Melvin Konner famous quotes

Children are born as individuals. If we fail to see that, if we see them as clay to be molded in any shape we like, the tougher ones will fight back and end up spiteful and wild, while the less strong will lose that uniqueness they were born with.
-- Melvin Konner

#Strong #Children #Fighting

In order to be treated fairly and equally, chidren have to be treated differently.
-- Melvin Konner

#Order #Treated

If it's working, keep doing it. If it's not working, stop doing it. If you don't know what to do, don't do anything.
-- Melvin Konner

#Simplicity #Knows #Ifs

In a cross-cultural study of 173 societies (by Herbert Barry and L. M. Paxson of the University of Pittsburgh) 76 societies typically had mother and infant sharing a bed; in 42 societies they shared a room but not a bed; and in the remaining 55 societies they shared a room with a bed unspecified. There were no societies in which infants routinely slept in a separate room.
-- Melvin Konner

#Mother #Bed #Pittsburgh

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

#Mother #Flower #Sleep

It is almost intrinsically impossible for ideas about how we are fooling ourselves to gain an adequate hearing. We are good enough at it to keep them nicely at bay.
-- Melvin Konner

#Ideas #Adequate #Hearing

A touching and compassionate yet completely professional account of the psychological--indeed spiritual--dimensions of the doctorDpatient relationship that make the difference between fixing and healing.
-- Melvin Konner

#Spiritual #Healing #Differences

Intern is not just a gripping tale of becoming a doctor. It's also a courageous critique, a saga of an immigrant family living (at times a little uneasily) the American dream, and even a love story. A great read and a valuable addition to the literature—and I use the word advisedly—of medical training.
-- Melvin Konner

#Dream #Doctors #Training

Priests might divide the world into good and bad. In battle there was strong and weak and nothing else.

People are needed to take up the challenge, strong people, who proclaim the truth, throw it in people's faces, and do what they can with their own two hands.

I knew when I met you an adventure was going to happen.

I think that the young people today feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to their brothers and sisters because of the sacrifices that most families make to send their children to college.

Happy bridegroom, Hesper brings All desired and timely things. All whom morning sends to roam, Hesper loves to lead them home. Home return who him behold, Child to mother, sheep to fold, Bird to nest from wandering wide: Happy bridegroom, seek your bride.

When we look at a child, we see that sense of fullness, of intrinsic aliveness, of joy in being, is not the result of something else. There is value in just being oneself, it is not because of something one does or doesn't do. It is there in the beginning, when we are children, but slowly it gets lost.

The music had to be rooted, and yet had to branch out,like the wild imagination of a child.

Is there a chance? A fragment of light at the end of the tunnel? A reason to fight? Is there a chance you may change your mind? Or are we ashes and wine?

Though the object of being a Great Power is to be able to fight a Great War, the only way of remaining a Great Power is not to fight one.

At the same time the Muslims are commanded to exercise self-restraint as much as possible. Force is a dangerous weapon. It may have to be used for self-defense or self-preservation, but we must always remember that self-restraint is pleasing in the eyes of Allah. Even when we are fighting, it should be for a principle not out of passion.