“The vitality of children is clean and honest. Their petty shortcomings derive, in ninety-nine out of a hundred instances, from their effete elders’ pettiness. Contagion is a generational fact. But children can develop defenses against their elders’ spiritual scurvy simply because they’re new.”

Source: A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (1975), Chapter 5, “Ambivalence: The Children of the Ouemartsee” (p. 93)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The vitality of children is clean and honest. Their petty shortcomings derive, in ninety-nine out of a hundred instance…" by Michael Bishop?
Michael Bishop photo
Michael Bishop 25
American writer 1945

Related quotes

Erik H. Erikson photo
Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Thornton Wilder photo
James Baldwin quote: “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
James Baldwin photo
Aldous Huxley photo
Derren Brown photo
Socrates photo

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Adapted from a passage in Schools of Hellas http://www.archive.org/stream/schoolsofhellasa008878mbp#page/n105/mode/2up, the posthumously published dissertation of Kenneth John Freeman (1907). The original passage was a paraphrase of the complaints directed against young people in ancient times. See the Quote Investigator article http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-children-in-ancient-times/.
see Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations Requested from the Congressional Research Service, Edited by Suzy Platt, 1989, number 195 http://www.bartleby.com/73/195.html. Last line: "Evidently, the quotation is spurious."
See also this Google Answers discussion http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=398104 about the topic.
Somewhat similar sentiments are in ( lines 961–985 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0241:card%3D961) of Aristophanes' The Clouds, a comedic play known for its caricature of Socrates. However, the lines are delivered by the character "Right" or "Just Discourse", not Socrates.
Misattributed

Frank Lloyd Wright photo

“The petty bias of personal taste can no longer hide either excrescence or spiritual poverty in the name of style.”

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American architect (1867-1959)

A Testament (1957)

Zhuangzi photo

Related topics