Love Quote by Desmond Tutu

Children, in Tutu's hands, aren’t sentimental props; they’re moral instruments. Calling them a "wonderful gift" opens with the familiar warmth of pastoral language, then he pivots: children "see into the heart of things" and "expose sham and humbug". That turn matters. He’s not praising kids for innocence so much as for their unwillingness to collaborate in adult fictions. The line frames childhood as a kind of truth-telling technology: blunt perception, low tolerance for hypocrisy, an instinctive radar for what doesn’t match what it claims to be.

The diction is doing quiet political work. "Sham and humbug" are old-school words for fraudulence, but they land like a verdict, not a complaint. Coming from a leader shaped by apartheid-era South Africa, Tutu’s subtext reads as: oppressive systems depend on rehearsed lies, and the young can puncture them with a single untrained question. Adults learn to rationalize injustice; children often just name the discomfort. That’s why authoritarians fear classrooms, why propagandists work early, why public virtue-signaling has to be taught.

There’s also a pastoral sting directed inward. Tutu, a cleric and public conscience, knew that institutions with lofty missions can become expert in their own self-excusing rhetoric. The quote flatters children, but it indicts grown-ups: if kids can spot "humbug", then the rest of us are often choosing not to. In that choice sits his real intent: to treat moral clarity not as a rare saintly achievement, but as something we once had and can reclaim.