Parenting & Family Quote by Hannah More

Idleness is doing a lot of work here: it’s not merely “kids should stay busy,” but a moral diagnosis aimed at the household, the classroom, and the nation. Hannah More writes from a late-18th/early-19th-century British world in which character is treated as infrastructure. Her target isn’t leisure in the modern sense; it’s unregulated time, especially among the young, that slips beyond supervision and into appetite, gossip, resentment, and vice. By pairing “children” with “men,” she flattens the difference between immature misbehavior and adult moral failure, implying that the stakes of childrearing are identical to the stakes of civic order.

The phrase “root of all evil” borrows the cadences of Christian warning, but More’s most revealing move is the pivot to “ill temper.” That sounds small - crankiness, sulking, irritability - yet it’s strategic. Ill temper is the socially visible symptom that justifies intervention: you can’t always prove what a child did in their idle hours, but you can point to the sourness that follows. In that sense, the quote is a behavioral argument disguised as theology: keep bodies and minds occupied, and you’ll prevent the emotional frictions that disrupt families and communities.

There’s also class and gender subtext. “Idleness” had long been a charge leveled at the poor and at women deemed insufficiently “useful.” More’s moral program domesticated social anxiety, turning structural fears - disorder, dependency, unruliness - into a personal schedule problem. The rhetorical certainty of “no other evil more certain” gives the reader an actionable enemy: not temptation, not politics, but empty time.