Parenting & Family Quote by Peter Ustinov

A single sentence, and Ustinov has already made you complicit in the joke: you’re meant to hear “four children” as a mildly outrageous number, then recognize the stereotype he’s dangling and puncturing in the same breath. The line works because it’s delivered like casual self-audit, a mock-serious bit of arithmetic that treats reproduction as a denominational sport. “Not bad” is doing heavy lifting here; it borrows the language of achievement and quietly suggests that family size is something you can win at, then undercuts the very premise with a wink.

The subtext is less about Catholics than about the social scripts people inherit. Mid-century British cultural life trafficked in tidy shorthand: Catholics have big families, actors have chaotic private lives, respectable people keep the numbers reasonable. Ustinov—cosmopolitan, polyglot, allergic to piety—leans into that shorthand to show how flimsy it is. He’s not confessing; he’s performing, turning biography into a one-liner that flatters the audience’s worldliness while exposing its lazy assumptions.

There’s also a sly reversal of moral accounting. In a culture where religious identity often policed sex and family, he frames fertility as a punchline, not a virtue or a burden. Coming from an actor, it’s a reminder that charm can smuggle critique: the joke is light, but the target is real. He makes prejudice sound quaint by making it funny, then leaves you noticing you laughed at a category.