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.
The freer that women become, the freer men will be. Because when you enslave someone, you are enslaved.
Violence is a symptom of impotence.
The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.
There are three kinds of praise, that which we yield, that which we lend, and that which we pay. We yield it to the powerful from fear, we lend it to the weak from interest, and we pay it to the deserving from gratitude.
Programs, systems and methods sit well in the ivory towers of monasteries or in the wooden arms of icons. Head knowledge comes from the pages of a theology text. But the invitation to know God - truly know Him - is always an invitation to suffer. Not to suffer alone, but to suffer with Him.
Often times we call a man [or woman] cold when he [or she] is only sad.
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