The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.
Interpretation
People often yearn for the past while embracing modern comforts.
This quote suggests that those who long for a nostalgic past often do so while benefiting from the advancements of the present. It highlights a contradiction in human behavior, where individuals may lament past times yet simultaneously enjoy the conveniences of contemporary life, illustrating a complex relationship with progress and memory.
In practice
In a speech about embracing change, you might quote this to illustrate contradictions in human behavior.
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.
The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.
Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.
Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.
Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.
Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?
In the alluvial sweep of the land, I thought I could see the past and the present and the future all at once, as though time were not sequential in nature but took place without a beginning or an end, like a flash of green light rippling outward from the center of creation, not unlike a dream inside the mind of God.
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.
There should be a balance between material and spiritual progress, a balance achieved through the principles based on love and compassion.
Your house is your larger body.
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