Parenting & Family Quote by John Mortimer

Mortimer’s line is a provocation dressed up as a diagnosis: he takes aim at a habit of speech that passes for realism and reframes it as sabotage. “Worst fault” is deliberately hyperbolic, the kind of overstatement that invites an argument and, in doing so, smuggles in his real concern: class isn’t only a structure of wages and schools, it’s a structure of expectations, rehearsed at the kitchen table.

The phrasing “telling their children” makes the transmission intimate and routine, not ideological. It’s not a manifesto; it’s a bedtime story with the wrong moral. Mortimer is pointing at the quiet pedagogy of discouragement, how a protective instinct (“don’t get your hopes up; the world won’t let you”) can harden into a prophecy that children then live inside. The subtext is unsentimental: oppression doesn’t only arrive from above; it can be internalized, repeated, even loved as “common sense.”

Context matters. Mortimer wrote from a Britain where class mobility was both a public promise and a private joke, where the welfare state expanded opportunity even as accents, networks, and inherited confidence still gated the future. His jab also carries an author’s bias: the successful outlier warning the group against the very coping strategies that helped them endure. That tension is the quote’s electricity. It’s not a denial of material barriers; it’s a critique of the moment those barriers become identity, when caution becomes a family tradition and ambition is treated as betrayal.