"The young are generally full of revolt, and are often pretty revolting about it"
About this Quote
Youth rebellion always sells itself as destiny; McLaughlin’s jab reminds you it can also be theater. The line pivots on a tidy linguistic trap: “full of revolt” sounds noble, even romantic, until she flips it into “revolting,” turning righteous dissent into something vaguely messy, self-indulgent, and hard to be around. It’s not an argument against protest so much as a skeptical note about the way protest can become a personality.
As a journalist and aphorist writing in mid-century America, McLaughlin had front-row seats to generational churn: postwar conformity cracking into civil rights agitation, Vietnam-era dissent, and the recurring moral panic about “kids these days.” Her wit cuts both ways. She grants the premise that the young are primed for revolt - energy, impatience, a low tolerance for hypocrisy - while puncturing the sanctimony that often accompanies it. The subtext: being correct about what’s broken doesn’t automatically make you charming, strategic, or even effective.
The sentence works because it compresses a whole adult ambivalence into one calibrated insult. It’s affectionate and irritated at once, the tone of someone who can’t deny the necessity of disruption but also can’t pretend that disruption is always articulate, informed, or humane. McLaughlin’s real target is the romance of rebellion as self-justification: a reminder that moral heat is not the same thing as moral clarity, and that righteous anger, performed badly, can curdle into mere noise.
As a journalist and aphorist writing in mid-century America, McLaughlin had front-row seats to generational churn: postwar conformity cracking into civil rights agitation, Vietnam-era dissent, and the recurring moral panic about “kids these days.” Her wit cuts both ways. She grants the premise that the young are primed for revolt - energy, impatience, a low tolerance for hypocrisy - while puncturing the sanctimony that often accompanies it. The subtext: being correct about what’s broken doesn’t automatically make you charming, strategic, or even effective.
The sentence works because it compresses a whole adult ambivalence into one calibrated insult. It’s affectionate and irritated at once, the tone of someone who can’t deny the necessity of disruption but also can’t pretend that disruption is always articulate, informed, or humane. McLaughlin’s real target is the romance of rebellion as self-justification: a reminder that moral heat is not the same thing as moral clarity, and that righteous anger, performed badly, can curdle into mere noise.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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