Did Plato Complain About Young People? The Famous Quote, Checked

A quotation attributed to Plato or Socrates circulates constantly: “the children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders.” A shorter cousin, “what is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders…”, circulates just as widely. Neither line appears anywhere in Plato’s dialogues, and neither was ever said by Socrates. Both are modern inventions dressed up in an ancient philosopher’s name. This essay traces where the real quote came from, what Plato actually wrote about the young, and why complaints like this one keep getting recycled and reattributed.

Where does the “children now love luxury” quote actually come from?

The line traces to Kenneth John Freeman, a Cambridge University student who submitted a dissertation in 1907 titled Schools of Hellas: An Essay on the Practice and Theory of Ancient Greek Education from 600 to 300 BC. In his introduction, Freeman summarised, in his own words, the kind of grumbling ancient Greek writers made about young people. His summary, not a translation of any single ancient source, read: “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” Freeman was describing a recurring type of complaint across Greek literature, not quoting one author.

Somewhere between 1907 and the internet age, quotation marks attached themselves to Freeman’s sentence and Socrates’ name attached itself to the quotation marks. No citation to a specific dialogue or text was ever needed because none exists. It is often mistakenly credited to Plato as well, and less often to Aristotle. All three attributions are equally unsupported. Our full page on Socrates quotes covers this misattribution alongside the other quotes falsely pinned on him, and Plato quotes: what he actually said does the same for lines wrongly assigned to Plato himself.

What about the “what is happening to our young people” version?

This shorter, more modern-sounding variant, sometimes continuing “they disrespect their elders, they no longer stand up when adults enter the room, they contradict their parents”, has no ancient source at all, not even Freeman’s paraphrase as a starting point. It reads like a further compression and modernisation of the same rumour, closer to something written for a sermon or a newspaper column than to Cambridge classical scholarship. Searches for a Stephanus reference or a named dialogue turn up nothing, because there is nothing to find. Treat any version of this quote that arrives without a specific book and line number as unverifiable at best.

What did Plato actually write about the young?

Plato did write something in the neighbourhood of this complaint, though it says something different from the viral quote and was making a different argument. In Republic Book 8, Socrates is describing what happens to a city that has become obsessed with liberty above every other value, the stage just before democracy tips into tyranny. Fathers, he says, grow anxious not to seem harsh, so they come down to the level of their sons and stop being feared; sons in turn stop respecting or fearing their fathers, because that is what they have learned freedom means. Teachers, worried about losing favour with their pupils, flatter them instead of teaching them, and pupils have no time for teachers, or for anyone older, in return. In one representative rendering:

The father grows accustomed to make himself like his child and fear his sons, and the son likens himself to the father and feels no shame or fear before his parents, in the name of being free. The teacher fears and flatters his pupils, and the pupils make light of their teachers.

Plato, Republic 562e–563a · loose rendering, own translation

The passage is not a “kids these days” complaint. It is a satire of what Plato saw as democratic excess, using the household as one small example of a wider social pattern in which every hierarchy flattens and every authority caves to the desire to be liked. The young behaving badly are a symptom Plato diagnoses, not a generation he is scolding for its own sake. Our summary of the Republic sets Book 8 in context, and Plato’s critique of democracy covers this section of the argument in full, including where it does and does not still apply.

Who was Kenneth Freeman, and why does his line still spread?

Freeman was not a professional classicist with a long career; Schools of Hellas appears to have been his one significant piece of published scholarship, and he died young, not long after it appeared. The book itself is a serious, footnoted survey of Greek education, covering gymnastics, music, rhetoric and moral training from the seventh to the fourth century BC, and Freeman drew on genuine ancient sources throughout it. The single sentence that escaped into meme culture was his own summary of a recurring theme in that reading, not a translation with a citation attached, which is exactly why no one chasing the “original Greek” for it has ever found one: there isn’t a single passage to find, because Freeman was compressing several writers’ worth of grumbling into one representative English sentence.

That is also why the quote is so hard to kill once it starts circulating. It does not sound like a paraphrase; it sounds like a translation, complete with the rhythm of a maxim and the specificity of a direct quotation. Once someone typed it with quotation marks and Socrates’ name attached, probably decades after 1907, it had everything a viral quote needs: brevity, a recognisable complaint, and the borrowed authority of ancient Greece.

Did other ancient writers complain about the young?

Yes, and this is likely part of why the myth of an ancient “kids these days” quote feels plausible enough to spread. Aristotle, in the Rhetoric (Book 2, chapter 12, around 1389a–1389b), gives a character sketch of young men as part of his advice to speakers on how to read an audience. He describes the young as passionate, quick to change their minds, inclined to trust others too easily, and confident they know everything, more prone to acting on impulse than on calculation. It is a rhetorician’s generalisation aimed at helping orators pitch a speech, not a moral complaint, but it is genuinely ancient and genuinely about the young, which makes it easy to blur together with the fabricated quotes in retelling.

Hesiod’s Works and Days, from around the eighth century BC, is also frequently dragged into these lists of ancient complaints about youth, usually with an invented line about children no longer respecting their parents. Whatever grumbling exists in Hesiod’s poem is about justice, hard work and his own brother, not a lament for the younger generation, so it is safest to leave Hesiod out of this particular myth altogether rather than repeat an unverified line.

How can you check a quote like this yourself?

The test that would have caught this quote before it spread is simple, and it is the same test worth applying to any philosophy quote passed around without a source. First, ask which work it comes from. A genuine Plato line has a dialogue title and, in any serious edition, a Stephanus number, the standard page-and-letter reference used across all translations, such as 562e–563a for the passage above. If a quote has no dialogue and no reference attached, that absence is itself informative. Second, check whether the sentiment fits the character doing the speaking within the dialogue, since Plato’s Socrates argues through dramatised conversation, not standalone proverbs; a line that reads as a flat, timeless generalisation is often a modern hand at work rather than Plato’s. Third, be suspicious of quotes that sound exactly like a familiar modern complaint, because ancient writers were working from a different set of assumptions about age, authority and the household than a contemporary reader is, and a quote that fits too neatly into current anxieties has often been shaped, consciously or not, to do exactly that.

Why do “kids these days” complaints keep recurring?

Every generation of adults tends to notice the manners, habits and technologies of the generation below them, and every generation of adults tends to find something to disapprove of. The genuinely old material, Plato’s Republic passage and Aristotle’s Rhetoric, shows this is not new: writers twenty-four centuries ago were already commenting on the young in terms modern readers find familiar. What is new each time is the specific target, itself once a symbol of decline, itself once complained about by an older generation, whether that is luxury goods in classical Athens, gramophones and cinema in the early twentieth century, or smartphones now. Attaching a fake ancient quote to a modern complaint borrows the authority of “philosophers have always said this” for an argument that does not actually need, and is not actually helped by, a two-thousand-year-old citation.

Quote, source and verdict

Quote	Real source	Verdict
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders”	Kenneth John Freeman, Schools of Hellas (1907), summarising ancient complaints in his own words	Not Plato or Socrates
“What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders…”	No identified source	Not Plato or Socrates
Fathers fearing sons, teachers flattering pupils, in an over-free democracy	Plato, Republic 562e–563a	Genuine, but a satire of excess liberty, not a complaint about youth as such
The young as passionate, changeable and sure they know everything	Aristotle, Rhetoric II.12, 1389a–1389b	Genuine, part of advice to public speakers on reading an audience
A general claim that Hesiod complained about disrespectful children	Unverified, often invented	Do not repeat without a specific line reference

Was Socrates himself accused of corrupting the young?

There is a real irony worth noting here. Socrates was not a critic of Athenian youth; he was formally accused of ruining them. The indictment brought against him in 399 BC charged him with corrupting the young and failing to honour the city’s gods, and it cost him his life. Why was Socrates executed sets out the charges and the trial in detail, and Plato’s Apology: Socrates’ defense and the ethics of dissent covers his response to them. The comic playwright Aristophanes had already mocked Socrates on stage decades earlier in The Clouds, portraying him as a corrupter of youth who taught young men to talk their way out of any obligation, a caricature Socrates himself says, in the Apology, helped poison the jury against him. So if any ancient figure has a documented, well-sourced connection to anxiety about young people in Athens, it is Socrates on trial for supposedly corrupting them, not Socrates complaining about their manners.

The short version

If you are looking for an ancient philosopher’s opinion on the younger generation, the honest answer is that there isn’t a tidy, quotable one to find. Plato wrote about the young only as part of a larger argument about how liberty curdles into disorder, and Aristotle wrote about them only as part of a manual on persuasive speaking. The pithy, standalone complaint people want to attribute to Socrates was written by a Cambridge student in 1907, describing a pattern he saw across ancient literature rather than quoting any single line of it. Worth remembering next time it turns up captioned as ancient wisdom: the oldest verifiable thing about this quote is not Greek at all, it is Edwardian.