The greatest reverence is due the young.

This line is commonly attributed to the Roman satirist Juvenal and is usually linked to a moralizing passage in his Satires about sexual ethics and the corrupting example adults set for children. In that context, Juvenal argues that the presence of the young should restrain vice: adults ought to feel shame and self-control when children are watching, because youthful minds are impressionable and because society has a duty not to initiate them into depravity. The sentiment functions less as praise of youth’s authority than as an admonition to elders: the young deserve protection, and their presence should command respectful conduct.

“The greatest reverence is due the young” frames youth as morally significant not because the young are inherently wiser, but because they are vulnerable and formative. The quote implies an ethical hierarchy: adults’ freedoms are bounded by their responsibility to safeguard and model virtue for those who are still becoming who they will be. Reverence here means restraint, care, and a refusal to treat children as spectators to adult corruption. Read broadly, it is a social principle about intergenerational duty—measuring a community’s decency by how it behaves in front of, and on behalf of, its youngest members.