Elizabeth Dodd wrote: > On Monday 24 July 2006 23:13, David de Bhál wrote: >> Back to the old idea that if you are not a socialist when you are 20 you >> have no heart and if you are not a capitalist by the time you are 40 you >> have no brains. >> IF you are not a socialist again by the time you are 65 you have dementia. >> >> David de Bhál > David, I've only ever heard you quote this. could you supply me with the > name > of the philosopher?
A few minutes googling, including triangulation across several web pages which do not link to each other in order to increase confidence in the veracity of the following factoids, reveals that David is misquoting Guisot, a French monarchist statesman under Louis Philippe: Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head. ~Francois Guisot (1787-1874) One commentator wondered about the fate of M. Guisot's own head during the French Revolution... apparently Guisot was the politician behind the deportation of Karl Marx from France in the mid-1840's. Marx found refuge in Brussels. A young Fred Engels in the spring of 1845 also settled in Brussels and, according to Marx, "we resolved to work out in common the opposition of our view to the ideological view of German philosophy, in fact, to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience." Thus Guisot helped to bring those two together. The rest is history (except that according to Francis Fukuyama, we reached the end of [dialectic] history in the early 1990s). However, David is forgiven as the quote, which in various forms has been wrongly attributed to George Bernard Shaw, Disraeli and Churchill over the years. Apparently our national role models (i.e. citizens of the US of A) like to tone it down and refer to "liberal" and "republican" in place of "socialist" and "capitalist". Main references: http://lalaland.msu.edu/~vanhoose/quotes/0018.html http://www.rabble.ca/babble/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=20&t=001692 Tim C Who is completely without brains but who looks forward to a dementia-free retirement. _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
