The truth is that you're never gonna avoid embarrassment at that age, because you're so easily embarrassed. One bad text will ruin your shit for days. You have to get out there and experience a shitload of personal humiliation before it finally dawns on you that it's really not that big of a deal. And then the more you talk to ladies, the less awkward it gets, and you eventually learn how to not fuck up, and then you become confident, and then women like you. That happens at around age 35.
"Mobbad blev man ju ändå." (Literally "You still got bullied", but with a wording which conveys resignation, passivity and depersonalized factualism.)
— Joakim Pirinen, translated from Swedish.
"Growing up was hard. Kids would make fun of me and call me names, like "Birbiggleberry", and "Birbibliography", and "faggot"..."
— Comedian Mike Birbiglia
"Schooldays are a live combat situation, with enemies on all sides, and friends who’ll stab you in the back just to clamber onto your corpse and stand that little bit higher on the social ladder. Everyone’s jostling for position like chimpanzees, with Alpha sports lads and popular girls sat like the general on the hill, while the gawky and the last-picked huddle together in the trenches, fearful of giving away anything that can be used to destroy them — rumours that you trod in shit that see you referred to as ‘Poo on the Shoe’ for the next decade."
"What if someone tries to knife her? Or god forbid, bring a gun to school? You know what kind of vindictive little bastards school kids can be."
— Dr. Houston Brooks, Abraxas (Hrodvitnon)
This woman, who had Lawyers I and III take out for her not less than 35 Rosewood girls, was not even capable of training her own children. She had a small girl who had fierce temper tantrums and was allowed to beat and kick the Rosewood girls, spit in their faces and upset their buckets when they were scrubbing the floors. If the girls protested, they were simply fired, and the lawyers got other girls for her on writs of habeas corpus.
—Leo Kanner, The American Journal of Psychiatry (1937)
"I was fat, my clothes were from Goodwill, and I had an accent. People might think that five-year-olds can't be cruel, but I have some strong evidence to the contrary."
— Anya, Anya's Ghost
"Children can be nasty, don't you think?"
—Hortense Daigle, The Bad Seed (1956)
At least one theory suggests that while great apes and adult Humans are sentient, young Human children are not. I admit to a certain fondness for this conclusion; if children aren't nonsentient, they're certainly psychopathic.
— Peter Watts' Blindsight, Notes and References
Kids are horrible, why do we keep making them?
—Bob Belcher, Bob's Burgers, "Bob and Deliver"
...And thirdly, the kids in this show - you know, the ones that the target audience relate to and really like to watch and may even copycat - can be dicks. Selfish, annoying, spoilt dicks; and I'm not saying that kids aren't like that, because they all are. I'm sorry, every single one of them are; and if you're an adult, well you were as well! So was I! Everybody was! We are pretty much all born from day one to be as selfish, lazy and self-fulfilling as possible as human beings, and the things that stop us going down that road in the future are the parents.
—Caddicarus in his review of Peppa Pig.
"People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children."
— Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes
"All the children here are miserable. When you are miserable, you need something that is even more miserable than you to feel good about yourself."
— Lucy, Elfen Lied
Sgt. Major Cody: I'm having a sit-down with the Shifflets on their turf, you two are just here for backup.
Sgt. Hill: They're kids.
Sgt. Major Cody: I'm sorry, what magical land do you live in where kids aren't dicks?
Sgt. Hill: They're kids.
Sgt. Major Cody: I'm sorry, what magical land do you live in where kids aren't dicks?
— Enlisted
Smeltings boys wore maroon tailcoats, orange knickerbockers, and flat straw hats called boaters. They also carried knobbly sticks, used for hitting each other while the teachers weren't looking. This was supposed to be good training for later life.
No one will ever know if children are monsters or monsters are children.
"Unfortunately for Benny, we had not yet developed the ability to empathize with the pain and suffering of other people, and his terrified fleeing was pretty much the most fun thing that had ever happened to us."
— Hyperbole and a Half, "Wolves"
[Children's] ingenuity in finding unexpected ways of doing mischief to themselves and others should never be underestimated.
— Lord Hoffman, Jolley (A.P.) v Sutton London Borough Council [2000] 1 W.L.R. 1082
"Kindergarten is like the ocean; you don't want to turn your back on it."
—Joyce, Kindergarten Cop
"Kids are cruel. All people are by nature, they just lose touch with it as they get older."
— Sundowner, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
"Like I said, kids are cruel, Jack... and I'm very in touch with my inner child!"
— Sundowner, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
"It's Children of the Damned day at the brain institute"
—Tom Servo, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank
With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother — it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals.
— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
23. If there's a shy, quiet kid in your class that everyone picks on, treat him with respect and kindness. When his Psychic Powers are made manifest, you may actually survive
"Innocence ain't all it's cracked up to be. Innocent little kids rip the wings off flies, because they don't know any better."
The most "worldly" society I have ever lived in is that of schoolboys: most worldly in the cruelty and arrogance of the strong, the toadyism and mutual treachery of the weak, and the unqualified snobbery of both. Nothing was so base that the school proletariat would not do it, or suffer it, to win the favour of the school aristocracy: hardly any injustice too bad for the aristocracy to practice.
— C. S. Lewis, On Stories and Other Essays
The children roared, tremendously excited; and those country boys, little more than animals, experienced that cruel craving which prompts the fowls of a farmyard to destroy one of their number as soon as it is wounded.
- —Simon's Papa on a kid with a Disappeared Dad
Principal Skinner: Kids can be so cruel.
Nelson Muntz: Ha ha! We don't know when we've gone too far!
Nelson Muntz: Ha ha! We don't know when we've gone too far!
Gabriel: People make the point that no child's born sexist or homophobic or racist, and that's true. But what children are born as is horrible, exclusionary little bastards...I've seen kids, all of whom are dressed in green shirts, and then one kid just happens to be dressed in a blue shirt. And they will fucking jump on that kid.
Yahtzee: They say "just let kids be kids." But then we'll end up with another Nazi Party.
Yahtzee: They say "just let kids be kids." But then we'll end up with another Nazi Party.
Eggman: It was middle school, and those girls were vicious!
Sonic: Fine. I admit it. I still can't swim. I never took those lessons at the community pool.
Amy: Sonic, you promised!
Sonic: They wanted to put me in the beginner's class with the little kids! I can't be swimming around with a bunch of five-year-olds! They can be so cruel when they sense weakness.
Amy: Sonic, you promised!
Sonic: They wanted to put me in the beginner's class with the little kids! I can't be swimming around with a bunch of five-year-olds! They can be so cruel when they sense weakness.
You know, in that one scene in The Wizard of Oz when the flying monkeys pull apart the Scarecrow? That's what it was like.
The alignment of a two-year-old is not automatically "Neutral Evil".
We're on our own, cousin
All alone, cousin
Let's think of a game to play
Now the grown-ups have all gone a way
You won't be much fun
Being blind, deaf and dumb
But I've no-one to play with today
Do you know how to play hide and seek?
To find me, it would take you a week
But tied to that chair, you won't go anywhere
There's a lot I could do to a freak
All alone, cousin
Let's think of a game to play
Now the grown-ups have all gone a way
You won't be much fun
Being blind, deaf and dumb
But I've no-one to play with today
Do you know how to play hide and seek?
To find me, it would take you a week
But tied to that chair, you won't go anywhere
There's a lot I could do to a freak
— Cousin Kevin, Tommy
Usagi: It's as if he was attacked by children!
Sasuke: Something more sinister.
Usagi: More sinister than children?
Sasuke: Something more sinister.
Usagi: More sinister than children?
—Usagi Yojimbo, "Bunraku"
"Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing."
— Paul Graham - Why Nerds Are Unpopular
"And children are wickeder than adults, they have no sense of restraint."
— Wicked
You don't know what I'm talking about, because you have never had it any other way. But go back to being a toddler and relive your life as the weird kid, or the fat kid, or the poor kid. Reach age 12 or 13 and see a group of females give you the same look they give to a spider they found in the bathtub. Go back and get familiar with that body language that says, "No one will be happy or relaxed until you leave." Go back and live your life in a universe that bites your hand when you try to reach out to it. Then see what your confidence is like at age 23.
''Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.'
— Elaine, Cat's Eye (1988)
