Parenting & Family Quote by Fran Lebowitz

Lebowitz swings this line like a switchblade: polite phrasing, lethal intent. “I must take issue” mimics the cadence of manners and committee meetings, then she detonates the real charge - the contempt packed into “mere.” The trick is that she refuses the usual hierarchy. Adults get the status, children get the diminutive. Lebowitz flips it, insisting the insult belongs to the grown-ups.

The subtext is less “kids are cute” than “adults are cowardly.” A “mere adult” is someone fully socialized into tedium: obsessed with propriety, frightened of looking foolish, trained to mistake seriousness for wisdom. Children, in her framing, aren’t angelic; they’re unedited. They ask bad questions, they say the quiet part out loud, they haven’t learned to launder their desires into respectable language. For a writer whose brand is impatience with hypocrisy, that’s not a sentimental preference - it’s an aesthetic one. She’s praising the unscripted.

Context matters: Lebowitz’s persona is the metropolitan curmudgeon, the New York observer who treats social life as a series of small frauds. The joke works because it arrives dressed as a formal objection, as if she’s correcting a point of etiquette, when she’s really issuing a moral verdict. It also smuggles in a critique of adulthood as performance: the adult world is full of people playing “adult” - managing impressions, networking, sanding down any sharp edge that might cost them a seat at the table. Lebowitz’s line suggests the most childish thing in the room is often the adult insisting on being taken seriously.