Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Fulghum

A handful of kindergarten rules, delivered like a scolding and a blessing, and that’s the trick: Fulghum smuggles moral philosophy into the plainest possible language. “Play fair” sounds like playground etiquette, but it’s really a theory of civic life. Fairness isn’t framed as a lofty ideal; it’s a basic operating system. You don’t need a constitution to understand it, just a memory of games where someone cheated and the whole thing collapsed.

“Don’t hit people” lands with almost comic bluntness, a phrase adults usually reserve for children precisely because it feels too obvious to need repeating. Fulghum repeats it anyway, implying the adult world is full of sanctioned hitting: war, policing, domestic harm, verbal cruelty, institutional violence. The line’s power comes from its refusal to dignify any of that with complicated justifications. It treats violence as a failure of imagination, not a sophisticated instrument.

“Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody” is the quiet hinge. He doesn’t say “when you’re wrong,” but “when you hurt,” shifting ethics from intent to impact. That’s a surprisingly modern move: accountability over self-exoneration. The subtext is that remorse is not a private feeling but a social repair mechanism, the simplest technology we have for keeping community intact.

Fulghum’s broader context - his late-20th-century project of extracting adult wisdom from childhood lessons - works because it flatters no one. It dares grown-ups to admit how often we still need the rules we pretend we’ve outgrown.