“Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?”
Stefan Zweig book Beware of Pity
Beware of Pity (1939)
“It is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.”
The Silver Chair (1953), Ch. 16: The Healing of Harms
The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956)
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Clive Staples Lewis272
Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist 1898–1963Related quotes
“Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.”
C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer
Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
Context: I've always believed that there is no subject that is taboo for the writer. It is how it is written that makes a book acceptable, as a work of art, or unacceptable and pornographic. There are many books circulating today, for the teen-ager as well as the grown up, which would not have been printed in the fifties. It is still amazing to me that A Wrinkle In Time was considered too difficult for children. My children were seven, ten, and twelve while I was writing it, and they understood it. The problem is not that it's too difficult for children, but that it's too difficult for grown ups. Much of the world view of Einstein's thinking wasn't being taught when the grown ups were in school, but the children were comfortably familiar with it.
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
1930s, Mortals and Others (1931-35)
“Dull grown-ups and bright children form a particularly tolerant friendship.”
Samuel R. Delany book Nova
Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 3 (p. 44)
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist
"An Unread Book," introduction to The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (Holt, Rinehart, 1965 edition)
General sources
George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist
From a review of Malcolm Muggeridge's The Thirties, in New English Weekly (25 April 1940)
Context: It is all very well to be "advanced" and "enlightened," to snigger at Colonel Blimp and proclaim your emancipation from all traditional loyalties, but a time comes when the sand of the desert is sodden red and what have I done for thee, England, my England? As I was brought up in this tradition myself I can recognise it under strange disguises, and also sympathise with it, for even at its stupidest and most sentimental it is a comelier thing than the shallow self-righteousness of the left-wing intelligentsia.
“Well, most grown-ups forget what it was like to be a kid. I vowed that I would never forget.”
Matt Groening (1954) American cartoonist
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 17e
