Quotes by Benjamin Spock


Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do.
– Benjamin Spock
What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble?
– Benjamin Spock
When women are encouraged to be competitive, too many of them become disagreeable.
– Benjamin Spock
What good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best after all.
– Benjamin Spock
There are only two things a child will share willingly communicable diseases and its mother's age.
– Benjamin Spock
The child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering.
– Benjamin Spock
I would say that the surest measure of a man's or a woman's maturity is the harmony, style, joy, and dignity he creates in his marriage, and the pleasure and inspiration he provides for his spouse.
– Benjamin Spock
Happiness is mostly a by-product of doing what makes us feel fulfilled.
– Benjamin Spock
Every child senses, with all the horse sense that's in him, that any parent is angry inside when children misbehave and they dread more the anger that is rarely or never expressed openly, wondering how awful it might be.
– Benjamin Spock
All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.
– Benjamin Spock