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.
Those people who treat politics and morality separately will never understand either of them.
If you are negotiating you must do so in a spirit of reconciliation, not from the point of view of issuing ultimatums.
How can you do the right thing when you can't figure out what that is? When all you have before you are choices in various shades of wrong?
To unfold the secret laws and relations of those high faculties of thought by which all beyond the merely perceptive knowledge of the world and of ourselves is attained or matured, is a object which does not stand in need of commendation to a rational mind.
Poor intricated soul! Riddling, perplexed, labyrinthical soul!
Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest. (Let no man belong to another that can belong to himself.)
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