No work of Cicero is ever named as the source, and neither Quote Investigator ↗ nor Wikiquote ↗ traces it to one — Wikiquote files it under “Misattributed.” It is the last stop on a wandering “ancient tablet” story: a lament about corrupt politics, disrespectful children and everyone wanting to write a book, printed in August 1908 as a translation of an inscription in the Imperial Museum at Constantinople, then re-dated and re-assigned for decades to a Chaldean king, an Assyrian tablet and an Egyptian priest before turning up as Cicero’s. QI finds no compelling evidence any such tablet inscription exists.
“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book” Not Cicero. "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book" is not traced to any work of Cicero — Wikiquote lists it as misattributed. Quote Investigator traces the saying to an "ancient tablet" story first printed in Bassett's Scrap Book in August 1908 ("We have fallen upon evil times… Each man wants to make himself conspicuous and write a book"), credited over the years to a Chaldean king, an Assyrian tablet and an Egyptian priest. The condensed Cicero version is documented in InfoWorld, 16 April 2001, p. 49. — Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Marcus Tullius Cicero. Use the credit shown above instead.
Can you use it?
? 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
Evoking the themes of change, time and character. Theme: "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book". 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 "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book". 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
Where the line actually comes from
Work of Cicero cited
None — no speech, letter or treatise is ever named
InfoWorld, 16 April 2001, p. 49 — as cited by Quote Investigator and Wikiquote
Verdict
Apocryphal — no evidence of an ancient tablet, no Cicero
The “good old times” seemed as bad to the “good-old-timers” as the present times seem to the modern man, as shown by the following translation of an inscription on a tablet in the Imperial Museum at Constantinople, Turkey:— Naram Sin, 5000 B. C. We have fallen upon evil times, the world has waxed old and wicked. Politics are very corrupt. Children are no longer respectful to their elders. Each man wants to make himself conspicuous and write a book.
The 1908 original
This is the earliest known printing of the saying, not the Cicero wording. The familiar one-sentence version — “Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book” — is a much later condensation; Quote Investigator records it attached to Cicero’s name by 2001.
August 1908 — a cycling magazine. The oldest known printing is not ancient at all: a filler item in Bassett’s Scrap Book, the official organ of the League of American Wheelmen, offering “the following translation of an inscription on a tablet in the Imperial Museum at Constantinople” and dating it to Naram Sin, 5000 B.C. The page is readable in the Internet Archive scan ↗.
1913–1948 — the tablet keeps moving.Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗ tracks the date sliding from 5000 B.C. to 3800 B.C. (Iowa philosophy professor George T. W. Patrick, Popular Science Monthly, May 1913) to 2800 B.C. (Connecticut State Librarian George S. Godard, 1922), the material changing from stone to papyrus (Bennett Cerf, 1948), and the speaker changing from Chaldean king to Assyrian scribe to Egyptian priest.
2001 — Cicero’s name gets attached. By 2001 the saying had been boiled down to one sentence and credited to “Marcus Tullius Cicero, statesman, orator, and writer (106–43 B.C.)” in InfoWorld of 16 April 2001, p. 49 — the citation carried by both Quote Investigator and Wikiquote’s Misattributed section ↗.
The Library of Congress got there first.Respectfully Quoted, entry 456 ↗ files the saying under “Tablet, Babylon,” records the 1949 and 1953 printings behind it, and concludes that both “would seem to be spurious” — suggesting the book-writing line may simply echo Ecclesiastes 12:12.
No status is asserted. The exact circulating wording has no identified author or first publication — it is an anonymous condensation of a saying that has been rewritten repeatedly since 1908, so there is nothing to date a copyright term from. The 1908 Bassett’s Scrap Book ancestor text quoted above is itself long out of copyright in the United States, but that does not extend to the modern one-sentence version.
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
Everyone who has been credited with this
Almost nothing about this quotation is stable. Over roughly a century the words changed, the date moved by thousands of years, the tablet became papyrus, and the speaker was reassigned several times — Cicero being only the most recent tenant.
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The whole sentenceMarcus Tullius Cicero Misattributed
Wikiquote ↗ lists it under “Misattributed,” sourcing it no further back than InfoWorld, 16 April 2001, p. 49. No speech, letter or treatise of Cicero’s is ever named, and Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗ shows the wording arriving from an early-1900s newspaper-and-magazine story, not from antiquity.
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The supposed source“Naram Sin, 5000 B.C.” — an unnamed tablet in Constantinople Apocryphal
This is the form in the August 1908 Bassett’s Scrap Book item, which names no king and no kingdom — only “Naram Sin” and a date, above a translation of an inscription said to be in the Imperial Museum at Constantinople, readable in the Internet Archive scan ↗. By May 1913 the philosopher George T. W. Patrick was telling it as “King Naram Sin of Chaldea, 3800 years B.C.,” and by 1922 the date had moved again, to 2800 B.C.
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The supposed sourceAn Assyrian clay tablet of about 2800 B.C., held in Constantinople Apocryphal
The best-travelled version, printed in a 1922 report by the State Librarian of Connecticut and repeated for decades after. Quote Investigator ↗ concludes there is “no compelling evidence” that any of these wordings was inscribed on an Assyrian tablet.
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The supposed sourceAn Egyptian priest, around 4000 B.C. Apocryphal
A 1925 Big Brother and Big Sister Federation publication reassigned the lament to “an Egyptian 6,000 years ago,” and a 1948 note in the journal World Affairs gave it to an Egyptian priest — both documented by Quote Investigator ↗.
✓No ancient tablet has ever been produced, and no Cicero: Quote Investigator finds no compelling evidence that any of these wordings was inscribed in antiquity. The oldest known text is a filler paragraph in an American cycling magazine of August 1908, and the Library of Congress’s own reference work had already concluded that the printings behind the tablet story “would seem to be spurious” in Respectfully Quoted, entry 456 ↗.
Context
Why this one keeps working
The quotation is a joke with a delivery mechanism attached. The punchline — that people have always thought the world was going to the dogs, and that the last straw is everybody writing a book — only lands if the words are genuinely ancient. So the story has always needed a source, and for more than a century it has borrowed whichever one sounded most impressive: a Chaldean king, an Assyrian tablet, an Egyptian priest, an ancient scrap of papyrus, and finally Rome’s most quotable orator.
Cicero is an unusually comfortable host for it, because he really did make a career of exactly this complaint. O tempora, o mores! — “Oh the times! Oh the customs!” — appears in four of his surviving speeches, most famously at the opening of the First Catilinarian, delivered in 63 BC. The trouble is that the sentence circulating under his name is not a translation of anything he wrote; it is a modern compression of an English paragraph that first appeared in print in 1908.
The saying is old enough to sound interesting and modern enough to be checkable — and the check keeps coming back the same way.
How a 1908 magazine filler became a Roman epigram
Each retelling trimmed something. The 1908 version has four complaints: evil times, corrupt politics, disrespectful children, and self-promoting authors. By 1922 an apocalypse had been added and the date had dropped from 5000 B.C. to 2800 B.C. By 1948 the tablet had become papyrus and the whole thing had shrunk to two clauses. The version now circulating keeps only the two clauses that still get a laugh — disobedient children and too many books — and prefixes them with a flat “Times are bad.”
The Library of Congress’s Respectfully Quoted offers a quieter possibility for the book-writing line: it may be an echo of Ecclesiastes 12:12, “of making many books there is no end” — a genuinely ancient complaint, just not the one being quoted.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
106–43 BC · Roman statesman, orator and philosopher
Marcus Tullius Cicero (born 3 January 106 BC, killed 7 December 43 BC) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, orator and philosopher who reached the consulship in 63 BC and spent that year suppressing the Catilinarian conspiracy. Because so much of his writing survives, and because he really did specialise in O tempora, o mores!, he is one of the internet’s favourite places to park an unsourced grumble about civilisational decline. This is one of those: a modern one-liner with no Latin behind it, no manuscript, and no Cicero.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented printing
Earliest known printing (of the ancestor text): “We have fallen upon evil times … Each man wants to make himself conspicuous and write a book,” Bassett’s Scrap Book: Scraps of History, Fact and Humor: Official Organ League of American Wheelmen 6, no. 6 (August 1908): 84. Attribution history traced in Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Ancient Tablet: The World is Speedily Coming to an End. Everyone Wants to Write a Book,” October 22, 2012, which records the condensed Cicero-credited wording in InfoWorld, April 16, 2001, 49. Listed as misattributed to Cicero in Wikiquote, “Cicero.”
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/times-are-bad-children-no-longer-obey-their-parents-and/