Although I'm only fourteen, I know quite well what I want, I know who is right and who is wrong. I have my opinions, my own ideas and principles, and although it may sound pretty mad from an adolescent, I feel more of a person than a child, I feel quite indepedent of anyone.

Anne Frank wrote this reflection in her diary while in hiding with her family and others in the Secret Annex in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands (1942–1944). Living under constant threat, confined quarters, and adult tensions, she used her diary (“Kitty”) to assert a sense of self and to test her developing moral and intellectual independence. The passage comes from a period when Anne was acutely aware of being treated as “just a child” by the adults around her, even as the extraordinary circumstances of persecution and hiding accelerated her maturity and sharpened her judgments about people’s behavior and fairness.

The quote captures Anne’s insistence that adolescence is not merely a preparatory stage but a real form of personhood. She claims the right to moral discernment (“who is right and who is wrong”) and to an inner life governed by “ideas and principles,” pushing back against adult condescension. In the claustrophobic, high-stakes environment of hiding, this declaration also functions as self-preservation: independence becomes an internal refuge when external freedom is impossible. The line’s poignancy lies in the contrast between her youthful certainty and the brutal historical forces that deny her agency, making her assertion of identity both defiant and fragile.