Spoiled Adults Quotes

…like the Greeks, I suppose. They made a big thing of hoodwinking the Germans, until recently, of course. The Germans suddenly turned round and told the poor Greeks that the game was up. Oh dear. … I can just imagine the mythical parallel. There are all the Greek gods on Mount Olympus, or wherever they liked to cavort - cavorting away and having a great time on borrowed funds from those northern gods - Thor, Odin and so on - who of course inhabit northern forests and mountains. Anyway, the Greek gods have a great time and then Thor and Freya and so on get all sniffy and tell them that they have to cut the whole thing out and move down the mountain and get a job, or whatever. A terrible row ensues, with thunderbolts being hurled. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Ender understood more than she said. Manipulation of gravity was one thing; deception by the officers was another; but the most important message was this: the adults are the enemy, not the other armies. They do not tell us the truth. ~ Orson Scott Card

Adolescents have a very rocky insecure time. Grown-ups treat them like children and yet expect them to act like adults. They give them orders like little animals, then expect them to react like mature, and always rational, self-assured persons of legal stature. ~ Beatrice Sparks

Forgetting the injustices and seeming injustices which one suffered from one's parents during childhood and youth must be the major part of any maturing process. I kept repeating this to myself, as though it were a lesson I would at some future time be accountable for. A certain oblivion was what we must undergo in order to become adults and live peacefully with ourselves. ~ Peter Taylor

A lot of negative words adults call the young, like 'naive,' 'impulsive' and 'way too connected online,' are all things we can turn into strengths to help us. ~ Adora Svitak

It was the gift that every girl dreams of, to be dead long enough for your parents to realize how meaningless their lives were without you, how they were suddenly and at once deeply sorrowed at all of the horrible injustices they caused you, how they had truly never appreciated your natural gifts of beauty and grace, being that their beautiful angel would have such a short time on earth and should have spent that time driving the restored 1965 convertible Mustang she had openly AND PUBLICLY desired. But nope, she spent her last, short, fleeting moments driving a 1980 Chevy Citation, every so clearly a GRANDMA car, with fake red-velvet upholstery, a hatchback, and an interior that smelled like spoiled milk and sometimes meat. Being temporarily run over by a car was the best present I had ever received, and I didn't even have to do anything dramatic to get it, like write a note or buy some rope. ~ Laurie Notaro

We have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us, and tell us that you really admire what we do.
We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back. ~ Greta Thunberg

I didn't normally talk this way: but sometimes you have to pretend to be an innocent child to learn something about the complicated world of adults. ~ Brock Clarke

It's better to build a peaceful child than re-build a violent adult. ~ Colman McCarthy

But here there were houses full of *stuff*, fancy sheets woven with silk floss as soft as a baby's bum; fancy washstands carved of dark wood that glowed like cherries where the light hit it; curtains the shade of the summer sky, heavy and glossy and smooth to the touch. The velvet-flocked wallpaper was so soft beneath her fingertips that had her eyes been closed, she might have thought she was brushing the belly of a rabbit.
And the stool in the corner! One wouldn't imagine you'd get too fancy with such a piece, but this stool was covered with embroidery so fine that her knuckles ached just looking at the stitches. Unbelievable. The rich even spoiled their arses! ~ Meredith Duran

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else's. ~ Aldous Huxley

I would not let an adult drive my robot. You don't have enough gaming experience. But I will let a kid with no license take control of my vehicle system. ~ Robert Ballard

Children rediscover their parents wisdom when they finally become adults themselves. ~ Charles Frazier

First off, I call them "children", not "kids". I am a child, and I am not ashamed to be one; time will cure this unfortunate condition. "Kid" is the cutesy name adults call children, because they think "child" sounds too scientific and clinical. I refuse to call myself by their idiotic pet name. Your grandmother might call you "Snugglepants Lovebotton", but that's not how you introduce yourself to strangers.
I also refuse to use terms like "teen", "tween", and etc. I find them patronizing and putrid. They are fake words, used to disguise the truth--that anyone under the age of eighteen is legally (and that's the only thing that matters) a child. ~ Josh Lieb

Whether people choose to have same sex relationships or relationships outside the marriage - whatever happens between two consenting adults should be purely their business, not the state's or the society's. ~ Kabir Bedi

I would say that [suffering] is different for all of us, but that it happens when we grow up, when we mature and pass from the childishness of our youthful tears, and become adults. I think that it is a part of growing up, learning to control our suffering. I think that when we grow up, and learn that happiness is rare, and passes quickly, we become disillusioned and hurt. And how much we suffer is a mark of how much we have been hurt by this realisation. Suffering, you see, is a kind of anger. We rage against the unfairness, the injustice of our sad and sorry lot. And this boiling resentment, you see, this anger, is what we call suffering. - Abdul Ghani ~ Gregory David Roberts

Although an increasing proportion of the Hispanic population is foreign-born - about half of adults in this group - English proficiency is and should remain a requirement for citizenship. ~ Linda Chavez

Children should always feel like the adults are living in this world to nurture them, to take care of them, to protect them from any bad thing that might come. ~ Chris Cornell

It is so demanding to be born into a house full of women, where everyone loves you so overwhelmingly that they end up suffocating with their love; a house where you, as the only child, have to be more mature than all the adults around ...
But the problem is that they want me to become everything they themselves couldn't accomplish in life ...
As a result, I had to work my butt off to fulfill all their dreams at the same time. ~ Elif Shafak

We all - adults and children, writers and readers - have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different. ~ Neil Gaiman

Most Americans, in their heart, are liberal and progressive. It's just a small minority of people who hate, they hate, they exist in the politics of hate, they don't believe two consenting adults should have the right to be in love and share their lives together and be legally protected by the state, ~ Michael Moore

In many countries, schools are preparing students to participate in a democratic environment; yet schools themselves tend to be extremely autocratic, with all high-level decisions being made by adults. ~ Adora Svitak

'Wipeout' is a giant obstacle course for adults of all shapes, sizes, and ages. Whoever wins takes home $50,000 and gets to brag to all of their coworkers that they made it out alive! ~ Jill Wagner

I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there. ~ Donna Tartt

But Moses could be hard too. And God can be hard." "Oh yes. God is good and just. He chastises us as we would chastise a child, for our own good." Ardon listened, but it was clear to Phinehas that he had shut his heart. "One of these days," he said, "you're going to grow up. Until you do, you're just a spoiled boy." Ardon was angry at his friend's words, but he did not argue, for he respected Phinehas, as did everyone. ~ Gilbert Morris

The best gardener is a baby killer. Baby insects are much easier to kill than adults, and haven't yet developed the big mouths and voracious appetite of the adolescent. ~ Janet Macunovich

A statement: children who watch violent TV programmes tend to be more violent when they grow up. But did the TV cause the violence, or do violent children preferentially enjoy watching violent programmes? Very likely both are true. Commercial defenders of TV violence argue that anyone can distinguish between television and reality. But Saturday morning children's programmes now average 25 acts of violence per hour. At the very least this desensitizes young children to aggression and random cruelty. And if impressionable adults can have false memories implanted in their brains, what are we implanting in our children when we expose them to some 100,000 acts of violence before they graduate from elementary school? ~ Carl Sagan

Surely no child, and few adults, have ever watched a bird in flight without envy. ~ Isaac Asimov

What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is in a way a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons: territoriality and aggression and dominance hierarchies. We are each of us largely responsible for what gets put in to our brains. For what as adults we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain we can change ourselves. Think of the possibilities. ~ Carl Sagan

You're sixteen years old. Trust me, relationships get a lot more complicated when you're an adult."
"Is this a friends-with-benefits situation?"
"Aren't you a little young to know about friends-with-benefits situations?"
"I didn't say I was partaking in them myself," Zach said. "But shockingly, yes, I have heard of scenarios in which adults engage in intercourse without riding off into the sunset together. ~ Julie James

I thought it very likely I might have this sort of untestable power myself. It was kind of logical--no good at sport, alrightish at my studies, there must have been some field in which I excelled. Magic had to be it.

It's difficult for adults to picture just what a grip these fantasies can take on a child. There's occasionally a reminder as a kid throws himself off a roof pretending to be Batman, but mostly the interior life of children goes unnoticed.

When I say I thought I could be a wizard, that's exactly true. I really did believe I had latent magical powers, and, with enough concentration and fiddling my fingers into strange patterns, I might suddenly find how to unlock the magic inside me.

I wouldn't call this a delusion, more a very strong suspicion. I'd weighed all the evidence, and that was the likely conclusion--so much so that I had to stop myself trying to turn Matt Bradon into a fly when he was jumping up and down on the desk in French saying, "Miss, what are mammary glands?" to the big-breasted Miss Mundsley. I feared that, if I succeeded, I might not be able to turn him back. It was important, I knew, to use my powers wisely.

There's nothing that you'd have to call a psychoanalyst in for here. At the bottom line my growing interest in fantasy was just an expression of a very common feeling--"there's got to be something better than this," an easy one to have in the drab Midlands of the 1970s. I couldn't see it, though. ~ Mark Barrowcliffe

When I first saw a picture of the crucifixion, I lost respect for my parents. I suddenly realised that this is what the adult world is like - full of cruelty and hypocrisy. ~ Vivienne Westwood

From a shamanic perspective, the psychic blockade that prevents otherwise intelligent adults from considering the future of our world - our obvious lack of future, if we continue on our present path - reveals an occult dimension. It is like a programming error written into the software designed for the modern mind, which has endless energy to spend on the trivial and treacly, sports statistic or shoe sale, but no time to spare for the torments of the Third World, for the mass extinction of species to perpetuate a way of life without a future, for the imminent exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves, or for the fine print of the Patriot Act. This psychic blockade is reinforced by a vast propaganda machine spewing out crude as well as sophisticated distractions, encouraging individuals to see themselves as alienated spectators of their culture, rather than active participants in a planetary ecology. ~ Daniel Pinchbeck

I am trying to come up with some "adult" reads, but I mostly read young adult fiction (my job), which, by the way is excellent. I will post about some of my favorites that should appeal to adult readers ~ Megan McCafferty

I grew up in a family that was multifaceted, sexually oriented, and pretty much open to everything. And because I was working, my friends were all adults. I had a tough time going to different schools because people knew me from films and I was the fat child who got beaten up every day. ~ Drew Barrymore

When you write for children and young adults, you have much more affect and influence on them than when you write for adults. The books that get us through our childhood stay with us for life. ~ O.R. Melling

Children, then, acquire social skills not so much from adults as from their interactions with one another. They are likely to discover through trial and error which strategies work and which do not, and later to reflect consciously on what they have learned. ~ Zick Rubin

[Young] adults who take gap years tended to be less motivated than their peers before the gap year. But after their gap year, most of them find new motivation. They had higher performance outcomes, career choice formation, improved employability, and a variety of life skills. The gap year can be seen as an educational process in which skills and critical reflection contribute to an individual's development. ~ Rich Karlgaard

With teenagers, the emotions are higher and things are more dramatic. That doesn't mean adults don't also act like children in their own way. ~ Sara Shepard

When it comes to expanding opportunity, businesses and young adults are not the sources of the problem - they are a substantial part of the solution. ~ Gerald Chertavian

Enmeshment creates almost total dependence on approval and validation from outside yourself. Lovers, bosses, friends, even strangers become the stand-in for parents. Adults like Kim who were raised in families where there was no permission to be an individual frequently become approval junkies, constantly seeking their next fix. ~ Susan Forward

Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child's need for sleep. ~ Stefan Zweig

I'm not a grownup, just a kid who has been around for a while. ~ Millie Florence

We sometimes observe that spoiled children contract a habit of annoying quite wantonly those who have charge of them, and seem tomeasure their own sense of well-being, not by what they do, but by the degree of reaction they can cause. It is vain to get rid of them by not minding them: if purring and humming is not noticed, they squeal and screech; then if you chide and console them, they find the experiment succeeds, and they begin again. The child will sit in your arms contented if you do nothing. If you take a book and read, he commences hostile operations. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

If parents want "success stories" to share at gatherings they should provide themselves with those, and they should not use their children for that purpose. ~ Lukasz Laniecki