Aging & Wisdom Quote by Lenny Bruce

It lands like a throwaway line, then keeps getting nastier the longer you sit with it. Lenny Bruce’s “When you’re eight years old nothing is your business” is funny because it’s brutally lopsided: a kid, all curiosity and questions, slammed up against an adult world that runs on secrecy, shame, and “don’t ask.” The joke is the exaggeration; the indictment is the accuracy.

Bruce is pointing at how childhood is structured as exclusion. Adults don’t just withhold information to protect kids; they withhold it to protect themselves. “Not your business” becomes a moral club, a way to shut down a child’s emerging sense that the world has rules, power, and hypocrisy. At eight, you’re old enough to notice contradictions - why people lie, why bodies are embarrassing, why money decides things - but young enough that your noticing is treated as insolence.

The subtext is pure Bruce: censorship doesn’t start with police raids and obscenity trials, it starts in the living room. The same culture that prosecuted him for saying the unsayable trains children to accept that whole regions of reality are off-limits: sex, religion, racism, family dysfunction, the messy motivations behind “respectability.” If you learn early that your questions are illegitimate, you learn to outsource your judgment.

Context matters because Bruce’s career was a running fight with American gatekeepers - courts, clubs, broadcasters - who insisted the public couldn’t “handle” certain truths. This line shrinks that whole battle down to one childhood lesson: power keeps its power by deciding what counts as your business.