Buck Rogers

Not to diminish the quote ....I think it is good at pointing out perspective(which I am a big fan of) but...

Misbehaving Children in Ancient Times

Dear Quote Investigator: There is a great quote by Plato or Socrates about the misbehavior of children in antiquity that I read in the New York Times. The quote shows that the problems between generations are not just a recent occurrence. Instead, the conflicts between parents and offspring are timeless [NY8]:
The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.
I wanted to use this quote, so I needed to know who said it; however, the NYT website contained a surprise. The newspaper had retracted the quote and now there was a note that said “Its origin is unclear, although many researchers agree that Plato is not the source.” I am sure I have seen this quote before. Can you tell me where it came from and who said it?

Quote Investigator: The quote is so entertaining and it fills its niche so well that it is cited repeatedly around the globe. Over the decades the quotation or a close variant has appeared in newspapers such as: Oakland Tribune of California in 1922; The Bee of Danville, Virginia in 1946; Winnipeg Free Press of Manitoba, Canada in 1976; The Sunday Herald of Chicago, Illinois in 1982; the Sun-Herald of Sydney, Australia in 2005; and the Taipei Times of Taiwan in 2008 [SOC1-SOC6]. The words are usually attributed to Socrates and the confusion with Plato is understandable because Plato’s dialogues are the primary source of knowledge concerning Socrates.

QI has determined that the author of the quote is not someone famous or ancient.



It was crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907. Freeman did not claim that the passage under analysis was a direct quotation of anyone; instead, he was presenting his own summary of the complaints directed against young people in ancient times. The words he used were later slightly altered to yield the modern version. In fact, more than one section of his thesis has been excerpted and then attributed classical luminaries. Here is the original text [CAMB]:
The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. …

Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs. They tyrannised over the paidagogoi and schoolmasters.
Not everyone misquoted and misattributed the work of Kenneth John Freeman. In an essay published in 1912 an educator named James J. Walsh of Fordham University properly credited Freeman and did not modify his text. Walsh used the excerpts in an address to fellow educators at the Schoolmasters’ Club of New York in 1911 [WAL].

In 1921 Munsey’s magazine reprinted a passage from Walsh’s essay and gave him credit. However, all of the excerpted text was actually from Freeman’s original work. The quotation in Munsey’s excised a section of Freeman’s text and combined two passages to create one [MUN]. In 1922 Freeman’s words were firmly reattached to Socrates in the Oakland Tribune [SOC1].

In the 1960s the publisher Malcolm Forbes attempted to determine the true origin of the quotation, but the investigation of his magazine was unsuccessful as discussed in the reference Respectfully Quoted. Now thanks to the Google Books archive the mystery is solved.