Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Contradicting Churchill (or whomever)

The famous Winston Churchill quote used to flog liberals the world over goes something like this:
 
If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain.
 
Old Winston was a drunk; anyway he never said that (see below). Whoever did had it exactly backwards. As we age, it's not our brain that leads us back to the old ways, but our heart.
 
Let me use myself as an example: As a younger whippersnapper I was a wild-eyed liberal, but not because of my heart. I wasn't acutely committed to justice and equality for emotional reasons and I didn't question tradition and authority because it felt nice. My liberalism came from the brain. It was rooted in arguments, arguments that may have been incorrect, of course, but arguments all the same. Now, as I age, I find myself wallowing in sentiment. I want my kids to have the sort of upbringing I had andI want them to develop the same attachments I did. When the chazan uses the wrong tune on Rosh Hashana I cringe. When my kid speaks Hebrew with a slightly different accent than mine, I find myself irrationally questioning the authenticity of his education.  That's not my intellect speaking. It's my heart.
 
~
 
 
If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain.
  • According to the Falsely Attributed Quotations page at the Churchill Centre, "there is no record of anyone hearing Churchill say this." Paul Addison of Edinburgh University is quoted as stating: "Surely Churchill can't have used the words attributed to him. He'd been a Conservative at 15 and a Liberal at 35! And would he have talked so disrespectfully of Clemmie, who is generally thought to have been a lifelong Liberal?"

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