Aging & Wisdom Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Progress, Holmes needles us, has a publicity problem: the world gets bored with correctness. "A new untruth is better than an old truth" sounds like a prank on common sense, but it’s really a diagnosis of how culture metabolizes ideas. “Better” here doesn’t mean morally superior; it means socially more potent. Novelty moves crowds. Staleness, even when it’s accurate, loses its grip.

Holmes was a 19th-century New England poet and public intellectual in an America intoxicated by invention, reform movements, and the churn of newspapers. In that environment, information wasn’t just evaluated; it was consumed. The line takes aim at the marketplace logic of belief: what’s fresh travels farther than what’s true. It’s an early warning about trend-driven thinking, where attention becomes the hidden currency and truth is forced to compete without an advertising budget.

The subtext is less anti-truth than anti-complacency. Old truths can calcify into slogans, becoming immune to scrutiny precisely because they’re “settled.” A “new untruth,” by contrast, has the advantage of friction: it provokes argument, creates identity, gives people a reason to pick sides. Holmes’s wit is in the uncomfortable inversion, flipping the hierarchy to expose a bias we’d rather deny.

Read now, it lands like a pre-social-media epigram: misinformation spreads not only because people are ignorant, but because novelty feels like agency. Believing something new can feel like participating in history, even if the history is fake. Holmes makes the bitter point cleanly: truth doesn’t automatically win; it has to stay alive.