The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise
Not Socrates — written by Kenneth John Freeman (1907)Kenneth John Freeman1882–1906 · Cambridge classical scholar; dissertation published posthumously 1907
The words are a modern paraphrase of a passage in Kenneth John Freeman’s Cambridge dissertation Schools of Hellas (1907), p. 74 — Freeman’s OWN summary of the complaints Athenians of Socrates’ day levelled at the young, not a quotation of Socrates. Freeman actually wrote: “The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise.” No such passage appears in Plato, Xenophon, or any ancient source. As Quote Investigator documents, the line was pinned on Socrates by 1922.
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise” Not Socrates. This line is a modern paraphrase of Kenneth John Freeman, Schools of Hellas (1907), p. 74 — Freeman's own summary of ancient complaints about the young, never a quotation of Socrates.
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Socrates. Use the credit shown above instead.
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? We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.
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In context
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Provenance
The real source
Work
Schools of Hellas: An Essay on the Practice and Theory of Ancient Greek Education from 600 to 300 B.C.
Author
Kenneth John Freeman (1882–1906)
Published
Macmillan & Co., London, 1907 (p. 74)
Status
Freeman's own summary of ancient complaints — not a quotation of Socrates
The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households.
Freeman's summary, not Socrates
Freeman's actual 1907 wording (as documented by Quote Investigator). The familiar “The children now love luxury…” version is a later paraphrase that recast his prose into a first-person ‘quotation.’
1907: Kenneth John Freeman writes the passage in Schools of Hellas (p. 74) as his own summary of ancient grievances — the full text is on Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive.
1922: the Oakland Tribune reattaches the words to Socrates, per Quote Investigator.
Verdict: classicists agree it is a fake Socrates quotation — no such line exists in any ancient text.
The underlying passage — Freeman's Schools of Hellas (1907) — is itself long in the public domain (published well before 1931). But the popular first-person wording (“The children now love luxury…”) is not Freeman's text; it is an anonymous 20th-century paraphrase whose exact phrasing evolved through newspapers, so the specific wording shown here has no single identifiable, datable source. We therefore mark the status uncertain rather than claim public-domain for a line no one is documented to have authored in this form.
Fact-check
A fake Socrates quotation
This is one of the internet’s most persistent fake ‘ancient wisdom’ quotes. The thought is real 20th-century scholarship; the Socrates label is an error.
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Most of the internetSocrates Fabricated attribution
Attributed to Socrates on countless quote sites and social posts, but no such passage exists in Plato, Xenophon, or any text preserving Socrates’ words. Quote Investigator shows it was pinned to Socrates only in 1922.
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Some versionsPlato Also wrong
Occasionally credited to Plato because Freeman’s passage broadly evokes Plato’s Republic, but Freeman was summarising, not quoting — the words are his, per Kiwi Hellenist.
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Wording— Paraphrase
Even the ‘real’ text is paraphrased: Freeman wrote “The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise” — later recast into the smoother first-person ‘quotation’ seen today.
✓The true author is Cambridge scholar Kenneth John Freeman, writing in Schools of Hellas (1907) — his own summary of ancient grumbles, never the words of Socrates (Quote Investigator).
Context
Why it spread
The quote endures because it flatters a comforting idea: that adults have complained about ‘kids these days’ since antiquity, so today’s worries are nothing new. Freeman’s 1907 passage genuinely captured that ancient sentiment — which is exactly why it was so easy to mistake his summary for an actual ancient voice.
Once a 1922 newspaper attached the name ‘Socrates,’ the borrowed authority made the line irresistible. Even Malcolm Forbes’ magazine tried and failed to trace it in the 1960s, and it still circulates as gospel today.
An authentic idea about the ancient world — wearing a fake ancient name.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1882–1906 · Cambridge classicist · author of Schools of Hellas (1907)
Kenneth John Freeman was a young Cambridge classical scholar whose dissertation, Schools of Hellas: An Essay on the Practice and Theory of Ancient Greek Education from 600 to 300 B.C., was published posthumously in 1907 (edited by M. J. Rendall, with a preface by A. W. Verrall). On page 74 he paraphrased the standard ancient grumbles about badly-behaved youth to give readers the flavour of the era. He never presented the lines as a quotation — and certainly not as the words of Socrates. Decades of newspapers turned his summary into a fake ‘Socrates said’ quotation.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source + fact-check
Kenneth John Freeman, Schools of Hellas: An Essay on the Practice and Theory of Ancient Greek Education from 600 to 300 B.C. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1907), 74. Misattribution traced in Quote Investigator, "Misbehaving Children in Ancient Times," 1 May 2010.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise’?” Last verified 10 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-children-now-love-luxury-they-have-bad-manners-contempt