Time & Perspective Quote by Michael D. Higgins

There is a quiet rebuke tucked into Higgins's phrasing: the modern habit of treating the measurable as the meaningful. By opening with "Now it is time", he frames the moment as a hinge point, a polite but unmistakable demand for course correction. This is politician-speak at its best: not a partisan punch, but a moral recalibration, delivered as if it were simply common sense we have temporarily misplaced.

The line performs a careful balancing act. Higgins concedes the legitimacy of "material comfort and security" and even elevates them to "a basic right of all" - language that borrows from social-democratic tradition and human-rights discourse. That matters because it blocks the usual misreading: this isn't austerity dressed up as spirituality, or a sermon telling people to want less. It's an insistence that a decent baseline is non-negotiable.

Then comes the real payload: "older wisdom" and "cannot be measured". The subtext is an indictment of economic reductionism - GDP, targets, metrics, the managerial state - and, more subtly, of a culture that outsources judgment to spreadsheets. "Older" signals continuity with civic republican and communal values (the stuff nations like to claim as heritage), but also implies we've become clever in the wrong ways.

Contextually, Higgins often speaks from Ireland's post-boom perspective: a society that tasted rapid prosperity and then watched it curdle into crash, inequality, and social atomization. The quote is a bid to re-legitimate the unquantifiable: dignity, solidarity, imagination, care - the things politics depends on but struggles to count.