Politics & Power Quote by Oscar Wilde

Wilde lands the punch with a mock-generous phrase: "the full benefits". It sounds like a civic virtue, the kind of praise you might offer in a toast. Then he flips it. The "benefits" are not wisdom or renewal but the costly, comic gift of naivete, freely bestowed on elders who should know better. The joke isn’t simply that young people are inexperienced; it’s that age happily launders its own interests through youth’s certainty.

The line carries an immigrant’s side-eye. Wilde spent his last, crucially formative American tour watching a country mythologize itself as new, pragmatic, unburdened by European decay. He needles that self-image by suggesting American youthfulness is less a promise than a political resource. Older people - the establishment, the gatekeepers, the salesmen of progress - rely on the young to mistake novelty for virtue and confidence for competence. Youth becomes a renewable energy source for bad ideas: ready enthusiasm, short memory, high moral volume.

There’s a deeper cynicism tucked into the syntax. "Always ready" implies reflex, not thought; "give" implies generosity, not manipulation. Wilde’s subtext is that the transaction feels voluntary because it flatters the young. They get to feel like disruptors even as they’re recruited into someone else’s script. It’s a one-liner that doubles as a warning label: beware the way power co-opts innocence by calling it hope.