Parenting & Family Quote by Thomas Dekker

Dekker turns a domestic image into a sly warning about bad thinking: an argument should resemble the subject that “begets” it, the way a child bears the marks of its parent. The line lands because it treats logic as lineage. If the topic is messy, the argument can be knotty; if the topic is small, the argument shouldn’t inflate itself into grand theory. What Dekker mocks is the rhetorical orphan: a clever speech unmoored from the matter at hand, all style and no legitimate parentage.

The phrase “like children” also carries a period-specific edge. Early modern London was obsessed with inheritance, legitimacy, and reputation; the wrong parentage could shadow a life. Dekker borrows that anxiety to police intellectual conduct. An argument that doesn’t “look like” its subject is implicitly illegitimate, maybe even a bastard of vanity, faction, or opportunism. It’s a jab at the courtroom trickster, the pulpit scold, the tavern sophist - anyone who can spin a case irrespective of facts.

As a dramatist working in a city loud with pamphlet wars and public disputation, Dekker knew how easily words detach from truth and become performance. The sentence is itself performative: a neat, memorable simile that enacts the discipline it recommends. No ornamental digressions, no imported outrage. Just a compact demand that rhetoric answer to its source.