“Man’s ideas change, but not his inherent nature.”
On Growing Up Tough (1970), "The Purple Lodge & The Hippies"
1970s-
Context: We, perhaps, have corrupted our children and our grandchildren by heedless affluence, by a lack of manliness, by giving the younger generation more money and liberty than their youth can handle, by indoctrinating them with sinister ideologies and false values, by permitting them, as young children, to indulge themselves in imprudence to superiors and defiance of duly constituted authority, by lack of prudent, swift punishment when the transgressed, by coddling and pampering them when they were children and protecting them from a very dangerous world — which always was and always will be. We gave them no moral arms, no spiritual armor.
In reality.... the nature of human beings never changes; it is immutable. The present generation of children and the present generation of young adults from the age of thirteen to eighteen is, therefore, no different from that of their great-great-grandparents.
Political fads come and go; theories rise and fall; the scientific ‘truth’ of today becomes the discarded error of tomorrow.
Man’s ideas change, but not his inherent nature. That remains. So, if the children are monstrous today – even criminal – it is not because their natures have become polluted, but because they have not been taught better, nor disciplined.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Taylor Caldwell 31
Novelist 1900–1985Related quotes

The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach (1965), Penguin Books, translated by Anna Bostock.

Callum Coats: Water Wizard
Viktor Schauberger: Our Senseless Toil (1934)
Source: Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920), p. 33
Context: The most significant change in a man is not the change in his bodily strength or mental capacity. The most marvelous and far-reaching change which man ever undergoes is in his moral character and spiritual nature.

Time and Individuality (1940)

“Such fire was not by water to be drowned,
Nor he his nature changed by changing ground.”
Né spegner può, per starne l'acqua, il fuoco,
Né può stato mutar, per mutar loco.
Canto XXVIII, stanza 89 (tr. W. S. Rose)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

“The biggest changes in a women's nature are brought by love; in man, by ambition”

“A man is as old as his arteries, and as young as his ideas.”
Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 4 : On Old Age