Most Popular Children's Book Quotes & Sayings

The battle against good and evil is raging now! Look at your television programming and movie advertisements presenting the occult ... the demonic ... the satanic ... the practice of witchcraft and sorcery in popular books ... the open hostility toward Christianity and the revival of anti-Semitism. The fight is on for the hearts and minds of our children in ours homes, our schools, our universities, and our society. — John Hagee

The best and most popular novelists do not, as a rule, have children in their books at all, and this is wise. Parents are about the only people who are interested in children, and they merely in their own ones. — E.M. Delafield

It is quite reasonable to subscribe both to the old saw that no good girl was ever ruined by a book and to the perception that it is not good for children to be constantly exposed to the sexual violence in our popular culture. Protecting children seems to me logically, legally, and rather easily differentiated from censorship ... — Molly Ivins

When English author Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty, in the late nineteenth century, she said that her aim was to "induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses." Though now considered a children's classic, the book was originally intended for an adult audience. Narrated from the horse's point of view, the novel describes Black Beauty's life, from his earliest memory, of "a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it" to his wretched existence pulling a heavy load for a cruel peddler. The sentimental and emotionally wrenching book was wildly popular, quickly becoming a bestseller first in England and then in the United States, where it became a favorite of the progressive movement. Sewell's book was the first to popularize interest in the plight of the horse and to generate widespread concern about the beast of burden's treatment. — Elizabeth Letts

[W]e have reason to ask what artists are working specially for children, and whether they are running with the popular tide or saying something special.... In America, we had the 'parlor gift book' makers, but we also had Howard Pyle. — Louise Seaman Bechtel

I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it. — Edith Wharton