Plato did not write this. Quote Investigator has found no substantive evidence for him ↗, and the earliest instance it can locate is only from 1967 — when Theodore M. Hesburgh, then president of the University of Notre Dame, opened a commencement address at Manchester College in Indiana by reading it out already attributed to “Plato (427-347 B.C.)”. So Hesburgh is not the author either: QI’s view is that he probably saw an earlier printed instance somewhere, though where is not certain. From there it passed to a newspaper editors’ convention in 1968, to a Supreme Court justice, to the Congressional Record, and to Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts. Nobody along that chain produced a source, because there is no Greek original to produce.
“They Riot in the Streets Inflamed with Wild Notions; Their Morals Are Decaying” not Plato. No dialogue, letter or fragment has ever been cited for it. The earliest documented appearance is Theodore M. Hesburgh's commencement address at Manchester College, Indiana, on 12 June 1967, printed in the University of Notre Dame pamphlet Thoughts IV (1968), p. 29 — where it is already labelled "Plato (427-347 B.C.)". Quote Investigator finds no substantive citation for Plato and identifies no author. Traced by Quotle.info. · Verbatim: “What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders. They disobey their parents. They ignore the laws. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Plato. Use the credit shown above instead.
Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool
In context
Evoking the themes of truth and time. Theme: "They Riot in the Streets Inflamed with Wild Notions; Their Morals Are Decaying". 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 "They Riot in the Streets Inflamed with Wild Notions; Their Morals Are Decaying". 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 earliest known instance: a commencement address, June 1967
Earliest located instance
Thoughts IV: Five Addresses Delivered During 1967 by Theodore M. Hesburgh
Speech
“Service: The Great Modern Prayer” — commencement exercises, Manchester College, North Manchester, Indiana, 12 June 1967
Published
1968 · University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana — quote page 29 (verified with scans by Quote Investigator)
In Plato’s works
Not found — no dialogue, letter or fragment has ever been cited for it
I would like to begin this morning by quoting to you something that may sound familiar: “What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders. They disobey their parents. They ignore the laws. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?” Plato (427-347 B.C.) Those words were written originally in Greek, by Plato, about 400 years before the birth of Christ.
Hesburgh at Manchester College, 12 June 1967
The oldest appearance anyone has found, as Quote Investigator transcribes it from scans of the 1968 pamphlet ↗. Read what it actually shows: Hesburgh is quoting, not composing — “something that may sound familiar” — and the Plato label with its dates is already attached. The trail does not begin with an invention; it begins with a man repeating something he had read somewhere, and QI says plainly that where he read it is not known.
June 1967 — the earliest instance. Hesburgh’s Manchester College commencement address, printed in the Notre Dame pamphlet Thoughts IV (1968), quote page 29 — verified with scans by QI ↗, which added this citation to its article in August 2021. The passage is already credited to Plato, with dates.
April 1968 — and it is already drifting. At the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention in Washington, the panel moderator Creed C. Black of The Chicago Daily News used it to open a session titled “What about the Generation Gap?” (quote page 105). His version reads “they ride in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decayed” — which QI suggests may reflect an imperfect transcription of the speech ↗. Two words had already moved within a year.
June 1968 — the Supreme Court. Justice William J. Brennan Jr. delivered “A Judge Looks at Student Dissent” at Harvard, published in the Harvard Law School Bulletin that July (quote page 9). He introduced the passage as “a complaint by Plato, some 2300 years ago” — in QI’s citations ↗. Twelve months after Hesburgh’s address, the line was being read out by a sitting justice of the Supreme Court — still with no source.
1968–1969 — into the record. A Pittsburgh Press letter to the editor ran it on 29 July 1968 signed “–Plato 427-437 B.C.” (the dates mistyped); the San Diego Union carried it in a Christmas-letter column that December; a Sarasota columnist noted in January 1969 that congressmen had taken to inserting it in the Congressional Record; and on 17 July 1969 Representative John Brademas of Indiana did exactly that, with a Hesburgh address titled “In Defense of the Younger Generation” (quote page 19992) — all dated and paginated by QI ↗.
1979 — and into the reference shelf.Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts printed it under “Ancient Peoples” (quote page 35) with the preface “And Plato wrote of his students”. To Asimov’s credit, the book opens by conceding that “I may have let a non-fact or two get by me” — QI quotes both ↗. The line is also absent from Wikiquote’s Plato page ↗, including its Misattributed section.
There is no ancient Greek original here, so nothing about this passage is public-domain by age. The oldest text it can be traced to is Hesburgh’s 1967 address as printed in a University of Notre Dame pamphlet in 1968 — well after the pre-1931 cutoff for automatic US public domain — and the title-case wording displayed at the top of this page is Quote Investigator’s own 2014 article heading. Treat the passage as modern, in-copyright text of unidentified authorship, and do not reuse it as a Plato quotation at all.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
A fabrication with a 2,300-year alibi
The attraction of this passage is that it appears to prove the generation gap is eternal. That is also why nobody checked it: a quotation whose whole point is its age is the last thing anyone asks for a page number.
✕
The credit on this pagePlato (c. 428–347 BC) No evidence
How it gained authorityCreed C. Black, William J. Brennan Jr. and the Congressional Record Repeated, never sourced
A newspaper-editors’ panel (April 1968), a Supreme Court justice at Harvard (June 1968) and the Congressional Record (July 1969) each passed it on as Plato’s — all three documented by QI ↗. None cited a text. Each repetition by a more eminent speaker made the next one likelier, which is the entire mechanism by which an unsourced quotation becomes common knowledge.
✕
Its better-known twin“The children now love luxury…” Also fabricated
The other famous ancient complaint about young people — usually given to Socrates — was traced by QI to Kenneth John Freeman’s 1907 Cambridge dissertation ↗, where it was Freeman’s own summary of ancient grievances rather than a quotation of anybody. The New York Times retracted it. Two of the best-known proofs that “nothing changes” are both twentieth-century compositions.
The passage surfaced in the summer of 1967 and spread through 1968 — which is to say, into the single most convulsive stretch of American campus and street protest of the century. It said exactly what a great many people wanted said, and it said it with the authority of antiquity: if Plato complained about rioting youth, then the present disorder was not a crisis of the republic but a permanent feature of being young.
That is also precisely why it survived unexamined for half a century. A quotation offered as evidence that nothing ever changes is self-insulating — checking it would defeat its only purpose. And it travelled upward rather than sideways: Hesburgh to a newspaper editors’ panel, to a Supreme Court justice, to the Congressional Record, to a popular book of facts. Plato ↗ has borne it ever since.
“Something that may sound familiar…”
The giveaway is in the wording
Hesburgh told his audience the words “were written originally in Greek, by Plato”. A translated passage ought to vary between renderings — different translators, different English. This one does not: every instance from 1967 onward repeats the same seven short English clauses in the same order, which is the signature of a text copied in English rather than translated from Greek.
The two variations that do appear are transmission noise, not translation. The 1968 newspaper-editors version has “ride in the streets” for “riot” and “morals are decayed” for “decaying”, which QI suggests reflects imperfect transcription of a spoken address ↗. A letter in the Pittsburgh Press managed to mistype Plato’s own dates as “427-437 B.C.” Nobody was consulting a source; they were copying each other.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
c. 428–347 BC · Athenian philosopher, founder of the Academy
Plato is the foundational thinker of the Western philosophical tradition — student of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle, founder of the Academy at Athens, and author of the dialogues that gave us the Theory of Forms. He did write about undisciplined young men, and the real passage is sharper than the forgery: at Republic 555c he argues that rulers who hold power because they own a great deal will not pass laws stopping undisciplined young people from squandering their wealth, precisely because lending to them against their property and then calling the loans in is how those rulers grow richer still. That is a complaint about the old exploiting the young, which is close to the opposite of the line on this page. Being a magnet for invented aphorisms is an occupational hazard of his standing: Wikiquote’s Plato page carries a Misattributed section listing eight other sayings handed to him ↗, from “Only the dead have seen the end of war” to “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle”.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented appearance
Theodore M. Hesburgh, “Service: The Great Modern Prayer” (commencement address, Manchester College, North Manchester, Indiana, 12 June 1967), in Thoughts IV: Five Addresses Delivered During 1967 by Theodore M. Hesburgh, President of the University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1968), 29 — the earliest located instance, where the passage is already credited to Plato. No source in Plato has ever been identified. Dates, pages and transcriptions per Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: They Riot in the Streets Inflamed with Wild Notions; Their Morals Are Decaying,” 13 December 2014, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/12/13/riot/.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘They Riot in the Streets Inflamed with Wild Notions; Their Morals Are Decaying’?” Last verified 6 Oct 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/they-riot-in-the-streets-inflamed-with-wild-notions-their/