[I had originally planned a series on historical inaugurations this week, but I don’t imagine too many of us want to be thinking about the inauguration any more than we have to. So instead, I’m gonna go with a suggestion from my wife, using the occasion of MLK Day to highlight a handful of historical quotes, from him and others, that our conservative commentators and politicians tend to get very wrong!]
This one
is pretty straightforward. Conservatives love to attribute to Winston Churchill
the quote, “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.” But as Professor
Paul Addison argued in
this piece, that’s not only not a Churchill quote, but it also goes against
both his own political journey and the lifelong liberalism of his beloved
wife Clementine. I’m a big believer in the importance of both a heart and a
brain, but we can’t let our heart dictate the way our brain works, and relying
on false quotes to support our pre-existing perspectives seems like doing
precisely that.
Special
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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