Parenting & Family Quote by Guy Laliberte

Guy Laliberte isn’t selling escapism as a guilty pleasure; he’s framing it as a latent human need with a price tag and a purpose. “Inside every adult there’s still a child that lingers” works because it flatters the audience without insulting their intelligence: you’re not naive, you’re simply overdue for wonder. The line quietly reframes adulthood as a kind of deprivation, a life stage where imagination survives but goes underfed. That sets up the second move, the more revealing one: “We’re happiness merchants.”

Calling it “merchants” is the tell. It’s a candid admission that joy can be engineered, packaged, and sold - not as fraud, but as craft. Laliberte’s context is the rise of Cirque du Soleil, a global entertainment empire built on turning circus into high art and adult nightlife into a sanctioned playground. The quote is basically a business model in two sentences: identify a universal psychological residue (the “lingering child”), then offer a premium experience that safely reactivates it.

The subtext is equal parts generosity and strategy. “Giving people the opportunity to dream like children” sounds altruistic, but it also shifts responsibility: they’re not handing you happiness, they’re providing the conditions for it. That’s a clever defense against cynics who dismiss spectacle as empty calories. Laliberte implies that the transaction is ethical because what’s being sold isn’t distraction, it’s permission - permission to suspend irony, to feel awe in public, to be moved without apology. In an era when sophistication often means detachment, he’s arguing that wonder is a form of sophistication too.