Steven Moffat Quotes

In the short term, corporal punishment may produce obedience. But it is a fact documented by research that in the long term the results are inability to learn, violence and rage, bullying, cruelty, inability to feel another's pain, especially that of one's own children, even drug addiction and suicide, unless there are enlightened or at least helping witnesses on hand to prevent that development.

Burnt child fire dredth.

He beat me like he beat the children. Cept he don't never hardly beat them. He say, Celie, git the belt. The children be outside the room peeking through the cracks. It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear man.

I wanted to write something from a child's viewpoint... Five of the characters I have played in movies have either been abused or became abusers, themselves, and I just kind of felt like there was a need.

Sometimes I think we're exposed to things we shouldn't be exposed to too early. I think that sets the tone to a person's whole life. Trauma.

My mind boggles at the amount of violence inflicted upon children in today's society.

It's a universal truth that no parent wishes to acknowledge that the fear and phobias we are in thrall to in adulthood almost invariably connect back to childhood experiences.

The worst thing you could do is scare a kid or trick them. Never, ever, ever do that.

I was ten when I got my first serious beating. It was rough.

What distresses me at times is that I meet a lot of people in their 40's, 50's, 60's, who still say they're a victim of child abuse.

We must do everything in our power to cease the behaviour that makes children everywhere feel afraid.

It's as much fun to scare as to be scared.

It was traumatic for my children to see the British army en masse coming into our home and searching the house. I recall on one occasion, when our home was raided, my youngest son was standing at the top of the stairs - he would probably have been only three years of age - in his pyjamas. The soldiers came up the stairs, and he peed himself.

The big 'Aha!' moment is that the trauma never goes away.

The first 20 years had such a profound effect on me, I spent the next 20 dealing with them.

An abused childhood affects the entire life... It affects every facet of the life.

Sadomasochiasm - which we know very well doesn't exist in societies that don't have child abuse - is regarded some sort of natural sexual expression.

I'm a child who was abused. I know the difference. I clearly know the difference. The whipping for correction and then their child abuse.

When I was 5, someone thought it was smart to let me watch The People Under the Stairs. It might not have even been that scary, but I do remember skinned people in cages under the stairs and a man who lived in a wall without a tongue… and that’s why I cry after sex.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

I think I asphyxiated my children.

The knowledge that you were beaten and that this, as your parents tell you, was for your own good may well be retained (although not always), but the suffering caused by the way you were mistreated will remain unconscious and will later prevent you from empathizing with others. This is why battered children grow up to be mothers and fathers who beat their offspring

Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.

Every year I volunteer at a hospital on Thanksgiving, deep-frying turkeys in the children's burn unit. I do it just to see the looks on their little "faces."

When I was a child, fear was common to my life - fear of having nothing to eat, fear of the other children taunting me at school because I was illegitimate, and particularly fear of the big bombers appearing overhead and dropping their lethal bursts from the sky.