Life & Wisdom Quote by Vera Brittain

“Politics” here isn’t the noble civic ideal; it’s the day-to-day machinery of power behaving like a badly supervised adolescence. Vera Brittain’s line lands because it treats immaturity not as a private flaw but as something that gets promoted, budgeted, and enforced. The sting is in “executive expression”: childish impulses don’t just exist in voters or dinner-table arguments, they get translated into policy, uniforms, borders, and punishments. Petty rivalries become diplomatic doctrine. Hurt pride becomes national interest. Fear gets a press office.

Brittain’s context matters. As a writer shaped by World War I and its aftermath, she watched supposedly grown-up institutions turn vanity and grievance into catastrophe, then narrate it as destiny. Her broader moral project - pacifist, feminist, suspicious of heroic mythmaking - makes the quote less a sneer than an indictment: the “immaturity” she’s naming is a cultivated political style, rewarded because it mobilizes people fast. Adolescence is good at choosing sides; it’s bad at ambiguity, compromise, and long memory. Democracies and empires alike can be tempted by that clarity, especially in crisis.

The subtext is also personal and gendered. Brittain knew how often public life codes aggression as “strength” and caution as “weakness,” a bias that keeps the playground logic in charge. The line works because it reframes politics as emotional management: the question isn’t who has power, but whose emotional development is running the state.