Parenting & Family Quote by William Feather

Feather’s line lands like a parental scolding that suddenly boomerangs back at the parent. The surface joke is tidy: children, caught red-handed, don’t just lie - they perform innocence. They widen their eyes, raise their voice, summon outrage. Feather’s wit is in treating that behavior not as childish aberration but as a transferable technique, a kind of low-rent acting method: if you want your lie to stick, don’t hedge. Act offended that anyone would doubt you.

The subtext is less about kids than about grown-up power. Indignation is social armor; it shifts the burden of proof. Once the liar signals moral injury, the listener risks looking cruel, paranoid, or impolite for pressing further. Feather is diagnosing a tactic that thrives in any setting where etiquette, hierarchy, or fatigue discourages follow-up questions - dinner tables, offices, politics. The “like your children” tag is the twist of the knife: adults pride themselves on sophistication, yet the most effective deception can be the one that regresses into tantrum logic.

Context matters: Feather wrote in a 20th-century America increasingly shaped by advertising, public relations, and mass media - arenas where confidence often substitutes for evidence. His aphorism captures a cynical truth about persuasion: certainty reads as credibility, and anger can masquerade as righteousness. It’s funny because it’s recognizable; it stings because it implies we’re not just fooled by lies, we’re trained to reward the loudest emotional signal.