Motherhood Quote by Dudley Nichols

Nichols’ line lands like a friendly warning wrapped in a blunt confession: persuasion isn’t a side effect of culture, it’s one of its main products. Coming from a screenwriter, it reads less like abstract philosophy than an industry admission. Movies, radio, schools, churches, advertisements: all are story machines, and stories are how adults “make” children believe. The sentence is chilling precisely because it refuses sentimentality about innocence. It treats childhood not as a protected sanctuary but as the most strategically valuable terrain.

The subtext is about power and timelines. “Whatever you want” is the quiet indictment: the content of belief is flexible; the key variable is who gets to author it. Nichols then snaps the horizon forward: today’s children are tomorrow’s “soldiers and mothers.” That phrasing isn’t accidental. It divides civic life into two state-serving roles: those who fight and those who reproduce and raise the next cohort. In other words, belief formation is not just personal development; it’s demographic management, a way of seeding obedience, nationalism, and gender expectations years before they’re needed.

Context sharpens the edge. Nichols worked in an era when mass media matured into mass influence, and when propaganda - wartime, corporate, ideological - proved how quickly narratives can mobilize entire populations. The line’s effectiveness comes from its pragmatic clarity: it doesn’t plead for better values; it exposes the mechanism. The discomfort it produces is the point. If belief can be manufactured, the moral question isn’t whether children are impressionable. It’s who is holding the mold, and to what end.