Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

Children today are lazy and disrespectful, they no longer obey their parents and contradict their teachers

Not Socrates — a 1907 dissertation paraphrase Kenneth John Freeman d. 1907 · Cambridge classicist · Schools of Hellas, published 1907
The grumble is genuinely ancient. The sentence is Edwardian. Free to reuse

Socrates wrote nothing. Everything we have of him comes through Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes or Diogenes Laërtius — and this passage is in none of them. That is the decisive test, and it fails cleanly. What actually happened is that a young Cambridge classicist, Kenneth John Freeman, wrote a dissertation called Schools of Hellas (published 1907) in which he summarised in his own words the standard ancient complaints about young people. He never claimed to be quoting anybody. By 1922 an American newspaper was printing his summary as Socrates, and it has been travelling under that name ever since.

Last verified 21 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Children today are lazy and disrespectful, they no longer obey their parents and contradict their teachers” Not Socrates. A paraphrase written by Kenneth John Freeman in his Cambridge dissertation Schools of Hellas (1907), p. 74, and misattributed to Socrates in the press from 1922. Via Quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Socrates. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Socrates — Athenian philosopher. Theme: "Children today are lazy and disrespectful, they no longer obey their parents and contradict their teachers". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Children today are lazy and disrespectful, they no longer obey their parents and contradict their teachers". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Document
Schools of Hellas — Kenneth John Freeman
Published
1907 · Cambridge dissertation, published posthumously
Page
p. 74 — Freeman’s own summary, not a quotation
Socrates source
None — absent from Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes and Diogenes Laërtius

The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. Freeman, Schools of Hellas, 1907, p. 74

Freeman’s actual sentence. Read it as what it is — a scholar listing, in his own words, the charges Greek writers levelled at the young. There are no quotation marks around it in the original because it is not a quotation of anyone.

Quote Investigator — the Freeman trail

How we traced it

  • Start with the decisive test. Socrates left no writings at all, so a Socrates quotation has to be in Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes or Diogenes Laërtius — there is nowhere else for it to be. This passage is in none of the four, in any wording, in any translation.
  • It is in Freeman. On p. 74 of Schools of Hellas he writes his own résumé of the ancient case against the young, and a few lines later adds that children ‘no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table.’ Every recognisable phrase of the modern ‘Socrates’ quotation is there, in an Edwardian Englishman’s prose the tracing ↗.
  • The handover is datable. In 1912 the educator James J. Walsh quoted the passage and correctly credited Freeman. By 1922 the Oakland Tribune was running it as Socrates, and that is the version the twentieth century inherited. The US Congressional Research Service’s Respectfully Quoted (1989) reached the same verdict in one word: spurious.
Public domain

Freeman’s Schools of Hellas was published in 1907 and its author died the same year, so the text is public domain worldwide and free to quote. The ancient material Freeman was summarising — Aristophanes’ Clouds and the rest — is likewise out of copyright in the original Greek, though a specific modern translation of it may not be. This is not legal advice.

Fact-check

The attribution problem

This is probably the most-repeated fake classical quotation in existence, and the reason it survives is that it is almost true — the sentiment really is ancient, so nobody feels a jolt when they read it.

Not Socrates fails the four-source test

Socrates wrote nothing, so the only possible homes for a Socrates quotation are Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes and Diogenes Laërtius. It is in none of them. There is no manuscript, no fragment, no ancient testimony — nothing to argue about.

Kenneth John Freeman, 1907 a paraphrase, not a quote

Freeman’s dissertation summarised the ancient complaints in his own words: ‘luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise.’ He set no quotation marks around it, because he was not quoting anybody the trail ↗.

Aristophanes, Clouds real, but a different speaker

A comparable rant about slack, disrespectful youths really does appear in Aristophanes’ Clouds — but it is delivered by the character of Just Discourse, and in that same play Socrates is the satirical target, not the moralist.

Sometimes offered instead a different passage

Book VIII of the Republic does describe the young in a democracy losing respect for their elders. It is a diagnosis of a political system, in Plato’s voice as author, and its wording is nothing like the sentence on this page.

Drifted well past Freeman variant creep

‘Lazy and disrespectful,’ ‘children are now tyrants,’ ‘they gobble their food’ — the versions in circulation have been rewritten repeatedly over a century. None of the wordings matches any ancient text, and most no longer match Freeman either.

Kenneth John Freeman’s own summary of ancient complaints, written for a Cambridge dissertation published in 1907 and handed to Socrates by an American newspaper in 1922 the tracing ↗.

Context

Why it resonates

The quotation is loved because of what it appears to prove: that every generation has said this, so your own irritation with teenagers is a permanent feature of human nature rather than a sign that you are getting old. That is a genuinely comforting thought, which is why nobody checks it.

The joke turns out to be doubled. The sentiment really is 2,400 years old — you can find versions of it in Greek comedy — but the sentence people quote to prove it is a hundred-odd years old and English. The evidence is fake; the phenomenon it is offered as evidence for is real.

The sentiment is 2,400 years old. The sentence is from 1907.

The four places a Socrates quote could be

Plato — the dialogues, where Socrates is the central speaker. Nothing resembling this.

Xenophon — the Memorabilia and related works, a soldier’s plainer portrait of the same man. Nothing.

Aristophanes — the Clouds, a hostile comic caricature written in Socrates’ lifetime. Contains a similar grumble, but from a different character, and aimed partly at Socrates.

Diogenes Laërtius — the third-century AD compiler who collected the philosophers’ sayings and quips. Nothing.

There is no fifth option. If it is not in those, it is not Socrates.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Change Truth

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Origin: Misbehaving Children in Ancient Timesquoteinvestigator.com

The full investigation: Freeman’s 1907 wording, the correct 1912 credit, and the 1922 handover to Socrates.
American Dialect Society list — proposed origin 1907listserv.linguistlist.org

The working thread of professional quotation researchers that first pinned the passage to Freeman.
Socrates — Misattributeden.wikiquote.org

Carries the Freeman finding and notes the parallel passage in Aristophanes’ Clouds.
Fake quotationskiwihellenist.blogspot.com

A classicist’s round-up of invented ancient quotations, this one included.

Popularly credited author

Why it gets pinned on Socrates

Socrates

c. 470–399 BC · Athenian philosopher

Socrates is the ideal host for a fake quotation because there is no manuscript to check him against — he wrote not a word, and everything attributed to him is already second-hand through Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes or Diogenes Laërtius. He was also, famously, prosecuted for corrupting the young men of Athens, which makes a grumble about badly behaved teenagers feel like it belongs to him. It is exactly backwards: at his trial he was cast as the one doing the corrupting, not the one complaining about it.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Freeman, Kenneth John. Schools of Hellas: An Essay on the Practice and Theory of Ancient Greek Education from 600 to 300 BC. London: Macmillan, 1907, p. 74. Freeman’s own paraphrase; not a quotation of Socrates.

MLA (9th ed.)

Freeman, Kenneth John. Schools of Hellas. Macmillan, 1907, p. 74.

APA (7th ed.)

Freeman, K. J. (1907). Schools of Hellas (p. 74). Macmillan.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Children today are lazy and disrespectful’?” Last verified 21 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/children-today-are-lazy-and-disrespectful

Copied