Aging & Wisdom Quote by Franklin P. Adams

Nostalgia doesn’t just edit the past; it airbrushes it until it becomes a political and emotional weapon. Franklin P. Adams, a journalist by trade and a humorist by instinct, lands the punchline with a deceptively mild setup: “Nothing is more responsible…” sounds like the start of a sober civic diagnosis. Then he swerves. The “good old days” aren’t an era at all, but a symptom of “a bad memory.” The joke is that sentimentality, which sells itself as wisdom, is often just cognitive laziness with better PR.

The intent is corrective, not sentimental. Adams is needling a common American reflex: when the present feels chaotic, we mythologize earlier decades as cleaner, simpler, more decent. His subtext is that this myth requires active forgetting - the dirt, the boredom, the exclusions, the ordinary humiliations that never make it into the scrapbook. “Bad memory” also implies selectivity rather than amnesia: we keep the comforting highlights and misplace the receipts.

Context matters: Adams wrote in a period when mass media was professionalizing nostalgia - newspapers, radio, and advertising constantly re-packaged “yesterday” as a stable brand. His line anticipates the way every generation declares a lost golden age while ignoring the fact that many people weren’t allowed into that gold. The wit works because it refuses a grand moral lecture; it offers a small, stinging reframe. If you’re longing for the good old days, check your memory’s accounting methods before you blame history.