Time & Perspective Quote by George Jean Nathan

Contradiction, here, isn’t a flaw to be corrected; it’s a credential to be flaunted. George Jean Nathan - the era’s razor-tongued editor-critic - takes a familiar accusation (“you contradict yourself”) and flips it into a boast about evolution. The punchline lands because it refuses the moral panic around inconsistency. In American public life, especially in print culture, changing your mind is often framed as weakness, hypocrisy, or lack of principle. Nathan treats it as proof that the mind is still moving.

The subtext is editorial power: I’m not here to provide you with a stable, comforting doctrine; I’m here to keep pace with new facts, new moods, new arguments - and to keep you off balance while I do it. The quip also winks at the reader’s desire for fixed positions. By embracing contradiction, Nathan sidesteps the trap of being pinned down, which is exactly what a skilled editor and polemicist wants. He suggests that the real embarrassment isn’t inconsistency; it’s stagnation dressed up as integrity.

Context matters: Nathan came up in a period when magazines and newspapers were battlegrounds for taste, politics, and modernism, and “consistency” often meant loyalty to a camp. His line is a neat bit of cultural sabotage, insisting that growth looks like revision, and that the most honest record of an active intellect will include a trail of abandoned certainties.