"As one grows older one becomes more critical of oneself and less of other people"
About this Quote
Aging, Basil Rathbone suggests, doesn’t simply sand down your edges; it reroutes your judgment. The line lands with a performer’s instincts: it’s short, balanced, and built on a quiet reversal. Youth is outward-facing critique, quick to diagnose everyone else’s flaws. Time flips the spotlight inward, where the harshest reviewer takes up residence: you.
Rathbone was an actor famous for precision and control (and for playing figures of authority, from Sherlock Holmes to polished villains). That background matters. Actors live by evaluation: auditions, reviews, the endless internal playback of a scene that could have been tighter, truer, less self-protective. In that world, “older” often means more technically capable and more aware of the gap between what you intended and what you delivered. The critique becomes less performative, less about scoring points in public, and more about craftsmanship and conscience.
The second half, “less of other people,” isn’t a halo of kindness so much as a fatigue with easy narratives. With age you collect enough evidence that most people are messy for reasons that aren’t flattering but are often understandable: bad timing, bad training, private grief, plain fear. That doesn’t excuse harm; it just makes the armchair prosecutor in you sound simplistic.
The subtext is a small ethics lesson disguised as personal observation: maturity isn’t moral superiority. It’s a shrinking appetite for judgment as entertainment, paired with an expanding tolerance for complexity and an unglamorous willingness to interrogate your own motives first.
Rathbone was an actor famous for precision and control (and for playing figures of authority, from Sherlock Holmes to polished villains). That background matters. Actors live by evaluation: auditions, reviews, the endless internal playback of a scene that could have been tighter, truer, less self-protective. In that world, “older” often means more technically capable and more aware of the gap between what you intended and what you delivered. The critique becomes less performative, less about scoring points in public, and more about craftsmanship and conscience.
The second half, “less of other people,” isn’t a halo of kindness so much as a fatigue with easy narratives. With age you collect enough evidence that most people are messy for reasons that aren’t flattering but are often understandable: bad timing, bad training, private grief, plain fear. That doesn’t excuse harm; it just makes the armchair prosecutor in you sound simplistic.
The subtext is a small ethics lesson disguised as personal observation: maturity isn’t moral superiority. It’s a shrinking appetite for judgment as entertainment, paired with an expanding tolerance for complexity and an unglamorous willingness to interrogate your own motives first.
Quote Details
| Topic | Aging |
|---|---|
| Source | Basil Rathbone — quote: "As one grows older one becomes more critical of oneself and less of other people." — cited on Wikiquote (Basil Rathbone) |
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