman, rejoice and do not weep. Your infant, too, now abides with the Lord in the host of his angels. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Like infants with their mothers, we're helpless before the God who feeds us, cares for us and embraces us with even greater devotion than that of a loving mother with nursing babies." Does a nursing babe have to "be good" to earn that love-to deserve that tender, intimate feeding? No. He has only to open his mouth and be fed.
And so with us.
My — Rachel Marie Stone

Navajo infants get so attached to cradleboard that they cry to be tied into it. Kikuyu infants in Kenya get handed around several"mothers," all wives to one man ... Mothers in rural Guatemala keep their infants quiet, in dark huts. Middle-class American mothers talk a blue streak at them. Israeli kibbutz mothers give them over to a communal caretaker ... Japanese mothers sleep with them ... All these tactics are compatible with normal health
physical and mental
and development in infancy. So one lesson for parents so far seems to be: Let a hundred flowers bloom. — Melvin Konner

The extra time and trouble required to follow Dr. Bob's alternative schedule are hard to justify unless the dangers of contracting infectious diseases early in life are minimized and the dangers of vaccinating early in life are exaggerated. Much of The Vaccine Book is devoted to this minimization and exaggeration. Tetanus is not a disease that affects infants, according to Dr. Bob, Hib disease is rare, and measles is not that bad. He does not mention that tetanus kills hundreds of thousands of babies in the developing world every year, that most children will encounter the bacteria that causes Hib disease within the first two years of their lives, and that measles has killed more children than any other disease in history. — Eula Biss

You see how many are the benefits of baptism, and some think its heavenly grace consists only in the remission of sins, but we have enumerated ten honors [it bestows]! For this reason we baptize even infants, though they are not defiled by [personal] sins, so that there may be given to them holiness, righteousness, adoption, inheritance, brotherhood with Christ, and that they may be his [Christ's] members — Saint John Chrysostom

There are so many ways to characterize evolutionary success. If one criterion is the number of millions of years that the species persists, we're still just infants. We're way too young of a species to tell if we were a creative fluke or if we have any staying power. — Greg Graffin

The only American soldier convicted in the [My Lai Massacre in Vietnam], Lieutenant William Calley, served three months under house arrest. What the massacre drove home to me was that Oriental life was not terribly valuable. You could extinguish hundreds of Orientals - unarmed villagers, farmers, women, toddlers, infants - and the penalty would be napping and watching television in your apartment for twelve weeks. — Alex Tizon

O LORD, our Lord, your majestic name fills the earth! Your glory is higher than the heavens. 2 You have taught children and infants to tell of your strength,[*] silencing your enemies and all who oppose you. 3 When I look at the night sky and see the work of your fingers - the moon and the stars you set in place - 4 what are mere mortals that you should think about them, human beings that you should care for them?[*] 5 Yet you made them only a little lower than God[*] and crowned them[*] with glory and honor. 6 You gave them charge of everything you made, putting all things under their authority - 7 the flocks and the herds and all the wild animals, 8 the birds in the sky, the fish in the sea, and everything that swims the ocean currents. 9 O LORD, our Lord, your majestic name fills the earth! — Anonymous

Mistaken
regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human
life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as
are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the
unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race. — Madison Grant

Holy spirits, you walk up there
in the light, on soft earth.
Shining god-like breezes
touch upon you gently,
as a woman's fingers
play music on holy strings.

Like sleeping infants the gods
breathe without any plan;
the spirit flourishes continually
in them, chastely kept,
as in a small bud,
and their holy eyes
look out in still
eternal clearness.

A place to rest
isn't given to us.
Suffering humans
decline and blindly fall
from one hour to the next,
like water thrown
from cliff to cliff,
year after year,
down into the Unknown. — Friedrich Holderlin

Gass once wrote: "Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the raveling cosmos. — Dan Simmons

Both Jews and Muslims believe that salt protects against the evil eye. The Book of Ezekial mentions rubbing newborn infants with salt to protect them from evil. The practice in Europe of protecting newborns either by putting salt on their tongues or by submerging them in saltwater is thought to predate Christian baptism. In France, until the practice was abolished in 1408, children were salted until they were baptized. In parts of Europe, especially Holland, the practice was modified to placing salt in the cradle with the child. — Mark Kurlansky

Infants manners are moulded more by the example of Parents, then by stars at their nativities. — George Herbert

Whence arose all the horrid assassinations of whole nations of men, women, and infants, with which the Bible is filled; and the bloody persecutions, and tortures unto death, and religiosu wars, that since that time have laid Europe in blood and ashes; whence arose they, but from this impious thing called religion, and this monstrous belief that God has spoken to man? — Thomas Paine

Learning organizations are possible because, deep down, we are all learners. No one has to teach an infant to learn. In fact, no one has to teach infants anything. They are intrinsically inquisitive, masterful learners who learn to walk, speak, and pretty much run their households all on their own. — Peter M. Senge

Whatever happens to a baby contributes to the emotional and perceptual map of the world that its developing brain creates. As my colleague Bruce Perry explains it, the brain is formed in a "use-dependent manner."5 This is another way of describing neuroplasticity, the relatively recent discovery that neurons that "fire together, wire together." When a circuit fires repeatedly, it can become a default setting - the response most likely to occur. If you feel safe and loved, your brain becomes specialized in exploration, play, and cooperation; if you are frightened and unwanted, it specializes in managing feelings of fear and abandonment. As infants and — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

WHEN I LOOK UP again, the paintings in my foyer, my Madonnas, bring a mirthless smile to my lips. The idealization of motherhood. All of them gazing at their infants, or staring inauspiciously down at me. — E.L. James

It is a spiritually impoverished nation that permits infants and children to be the poorest Americans. — Marian Wright Edelman

The drops (polio vaccine) were designed,said these believers. Their intention and effect was genocidal. Nobody was to swallow them, or administer them to infants. Within months, polio was back ... — Christopher Hitchens

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. — Omar Nelson Bradley

If infants are ready to do something, they will do it. In fact, when they are ready, they have to do it. — Magda Gerber

Byron; and, realistically, quite a number of those infants will die without my care, and Josephine is hardly a creature with potential, hardly anybody's idea of a tabula rasa, a blank slate - hell, she's a slate that's had bad math scrawled on it and then been waxed so that nothing can ever be written on it again. I've treated sheep that had more of a right to live. — Tim Powers

FRYING-PAN, n. One part of the penal apparatus employed in that punitive institution, a woman's kitchen. The frying-pan was invented by Calvin, and by him used in cooking span-long infants that had died without baptism; and observing one day the horrible torment of a tramp who had incautiously pulled a fried babe from the waste-dump and devoured it, it occurred to the great divine to rob death of its terrors by introducing the frying-pan into every household in Geneva. Thence it spread to all corners of the world, and has been of invaluable assistance in the propagation of his sombre faith. — Ambrose Bierce

An obvious example of this reverse causation would be pregnant women, who are driven to fatten by hormonal changes. This hormonal drive induces hunger and lethargy as a result. In the context of evolution, these expanded fat stores would assure the availability of the necessary calories to nurse the infants after birth and assure the viability of the offspring. — Gary Taubes

Children under five are the poorest age group in America, and one in four infants, toddlers and preschoolers are poor during the years of greatest brain development. — Marian Wright Edelman

The Highlanders regale themselves with whisky. They find it an excellent preservation against the winter cold. It is given with great success to the infants in the confluent smallpox. — Tobias Smollett

[My] excursions provided a unique opportunity for observing [the gorillas' behavior] in their natural habitat ... Then, all too soon, the infants were demanded for their trip to the zoo ... [H]appily the babies did not know they would never see their mountain home again — Dian Fossey

As a Jew and a psychologist, I understand the stress that religious communities feel in connection with questioning of circumcision ... I raise these questions out of deep caring and compassion, for our community generally, and our male infants in particular. We are inflicting, generally, unrecognized harm with circumcision, and the perpetuation of this harm is far greater a concern than the discomfort that comes from confronting the advisability of this practice. Many Jews who do not circumcise in North America, South America, Europe, and Israel support this view. — Ronald Goldman

Extrapolating from the statistical growth of the legal profession, by the year 2035 every single person in the United States will be a lawyer, including newborn infants. — Michael Crichton

What infants need is the opportunity and time to take in and figure out the world around them. — Magda Gerber

Not until Freud's writings became popular did descriptions of infants center on relationships with their mothers. The idea that children have feelings of any lasting importance for their development is a very recent invention (or insight if you wish). — Sandra Scarr

While infants will sync with the human voice regardless of language, they later become habituated to the rhythms of their own language and culture ... humans are tied to each other by hierarchies of rhythms that are culture-specific and expressed through language and body movement. — Edward T. Hall

We discovered, like infants opening their eyes for the first time, that God's coming upon earth out of love for us had radically changed the world, because he had remained with us. As we walked about the city, or traveled to different cities and countries, it was not the beautiful and interesting things around us that attracted us. Not even Rome's wonderful monuments and precious relics seemed so important. Rather, what gave a sense of continuity to our journeying through the world for Jesus, was His Eucharistic presence in the tabernacles we found wherever we went. — Chiara Lubich

Every soul that is born into flesh is soiled by the filth of wickedness and sin ... In the Church, baptism is given for the remission of sins, and, according to the usage of the Church, baptism is given even to infants. If there were nothing in infants which required the remission of sins and nothing in them pertinent to forgiveness, the grace of baptism would seem superfluous — Origen

Asita wasn't hungry this day, however. There were other ways to keep the prana, or life current, going. If he did visit the demon loka, it would take enormous prana to sustain his body. There would be no air for his lungs to breathe among the demons.
He allowed the brilliant Himalayan sun to dry his body as he walked above the tree line. Demons do not literally live on moun-taintops, but Asita had learned special powers that allowed him to penetrate the subtle world. He had to get as far away as possible from human beings to exercise these abilities. The atmosphere was dense around population. In Asita's eyes a quiet village was a seething cauldron of emotions; every person - except only small infants - was immersed in a fog of confusion, a dense blanket of fears, wishes, memories, fantasy, and longing. This fog was so thick that the mind could barely pierce it. — Deepak Chopra

We are all born rude. No infant has ever appeared yet with the grace to understand how inconsiderate it is to disturb others in the middle of the night. — Judith Martin

Children and babies should be held in the most sacred regard. We feel that they're the most natural and true magicians. — Zeena Schreck

All of us learned how to walk by failing. — J.R. Rim

If it wasn't a chaotic scene, if it was an orderly evacuation, we would be able to give you specifics about what our preferences would be, such as evacuating first the disabled, then the elderly and infants. That would of course be our preference. But the reality on the scene does not permit that. We're going to do the best we can with the resources we have. — David Catania

My Tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint. Because they have been such a little time with us, they seem to hold to life but weakly. I used to wonder if it was so because the memory of Heaven still lived within them, so that in leaving here they do not fear death as we do, who no longer know with certainty where it is our spirits go. This, I thought, must be the kindness that God does for them and for us, since He gives so many infants such a little while to bide with us. — Geraldine Brooks

Instead of being a static one-time event, bonding is a process, a dynamic and continuous one. Thus, a reciprocal, loving attachment is still realizable even when early contact is delayed
as it is for many mothers and their prematurely born infants, or when illness of either the newborn or the mother intervenes. — Julius Segal

Rationally considered, nothing can be more absurd than the baptism of infants under any circumstances. No statement, no matter by whom it may be said to have been uttered, can make that true which is radically false. If an innocent child, unconscious of good or evil, irresponsible to God and man, incapable of thought or action, is not already, in accordance with Christian theology, a member of Christ, then no vicarious promise or priestly ablution can make him one. For if this were so, a similar ceremony under devil worship could make him a member of Satan. — Tennessee Celeste Claflin

NICUs are like the bowels of the technological underworld. They are places where infants are literally held captive for weeks and months and subjected to all manner of painful and torturous medical procedures, most of the time without being given any form of pain relief whatsoever. — Jeanice Barcelo

The Garden
En robe de parade.
- Samain
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anaemia.
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion. — Ezra Pound

They decided to allow their baby to be born. What they did not realize is that they themselves were the ones who would be 'born,' infants in a new world where magic is commonplace, Harvard professors are the slow learners, and retarded babies are the master teachers. — Martha N. Beck

Imagine that the world had created a new 'dream product' to feed and immunize everyone born on earth. Imagine also that it was available everywhere, required no storage or delivery, and helped mothers plan their families and reduce the risk of cancer. Then imagine that the world refused to use it. — Frank A. Oski

I don't know what I would have done if they had hugged me. I probably would have frozen in place, become stiff. It took most of my life to overcome my distaste for physical contact and not to stiffen when I was touched, or flinch, twitch, fidget, and eventually figure out how to move away. I learned to accept being hugged by my children when they were infants. Their joy at seeing me enter a room was real and filled with true love and affection and it showed in their embraces. Like a convert, when I learned the joy and comfort of being hugged by and hugging those I loved, I became a regular practitioner. — John William Tuohy

Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, a night on the town, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep ... music is a part of the fabric of everyday life. — Daniel Levitin

We may rest assured that God would never have suffered any infants to be slain except those who were already damned and predestined for eternal death. — John Calvin

Only idiots and infants need things. The language of needs is the native tongue of socialists, therapists, and paternalists of all sorts and is addressed to needy dependents. The language of wants is spoken by self-respecting adults and is addressed to other self-respecting adults. — Thomas Szasz

It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life. — Augustus Hare

Once we ask why it should be that all human beings - including infants, the intellectually disabled, criminal psychopaths, Hitler, Stalin, and the rest - have some kind of dignity or worth that no elephant, pig, or chimpanzee can ever achieve, we see that this question is as difficult to answer as our original request for some relevant fact that justifies the inequality of humans and other animals. — Peter Singer

Where do we end, and what is the self? You cut off your arm, you're still yourself. You cut off two of your arms, you're still yourself. You cut off your arms and your legs, you're still yourself, right? Also, the idea of the self seems to be embedded right around here, right around the eyes. Infants know to look at the eyes. — Mike Cahill

(as a single woman in my early thirties, I was careful not to coo excessively over other people's infants, lest it seem like I was telegraphing my desperation; the necessity of this precaution annoyed me, making me want to defiantly announce that I'd always liked babies, — Curtis Sittenfeld

Laws must be efficaciously deterrent in nature, and in grave offences where offenders trespass the precincts of being a human, and commit crimes against even babies/infants/children; solely for beastly gratification, deserve no mercy. — Henrietta Newton Martin Legal Consultant

Fireflies were the souls of unbaptized dead infants. — Barbara W. Tuchman

My stories are my children. Some are sweet infants that I coddle and care for. Others are old enough now, they need to damn well get a job! — Christy Hall

Cyprian was not issuing a new decree but was keeping to the most solid belief of the Church in order to correct some who thought that infants ought not be baptized before the eighth day after their birth ... He agreed with certain of his fellow bishops that a child is able to be duly baptized as soon as he is born. — Saint Augustine

Crying, that is, sobbing is the earliest and deepest way to release tension. Infants can cry almost from the moment of birth, and do so easily following every stress that produces a state of tension in the body ... Human beings are the only creatures who can react in this way to stress and tension. Most probably, they are the only ones who need this form of release. — Alexander Lowen

Although all new talkers say names, use similar sounds, and prefer nouns more
than other parts of speech, the ratio of nouns to verbs and adjectives varies
from place to place (Waxman et al., 2013). For example, by 18 months, Englishspeaking infants speak far more nouns than verbs compared to Chinese or Korean
infants. Why?
One explanation goes back to the language itself. The Chinese and Korean
languages are "verb-friendly" in that verbs are placed at the beginning or end of
sentences. That facilitates learning. By contrast, English verbs occur anywhere in
a sentence, and their forms change in illogical ways (e.g., go, gone, will go, went).
This irregularity may make English verbs harder to learn, although the fact that
English verbs often have distinctive suffixes (-ing, -ed) and helper words (was, did,
had) may make it easier (Waxman et al., 2013). — Kathleen Stassen Berger

Infants have around 30,000 tastebuds, only about a third of which survive into adulthood, so a child's sensitivity towards extremes of sweet, sour and bitter flavours is heightened. — Yotam Ottolenghi

We should naturally expect that the baptism of infants, if enjoined at all, would have been enjoined in the law which instituted the ordinance of Christian baptism. But this law is silent on the subject of infants. — Adoniram Judson

Carpe Infans!
Beware Babies
There is no other human so seductive that an otherwise rational human will feed, clothe, sit up nights, work trigonometry with, bake cookies for, and generally tolerate for such long extents of time for such paltry returns of goods and services. They are a trap for the unwary ... all of us. — W. Clark Boutwell

I can't convince myself that it does much good to try to challenge the everyday political delusions and dementias of Americans at large. Their contained and confined mentalities by far prefer the petty and parochial prisons of the kind of sense they have been trained and rewarded for making out of their lives (and are punished for deviating from them). What it costs them ultimately to be such slaves and infants and ideological zombies is a thought too monstrous and rending and spiky for them even to want to glance at. — Kenny Smith

In the darkness you could hear the crying of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men. Some prayed for help. Others wished for death. But still more imagined that there were no Gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness. — Pliny The Younger

The most important educational need of the child is to feel himself worthy of love and a worthy dispenser of love. If infants learn what love is, they can go through life with sanity and happiness. — Herbert Ratner

Why am I an atheist? I ask you: Why is anybody not an atheist? Everyone starts out being an atheist. No one is born with belief in anything. Infants are atheists until they are indoctrinated. I resent anyone pushing their religion on me. I don't push my atheism on anybody else. Live and let live. Not many people practice that when it comes to religion. — Andy Rooney

Without history we are infants. Ask what binds the British Isles more closely to America than to Europe and only history gives a reply. Of all intellectual pursuits, history is the most supremely useful. That is why people crave it and need ever more of it. — Simon Jenkins

We live in a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We have solved the mystery of the atom and forgotten the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about dying than we know about living. — Omar N. Bradley

All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes. Mathematicians go backward and forward from one world to another. They're adults in the crystalline world, infants in the real one. — Sylvain Cappell