Parenting & Family Quote by Evelyn Waugh

Waugh lands the punch with a velvet glove: the sentence starts as a moral admonition and ends as a biological threat. "Don't hold your parents up to contempt" sounds like the kind of piety that props up family respectability; then he flips it into self-preservation. The real warning isn not that contempt is rude, but that it is reckless, because contempt presumes distance. Waugh reminds you that the distance may be imaginary.

The sly engine here is the phrase "just possible". It pretends to soften the blow while sharpening it. Of course you may take after them; the understatement lets the reader do the humiliating math. Waugh's comedy is never merely decorative. It smuggles in a darker claim: we use disdain for our parents as a way to narrate our own superiority, to treat our origins as a bad neighborhood we escaped. His line punctures that self-myth with hereditary and social determinism: your parents are not only people you judge, they are a forecast.

Context matters because Waugh wrote in a Britain obsessed with class performance, pedigree, and the anxious policing of "good breeding" - themes that run through his fiction as both satire and lament. The jab is aimed at youthful modern confidence, the belief that taste and identity are chosen rather than inherited. The subtext is almost theological in its cynicism: pride is funniest, and most dangerous, when it forgets where it came from.