Posted on 10/28/2009 6:25:08 PM PDT by Michael.SF.
"If you are not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart and if you are not conservative at thirty, you have no brain."
Does anyone have a reference to an earlier attribution then Winston Churchill?
I would like to find the correct or earliest reference to it, but all searches lead back to Churchill. Cany anyone help?
Interesting quote but I was never a liberal, even as a kid.
Yeah I can’t recall ever being liberal. Maybe more liberal than I am now but still pretty conservative.
I don’t know, but I wasn’t a liberal at 20...
I think Churchill is where you will find your search ending.
Hannity aside, I don’t think Churchill would have used those terms.
I was only a bit more liberal as a kid. Back in my late teens, I would have assumed that someone like Obama was misguided. Since then, I'm met genuine evil face to face. I no longer mistake such people for those who are merely mistaken.
Was it Bismarck?
I used to think it was Churchill but not anymore... still, I can’t remember who actually said it.
Churchill was first in the Conservative Party, then switched to the Liberal Party, then switched back to the Conservative Party.
The other person who normally gets credit is Buckley, but I think he lifted it from Churchill.
I started out in single digit years of age with a reagan-ish point of view.
Then as I aged , i got more and more conservative.
Now I’m middle aged and there are probably less than ten thousand people on the planet further right than I am.
Sorry, I can’t help you out on that quote. All I can say to you is that I think churchill didn’t say it. I remember reading about that quote and all the people it was attributed to. But I don’t remember who it was that really said it first.
It was first said by Francois Guisot, a French monarchist statesman:
“Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head.”
(Said in reference to whether France should be a republic or a monarchy.)
It was later adapted by French Premier Georges Clemenceau:
“Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head.”
I think the correct quote is:
If you are not a liberal at twenty I would say you had no heart. If you are not a conservative by 40 I would say you had no brain.
It does no good to have a heart with no brains. Most conservatives have both. I was always a conservative except where the death penalty applied. I have since changed my standing on that. LOL!
I think it was my Uncle Eddie just before he fell asleep after Thanksgiving dinner.
It appears Guisot is the orginator. I was thinking of George Bernard Shaw but that isn’t correct either.
U.S. leftists co-opted the word “liberal”; because they knew better than to call themselves what they actually are.
Churchill would have said “socialist” — and that's how I've always heard the quote repeated.
What's the opposite of “stand corrected”? IMHO, you were right the first time.
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