Parenting & Family Quote by Daniel H. Hill

A career soldier urging children toward "love love love" lands like a small, deliberate provocation. Daniel H. Hill is not a pastor or a poet by trade; he’s a man shaped by command, hierarchy, and the grim arithmetic of war. That makes the triple repetition feel less like decoration and more like insistence - a verbal drumbeat. He’s trying to overwrite something. Not ignorance, but reflex: the cultural training that defaults to suspicion, rivalry, and hardness.

The line’s simplicity is its tactic. Hill doesn’t specify love of what, exactly, because specificity would invite argument: love of God, love of country, love of neighbor, love within the family. By keeping it open, he turns "love" into a kind of civic and moral solvent, something that can be poured into multiple containers. Repeating the word three times performs urgency and scarcity, as if love is not assumed in the world he knows - it must be drilled, the way discipline is drilled.

The subtext is partly corrective and partly strategic. A soldier has seen what happens when children grow into adults trained only in obedience and grievance; he has watched communities fracture into enemies. "Let our children be taught" shifts the responsibility to institutions and parents, hinting that love is not merely felt, it is cultivated - and that a culture can choose what it reproduces.

Context matters: Hill’s 19th-century America was soaked in moral instruction, sectarian certainty, and looming or remembered conflict. In that climate, an appeal to love reads as both a plea and a warning: the next generation won’t drift into tenderness by accident.