Here are a few quotes I collected from this site. (I recommend the site for anyone not convinced on the circumcision issue--although I say this with the disclaimer that it has actual photos...) I believe these quotes can apply to a lot more than routine infant circumcision though...the cesarian epidemic, early weaning, separating babies from their parents, CIO (crying it out)...the list goes on and on.
"Tradition will accustom people to any atrocity." --George Bernard Shaw
"Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to waste and destroy." --Henri de Lubac
"As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities." --Voltaire
"Often the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it." --Mark Twain
"What's done to children they will do to society." --Karl Menniger
"The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children." --Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect." --Mark Twain
"Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm." --Hippocrates
"We shall have to learn to refrain from doing things merely because we know how to do them." --Theodore Fox, Spech to Royal Physicians
"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom." --Bertrand Russell
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." --Friedrich Nietzsche
"What history teaches us is that men have never learned anything from it." --Georg Wilhelm Hegel
"It is never too late to give up your prejudices." --Henry David Thoreau
"All truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Then it is violently opposed. Finally, it is accepted as self-evident." --Arthur Schoepenhauer
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead
"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day." --Thomas Jefferson
"Each time a person stands up for an idea, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." --Robert F. Kennedy
"[A] long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason." --Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed; - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!" --Frederich Nietzsche
"It's not the facts which guide the conduct of men, but their opinions about the facts; which may be entirely wrong. We can only make them right by discussion." --Sir Norman Angell
I love them! Thank you so much for sharing!
ReplyDeleteYes, thank you for sharing these:-)
ReplyDeleteThese are great for intactivism and so many other important natural parenting causes.
The Theodore Fox and the Bertrand Russell are my favorites. I might put the Theodore Fox one on my Facebook.
ReplyDeleteI know that is why I had to fight to have a vaginal birth with my twins. And fear did lead all of my doctors to do everything they did, those doctors should thank God everyday nothing was wrong with my girls...they really could have made it much worse. That's why all my babies from her on out will be born right here at home.