Aging & Wisdom Quote by Charles Simmons

Politics loves to dress its hunches up as permanence, and Simmons’ line punctures that costume with a single, quiet turn of the screw. “Much of the wisdom of one age, is the folly of the next” isn’t just a warning about changing fashions; it’s an indictment of how power manufactures “common sense” and then forgets it ever did. The comma after “age” forces a small pause, like a raised eyebrow, before the verdict lands: what we call wisdom is often just yesterday’s successful argument.

Coming from a politician who lived through two world wars, the Great Depression, and the rise of mass media, the sentence carries the texture of bruising historical whiplash. Policies sold as enlightened in one decade can look grotesque in retrospect: eugenics once paraded as science, colonialism as “development,” segregation as “order,” austerity as “responsibility.” Simmons doesn’t need to name examples because the structure of the thought does the work: it frames “wisdom” and “folly” as rotating labels pinned to the same human impulses.

The subtext is an invitation to humility without lapsing into cynicism. “Much of” matters: he’s not claiming progress is impossible, only that certainty is suspect. For a political mind, that’s a tactical insight as much as a moral one. If time will eventually mock today’s orthodoxy, the smart move is to build institutions and policies that can absorb revision, and to treat moral confidence as a provisional draft, not a final law.