Saturday, October 27, 2012

Irritating political quote debunked




"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."


Many of us have probably been faced with this oft-repeated “Winston Churchill” quote at some point. Only last night, a good friend of mine was telling me how infuriated she gets when her conservative uncle lectures her with it. Because isn’t it wonderful to be told that if you haven’t abandoned all of your core beliefs by a certain age, you must be somehow lacking in intelligence?

Just for the record, I don’t like any more that the quote deems young conservatives “heartless.” I just tend to find that most of the people who actually enjoy this quote are older conservatives—you know the individuals whose current and future dispositions aren’t at stake.

So, I was thrilled to learn from WinstonChurchill.org (where you can actually sign up to receive a free Churchill newsletter subscription) that the quote is false. In its refutation of the statement, it cites Paul Addison of Edinburgh University:

“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 [his wife] Clemmie, who is generally thought to have been a lifelong Liberal?”

It should be mentioned that the meanings behind “liberal” and “conservative” change continually and have changed significantly since Churchill’s time, though no one can be completely sure of certain words’ social interpretations in a given era (unless he or she actually lived in that era). Nevertheless, the quote in question seems to be using our contemporary definitions of the terms—extra proof that Churchill didn’t say it.

The Washington Post recently published an opinion piece titled “Liberals and Conservatives Don’t Just Vote Differently. They Think Differently.” The title says it all. The writer argues that a liberal mentality is characterized by openness to experience, whereas the conservative mind tends to desire closure and structure and to resist change. I appreciate an article that engrains “liberal and conservative” in personality instead of in conscious choice. We form opinions based on what we’ve seen and done, and the fact that the quote in question would label people “stupid” or “heartless” based on who they are at any given point in their lives is, I think, pretty insulting and simplistic.

So, I’m very happy to know it’s false! Let me know what you think!
 

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