Sacred Trust

There is no trust more sacred than the one the world holds with children.
There is no duty more important than ensuring that their rights are respected,
that their welfare is protected, that their lives are free from fear and want
and that they can grow up in peace.
– Kofi Annan,
former Secretary-General of the United Nations

Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together,
and if you continue to use the labor of children as the
treatment for the social disease of poverty,
you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.
–  Grace Abbott

Every gun that is made, every warship launched,
every rocket fired signifies is, 
in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists,
the hopes of its children.
–President Dwight David Eisenhower

Hundreds of millions of children spend their 
childhood working and do not have an opportunity to
play, go to school, or live in a healthy environment.

There is no room for complacency when 215 million children
are still laboring to survive and
more than half of these are exposed to the
worst forms of child labor, including slavery and
involvement in armed conflict.
We cannot allow the eradication of child labor
to slip down the development agenda.
All countries should be striving to
achieve this target, individually and collectively.
– Juan Somavia,
former Director-General of the International Labour Organization

Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and
dolphins from tuna nets,
the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.
– Anna Quindlen