Quotes about adult
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Cornelia Funke photo
Jasper Fforde photo
William Faulkner photo
Simone de Beauvoir photo

“What is an adult? A child blown up by age.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

A Woman Destroyed [Une femme rompue] (1967)
General sources

Rachel Carson photo
Paula Poundstone photo
Art Spiegelman photo

“Sometimes I don't feel like a functioning adult”

Art Spiegelman (1948) cartoonist from the United States

Source: The Complete Maus

Rick Riordan photo
Patrick Rothfuss photo
Mortimer J. Adler photo

“The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth.”

Mortimer J. Adler (1902–2001) American philosopher and educator

Source: How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

Neal Shusterman photo
Brian W. Aldiss photo

“When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of Hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Quoted in the Manchester Guardian (31 December 1977), and Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations (1988) https://web.archive.org/web/20000709051930/http://www.bartleby.com/63/90/4790.html edited by James B. Simpson; Says Who?: A Guide To The Quotations Of The Century (1988) by Jonathon Green, p. 17 http://books.google.com/books?id=xUwOAQAAMAAJ&q=%22When+childhood+dies,+its+corpses+are+called+adults%22&dq=%22When+childhood+dies,+its+corpses+are+called+adults%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KZO4U_WwFJSlqAaquoKoCg&ved=0CK0BEOgBMBk and The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1989), p. 45 http://books.google.com/books?id=bs0J36MpieIC&pg=PA45&dq=%22When+childhood+dies,+its+corpses+are+called+adults%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KZO4U_WwFJSlqAaquoKoCg&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=%22When%20childhood%20dies%2C%20its%20corpses%20are%20called%20adults%22&f=false

Maria Dahvana Headley photo
Daniel H. Wilson photo
Craig Claiborne photo
Brené Brown photo

“Are you the adult that you want your child to grow up to be?”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

John Steinbeck photo
Stephen King photo
Orson Scott Card photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Jodi Picoult photo
Elizabeth Wurtzel photo
Leo Rosten photo
Orson Scott Card photo
Thomas Szasz photo
Richard Dawkins photo
Philip Pullman photo
David Foster Wallace photo
Marian Wright Edelman photo
John Connolly photo
Lynda Barry photo
Rachel Caine photo
Harper Lee photo
Gillian Flynn photo
Arthur C. Clarke photo

“I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

1984: Spring (1984)
1980s

Darren Shan photo
Brian Selznick photo
Margaret Atwood photo
Jon Stewart photo

“I was born with an adult head and a tiny body. Like a 'Peanuts' character.”

Jon Stewart (1962) American political satirist, writer, television host, actor, media critic and stand-up comedian
Salman Rushdie photo

“Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.”

Source: Midnight's Children (1981)

Margaret Atwood photo
Hans Urs Von Balthasar photo
André Breton photo
Nick Hornby photo
Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
Laurie Halse Anderson photo
Markus Zusak photo
Richard Ford photo
Doris Kearns Goodwin photo

“An adult friend of Lincoln's: "Life was to him a school.”

Source: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

Rick Riordan photo
Jean Cocteau photo
Stephen King photo

“Adults are the real monsters.”

Source: It

“It's only adults who read the top layers most of the time. I think children read the internal meanings of everything.”

Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) American illustrator and writer of children's books

Source: The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to Present

André Breton photo
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs photo

“The prohibition of the expression of the sex drive, i. e., between consenting adults in private, lies outside the legal sphere.”

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) German jurist, writer and pioneer of LGBT human rights

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. The riddle of "man-manly love": the pioneering work on male homosexuality, Volume 2, Prometheus Books, 1994. p. 604

Ingrid Newkirk photo

“If anyone did that, I absolutely apologize. … Because everything we do is based at adults. We're asking adults be responsible. You were telling me about giving your children meat and milk. They're going to be to grow up to be tubs of lard. They're getting heart attacks.”

Ingrid Newkirk (1949) British-American activist

Interview on CNN's Crossfire http://www.animalrights.net/archives/year/2002/000094.html (2002); in response to Tucker Carlson's description of a PETA member campaigning directly to his four-year-old son outside a circus.
2002

Bel Kaufmanová photo

“A teacher is frequently the only adult in the pupil's environment who treats him with respect.”

Part VI, ch. 29 (Samuel Bester)
Up the Down Staircase (1965)

Daniel Levitin photo
Kenan Malik photo
Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark photo

“Often it is the case that it takes ‘just a little’ to help and support people, so they can help themselves. I have met adults and children, men and women, whose living conditions are difficult for us to imagine, but every time I come away inspired by their strength and will to improve their lives and provide a better life for their children.”

Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark (1972) Crown Princess of Denmark

Speech at the opening of Danida’s 50th anniversary exhibition in Bella Center; quoted on royal website http://kongehuset.dk/Menu/materiale/taler/speech-by-hrh-the-crown-princess-at-the-launch-of-danidas-50th-anniversary-exhibition-in (16 March 2012)

Jules Feiffer photo

“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)

Frank Klepacki photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“Q: Why is America the land of the overrated child and the underrated adult? Q: How can children grow up in a world in which adults idolize youthfulness? Q: What happens when the ad makers taker over all the popular myths and poetry?”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 141

Ehud Barak photo

“The Left is acting like a young child, saying 'I want peace'… A child says 'I want candy right away,' an adult takes all of the factors into account and understands who he's dealing with.”

Ehud Barak (1942) Israeli politician and prime minister

Barak Fights Labor MKs over Goldstone http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/134060 Israel National News, October 26, 2009.

Richard Cobden photo
Bryce Dallas Howard photo
Gene Wolfe photo

“The true dawn of adulthood, of intellectual maturity, if you like, is the realization that adults are all fools.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"The Pirates of Florida and Other Impossibilities", speech at the Conference on the Fantastic (1991), as published in Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction

Tim Shieff photo
Jane Roberts photo
Richard Dawkins photo
Jair Bolsonaro photo
Robert T. Bakker photo
William H. McNeill photo
Jim Gaffigan photo

“I liked the idea that my character was not gonna be the typical dumb guy that I play, typically. I also loved the fact that it was dealing with kind of adult-extended adolescence, which I think is always interesting -- a bunch of people that don't wanna grow up.”

Jim Gaffigan (1966) comedian, actor, author

On his character in My Boys — interview in Bob Kostanczuk (December 15, 2006) "From 'Pale Force' to 'My Boys' Region native Jim Gaffigan keeps comedy career chuggin' with new sitcom", Post-Tribune, p. D1.

Enoch Powell photo

“The immediate occasion for alarm is the government's announcement that British contractors for supplying armaments to our armed forces must in future share the work with what are called ‘European firms’, meaning factories situated on the mainland of the European continent. I ask one question, to which I believe there is no doubt about the answer. What would have been the fate of Britain in 1940 if production of the Hurricane and the Spitfire had been dependent upon the output of factories in France? That a question so glaringly obvious does not get asked in public or in government illuminates the danger created for this nation by the rolling stream of time which bears away the generation of 1940, the generation, that is to say, of those who experienced as adults Britain's great peril and Britain’s great deliverance. Talk at Bruges or Luxembourg about not surrendering our national sovereignty is all very well. It means less than nothing when the keys to our national defence are being handed over: an island nation which no longer commands the essential means of defending itself by air and sea is no longer sovereign…The safety of this island nation reposes upon two pillars. The first is the impregnability of its homeland to invasion by air or sea. The second is its ability and its will to create over time the military forces by which the last conclusive battle will be decided. Without our own industrial base of military armament production neither of those pillars will stand. No doubt, with the oceans kept open, we can look to buy or borrow from the other continents; but to depend on the continent of Europe for our arms is suicide.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech to the Birmingham branch of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers Association (18 February 1989), from Enoch Powell on 1992 (Anaya, 1989), pp. 49-50
1980s

Benjamin R. Barber photo
Robert Fulghum photo
Isaiah Berlin photo

“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)

Neal Boortz photo