Parenting & Family Quote by Cyril Connolly

Connolly’s line has the clean, surgical confidence of a journalist who distrusts grand moral posturing and prefers origin stories. He refuses to treat hate as a mysterious evil or a political “tribal” instinct; he drags it back to a humiliating beginning: fear. The bite is in the sequence he insists on - consequence, before, becomes. Hate isn’t a lightning strike. It’s a habit, a learned reflex that starts as self-protection and hardens into identity.

The child-to-man example is doing more than illustrating a point; it’s a miniature social theory. Noise is trivial, almost comic, which is exactly why it’s effective. By choosing something mundane, Connolly implies that the machinery of hatred doesn’t require ideological stakes. It can grow from the smallest private discomforts, then masquerade as principle. The adult “hates noise” not because noise is morally wrong, but because he’s built a life around controlling what once overwhelmed him.

Subtextually, Connolly is warning how easily personal anxieties get moralized. Fear is admitted reluctantly; hate is worn proudly. One is vulnerability, the other is performance - a stance that can be rationalized, shared, organized. In Connolly’s 20th-century British milieu, with mass politics turning fear into propaganda fuel, that matters: hatred becomes the public language of private panic.

The final transformation - “becomes a man” - lands as indictment. If you don’t interrogate your fears early, they don’t fade; they mature, acquire vocabulary, and start calling themselves taste, reason, or even virtue.