Parenting & Family Quote by Dennis Potter

Dennis Potter doesn’t dress this up as a regrettable exception or a moral lesson; he states it like a diagnosis. The repetition - "very cruel, yes. Of course" - is doing more than emphasis. It’s a preemptive strike against the sentimental reflex that children are naturally innocent and that harm only arrives later, imported by “society.” Potter’s cadence mimics the tone of a weary adult who’s tired of being corrected by that myth. By the time he lands on "extraordinarily cruel little creatures", the shock isn’t just the insult; it’s the implication that cruelty can be native, even ordinary, long before we acquire adult ideologies.

As a dramatist, Potter is interested in the small, intimate violences that polite culture prefers to outsource to villains. Children’s cruelty is often social rather than sadistic: the quick scanning for weakness, the group instinct to isolate a target, the untrained enjoyment of power with no legal or reputational consequences. Calling them "little creatures" strips away the halo and reframes childhood as a rough ecosystem - less cherub, more pack animal. It’s unsparing, but not purely contemptuous; there’s an undercurrent of bleak realism about how people are made.

Contextually, Potter’s work keeps returning to memory, shame, class, illness, and the way early humiliations fossilize into adult identity. This line reads like a key to his dramatic engine: the past isn’t quaint, it’s predatory. The cruelty isn’t just what children do; it’s what adults spend decades translating into scars, jokes, and self-protective narratives.