Parenting & Family Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Holmes slips a compliment to children inside a rebuke of adults, and the line lands because it refuses to flatter grown-up society. “Pretty much” is the tell: not an absolute, but a weary estimate from someone who’s watched respectable people sand down their opinions into manners. The joke is sharp, not cute. If honesty mostly belongs to children, then adult “truth” has been professionalized into something safer: tact, diplomacy, euphemism, the well-bred art of not quite saying what you mean.

The subtext is that innocence isn’t just moral purity; it’s informational freedom. Children tell the truth because they haven’t learned the social tariffs that come with it. They haven’t internalized the penalties for naming the obvious, puncturing vanity, or noticing the contradictions adults rely on to keep the room calm. Holmes, a physician-poet steeped in 19th-century Boston decorum, understood how heavily a culture can invest in appearances. In that world, “honesty” often got recast as rudeness, and silence was treated as character.

The line also carries a quieter, more unsettling implication: we train truthfulness out of people. Childhood candor is not merely a phase; it’s a resource that gets managed, disciplined, and redirected into “appropriate” channels. Holmes isn’t arguing that children are wiser. He’s arguing that they’re less compromised. The barb isn’t aimed at kids; it’s aimed at the adult bargain that trades accuracy for belonging.