Parenting & Family Quote by Kingsley Amis

Amis lands the joke like a paperweight: of course people are terrible, they began as children. The line flips our usual sentimentality. Childhood is supposed to be innocence, a moral alibi. Amis treats it as the original contamination - not because kids are uniquely wicked, but because they are uniquely unformed: needy, self-absorbed, loud with appetites and short on empathy. The punch is in the mock-logical phrasing ("It is no wonder...") as if he’s offering a calm sociological finding while smuggling in a cranky verdict on human nature.

The subtext is classic Amis: contempt for pieties, impatience with softness, and a suspicion that civilization is a thin varnish we spend our lives repainting. Calling children the starting point of "horrible" adults needles two modern myths at once: that people are naturally good until society ruins them, and that the child is a sacred figure who grants meaning to adult life. Amis implies the opposite: adulthood is an uphill negotiation with the worst raw materials of the self.

Context matters. Postwar British culture was busy refurbishing its own moral story after catastrophe, and the mid-century novel often took aim at public sincerity. Amis, a patron saint of the anti-pretentious, uses comedy as a disinfectant. The line isn’t an argument against children so much as against our taste for comforting narratives. It works because it sounds like a quip and behaves like a diagnosis: if people disappoint you, stop acting surprised - we all started out as small tyrants.