Parenting & Family Quote by Samuel Butler

A line like this works because it flips the sentimental script: the people most invested in the idea of parenting are, Butler suggests, the least qualified to do it. The sting is in “ought.” He isn’t claiming parents can’t have children; he’s mocking the moral presumption that wanting to be a parent is evidence of fitness. It’s a Victorian-era jab at the way “family values” were already being used as social camouflage.

Butler’s subtext is basically an argument about power. Parents, in his view, aren’t neutral caretakers; they’re self-appointed governors with a captive citizenry. The household becomes a miniature state where authority is enforced as “love,” and conformity is sold as “character.” Calling parents “the last people on earth” casts parenting less as sacrifice than as a role that attracts exactly the wrong blend of vanity, anxiety, and need for control. The joke lands because it names an uncomfortable truth: raising children is one of the few arenas where amateurs are granted near-total jurisdiction over another human being.

Context matters. Butler made a career out of skewering Victorian certainties, and his own life sharpened the blade: he clashed bitterly with his clergyman father, rejected the pieties of respectable domestic life, and wrote against the moral machinery of his age. You can hear the anti-authoritarian pulse that runs through his work: suspicion of institutions, suspicion of inherited “wisdom,” suspicion of any system that demands obedience while calling itself virtue.

It’s also a sly warning. The sentimental myth of the naturally benevolent parent is convenient for society; it keeps the family beyond critique. Butler’s quip drags it back into the realm of accountability.