Parenting & Family Quote by Kingsley Amis

Amis lands the punch by dressing cruelty up as logic. "No wonder" signals the mock-serious tone of a man about to offer an explanation so obvious it becomes ridiculous. Then he delivers the twist: the cause of human awfulness is that we "started life as children". The line works because it reverses the usual sentimental narrative in which childhood is innocence and purity, the moral alibi that makes adults forgivable. Amis treats childhood less as Eden than as training ground for pettiness, entitlement, humiliation, and fear - the raw materials of later viciousness.

The subtext is anti-romantic and anti-therapeutic before those became cultural defaults. He is skeptical of self-help consolations and the tidy story that trauma neatly explains character. Yes, childhood shapes you, but Amis's joke suggests something harsher: the very condition of being small, dependent, and socially powerless encourages strategies that scale up badly. Kids learn to bargain, perform, bully, flatter, and compete for scarce attention; adults just get better tools.

Context matters because Amis, a postwar British novelist with a satirist's appetite for hypocrisy, is allergic to pieties. In Lucky Jim and beyond, he skewers institutions that pretend to be civil while rewarding small-mindedness. This aphorism shrinks the timeline: society's failures aren't aberrations that arrive later; they're baked in at the nursery. It's funny because it's bleak, and it's bleak because it refuses to grant anyone the comforting myth of an uncorrupted beginning.