Aging & Wisdom Quote by John Edward Christopher Hill

“Common sense” is usually wheeled out as a blunt instrument: a way to end an argument by implying the other side is not just wrong, but irrational. Hill’s line quietly disarms that move. By insisting that common sense “varies” among the young and the old alike, he treats it not as a universal faculty but as a historical product - shaped by experience, class, education, habit, and whatever a given society has taught people to treat as “obvious.”

The intent feels characteristically historian: puncture complacent presentism. Adults often dismiss youth politics or culture as naive, as if maturity naturally confers better judgment. Hill denies that comforting hierarchy. Age doesn’t deliver a single, superior “common sense”; it produces different toolkits of plausibility. What seems self-evident to an older generation may be unthinkable to the young, not because one group has abandoned reality, but because each has been trained by different crises, technologies, moral vocabularies, and economic constraints.

The subtext is also a warning about power. “Common sense” is frequently the ideology of the winners - the worldview that has hardened into normality. Hill, writing as a Marxist-inflected historian of upheaval and revolution, is alert to how elites sanctify their preferences as mere practicality. By making common sense plural and age-symmetric, he exposes its politics: appeals to common sense often mask an attempt to freeze the world as it is and cast dissent as childish. Hill’s sentence restores dissent - including youthful dissent - to the realm of legitimate, historically intelligible reasoning.