“Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.”
Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas
As quoted in The Listener (1978)
“This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere - that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness.”
The Precession of Simulcra, The Hyperreal and the Imaginary
1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
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Jean Baudrillard64
French sociologist and philosopher 1929–2007Related quotes
“I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.”
Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist
“It is not size or age or childishness that separates children from adults. It is "responsibility."”
Jules Feiffer (1929) American cartoonist, screenwriter and playwright
The Great Comic Book Heroes http://books.google.com/books?id=zxbuAAAAMAAJ&q=%22It+is+not+size+or+age+or+childishness+that+separates+children+from+adults+It+is+responsibility%22&pg=PA75#v=onepage (1965)
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
“[…] Tradition is not a childish and outmoded mythology but a science that is terribly real.”
Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher
Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist
"On Three Ways of Writing for Children" (1952) — in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1967), p. 25
Context: Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author
Nobel lecture as quoted in The Observer (17 December 1978) Variant: "They still believe in God, the family, angels, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other obsolete stuff."
