"It is a pledge that senility has not the last say in everything"
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A surprisingly barbed vow hides inside this genteel sentence. Leslie frames “senility” not as a private medical fate but as a political force: the fear that public life will be governed by tired reflexes, inherited dogmas, and the complacent authority of those who have simply been around the longest. Calling his point a “pledge” matters. It’s not mere optimism about youth or progress; it’s a formal promise, the kind that implies duty, witnesses, and a future that can hold you accountable.
The line works because it dodges the easy insult. Leslie doesn’t say old people are useless; he says “senility” shouldn’t have “the last say.” That’s a surgical distinction. Age can confer memory and prudence, but senility suggests the petrification of judgment: the moment when experience stops being a resource and becomes a veto. “Last say” is the key phrase. He’s talking about who gets final authority in culture and statecraft, who gets to close the argument, who gets to define what’s realistic.
As a diplomat writing in a century bruised by two world wars and the slow unspooling of empires, Leslie would have watched institutions cling to prestige long after their ideas had gone stale. The subtext is a rebuke to gerontocratic inertia dressed up as civic reassurance: history is not obliged to end in decline, and power doesn’t get to confuse longevity with legitimacy.
The line works because it dodges the easy insult. Leslie doesn’t say old people are useless; he says “senility” shouldn’t have “the last say.” That’s a surgical distinction. Age can confer memory and prudence, but senility suggests the petrification of judgment: the moment when experience stops being a resource and becomes a veto. “Last say” is the key phrase. He’s talking about who gets final authority in culture and statecraft, who gets to close the argument, who gets to define what’s realistic.
As a diplomat writing in a century bruised by two world wars and the slow unspooling of empires, Leslie would have watched institutions cling to prestige long after their ideas had gone stale. The subtext is a rebuke to gerontocratic inertia dressed up as civic reassurance: history is not obliged to end in decline, and power doesn’t get to confuse longevity with legitimacy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Aging |
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