Birthday Parties

Famous quotes containing the words birthday parties, birthday and/or parties:

    “Since mothers are more likely to take children to their activities—the playground, ballet or karate class, birthday parties—they get a chance to see other children in action.... Fathers usually don’t spend as much time with other people’s kids; because of this, they have a narrower view of what constitutes “normal” behavior, and therefore what should or shouldn’t require parental discipline.”
    —Ron Taffel (20th century)

    “It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator—our very self-consciousness—is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.”
    —Annie Dillard (b. 1945)

    “Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a “taxing- machine;” to the contented, a “machine for securing property.” Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable.”
    —Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)