Science Quote by John B. S. Haldane

Haldane’s line lands with the cool bite of a scientist who has spent too long in rooms full of credentialed mediocrity. It’s not just a compliment to children; it’s an indictment of adulthood as a social institution that rewards conformity over curiosity. “Fairly bright” is doing sly work here: he’s not romanticizing prodigies or innocence. He’s saying you don’t even need genius to outshine the average grown-up; you just need an unbroken habit of thinking.

The subtext is evolutionary in the cultural sense. Adults, in Haldane’s world, are often “adapted” to committees, careers, and polite consensus. They learn the survival skills of status: hedging, posturing, repeating whatever passes as common sense in their class. A bright boy hasn’t yet been fully trained into those rituals. He asks inconvenient questions, follows a line of reasoning past where it becomes socially comfortable, and treats ideas as things to play with rather than positions to defend. That’s the “better company” part: intelligence as liveliness, not IQ.

Context matters. Haldane was a polymath and public intellectual in a century of bureaucratized expertise, mass politics, and catastrophic propaganda. He watched how easily adults could be organized into certainty. The quote reads like a small, acid remedy: prefer the person still capable of genuine wonder and directness over the adult who’s learned to sound right while thinking less.