"No man is ever old enough to know better"
About this Quote
A neat little blade of optimism disguised as a scold, Holbrook Jackson's line takes aim at the smug fantasy that age confers immunity from error. "Old enough to know better" is usually trotted out as a moral cudgel, implying that experience should harden into certainty. Jackson flips it: nobody ever arrives at that final, superior vantage point. The joke is that the phrase itself is a kind of vanity project, a claim that somewhere out there exists the adult who has finished learning, finished misjudging, finished wanting.
The intent feels less like permission to be reckless than a warning against self-satisfaction. If you believe you "know better", you're already vulnerable to the most predictable mistake: confusing familiarity with wisdom. The subtext is humane and slightly dangerous: people keep making the same errors not because they're stupid, but because they're alive - desire, pride, fear, and curiosity don't retire. Aging doesn't delete the appetite for bad ideas; it just gives them better justifications.
Context matters here. Jackson wrote in a period when the authority of "maturity" was marketed hard: the respectable citizen, the settled empire, the confident modern man. Between world wars and rapid social change, that confidence looked increasingly theatrical. His line punctures the era's worship of steadiness. It also works as a writerly credo: if you can never be old enough to know better, you can also never be too old to revise your beliefs, to be surprised, to start over. The sting is in the egalitarianism - no exemptions, no dignified final stage where the messiness stops.
The intent feels less like permission to be reckless than a warning against self-satisfaction. If you believe you "know better", you're already vulnerable to the most predictable mistake: confusing familiarity with wisdom. The subtext is humane and slightly dangerous: people keep making the same errors not because they're stupid, but because they're alive - desire, pride, fear, and curiosity don't retire. Aging doesn't delete the appetite for bad ideas; it just gives them better justifications.
Context matters here. Jackson wrote in a period when the authority of "maturity" was marketed hard: the respectable citizen, the settled empire, the confident modern man. Between world wars and rapid social change, that confidence looked increasingly theatrical. His line punctures the era's worship of steadiness. It also works as a writerly credo: if you can never be old enough to know better, you can also never be too old to revise your beliefs, to be surprised, to start over. The sting is in the egalitarianism - no exemptions, no dignified final stage where the messiness stops.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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