Any young man who is not a liberal

Never miss a story! Stay connected and informed with Mint. Download our App Now!! It'll just take a moment. Looks like you have exceeded the limit to bookmark the image. Remove some to bookmark this image. You are now subscribed to our newsletters. Young people, especially young people who support the BJP, are less liberal today.

Subscribe to Mint Newsletters. Internet Not Available. If he remains one after 25 he has no head. Which is one of those yes and no conclusions dependent largely upon the sort of Socialist you happen to be. An interesting and thematically connected statement was made by George Bernard Shaw when he delivered a speech at the University of Hong Kong in If you are a red revolutionary at the age of twenty you have some chance of being up to date when you are forty. Interestingly, this version mentioned the heart and head whereas the instance credited to Guizot in omitted the heart and head.

The compiler of the quotation book was Sir Gurney Benham, and he also stated that there was a variant expression ascribed to Georges Clemenceau: Guizot French statesman under Louis Philippe. In the industrious anecdote collector Bennett Cerf presented an entertaining tale featuring Georges Clemenceau: If he had not become a Communist at 22, I would have disowned him.

If he is still a Communist at 30, I will do it then. A facile saying, whipped up in a moment of inspiration by some ex-socialist press agent for the status quo. In the s student protests were rocking the universities in the U. A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head. Winston S.

Churchill supposedly once observed that anyone who was not a liberal at 20 years of age had no heart, while anyone who was still a liberal at 40 had no head. In conclusion, the earliest strong match known to QI appeared in a letter written by Anselme Batbie in An important precursor was attributed to John Adams in Many thanks to Dr.

Thanks to researcher Fred R. Thanks to Barry Popik for his valuable work examining this quotation. Special thanks to Steve Perisho and T. Mills for supplying translations from French to English. Any errors are the responsibility of QI. While the quotation clearly has staying power, it seems overly facile to me.

The distinction that liberals feel and conservatives think is silly and shallow, and shows little understanding of either. The strong beliefs of young people are easily dismissed as rooted only in feelings, but at least young people often show some flexibility about learning and adapting.

It often seems the strong feelings of the middle aged and elderly are often based as much on being set in their ways and confirmation bias , and about lessons learned in the rather-different past, rather than seeking to apply some deeper weighing of facts, values, and experience. Herbert Stein, who was an economist in many positions in Washington, DC for more than 50 years, captured some of my own sense here in his collection of essays, O n the Other Hand - Essays on Economics, Economists, and Politics from pp.

I would say that whoever is not a liberal when young has no heart, whoever is not a conservative when middle-aged has no head, and whoever is still either a liberal or a conservative at age seventy-eight has no sense of humor.