Daily Inspiration Quote by Lorraine Hansberry

Hansberry’s line flatters the naive only to recruit it as a weapon. “Children see things very well sometimes” isn’t a cute ode to innocence; it’s an indictment of the adult world’s trained blindness. Children, in her work, notice what society works hard to normalize: humiliation that gets renamed “custom,” exclusion that gets called “policy,” fear that hides behind “good manners.” The qualifier “sometimes” matters. She’s not romanticizing childhood as pure truth. She’s pointing to those flashes when perception hasn’t yet been bribed by comfort.

Then she pivots: “and idealists even better.” Idealism is usually dismissed as unserious, a luxury belief. Hansberry reframes it as a sharpened form of seeing. The idealist isn’t someone who ignores reality; it’s someone who refuses the reality that’s been packaged as inevitable. That’s the subtext: cynicism is not sophistication. Cynicism is often compliance wearing a smirk.

Context gives the line its bite. Writing in mid-century America, Hansberry watched “realism” used to discipline demands for racial justice, housing access, and basic dignity. Be practical, they said. Be patient. Her plays, especially A Raisin in the Sun, expose how that rhetoric keeps power intact: the so-called realists urge you to accept the rules precisely when the rules are immoral.

The sentence works because it pulls off a quiet reversal. It elevates two groups adults love to patronize - children and idealists - and implies they might be the clearest-eyed people in the room. Seeing well becomes an ethical act, not just an optical one.