Aging & Wisdom Quote by Walter Lippmann

Orthodoxy, in Lippmann's hands, isn't a harmless youthful phase; it's a lifestyle choice that calcifies early. The jab lands because it flips a familiar consolation: we tend to forgive young people their certainty as a kind of training-wheel ideology. Lippmann warns that the real risk isn't being wrong at 19, it's getting addicted to the comfort of being "right" in a way that outlasts curiosity.

Calling that fate "middle-aged all their lives" is a particularly surgical insult. Middle age here isn't biology, it's a mental posture: risk management, reputation protection, a preference for settled answers over messy inquiry. The line implies that orthodoxy is less about conviction than about status. To be orthodox is to join a club with passwords, to trade exploration for belonging. That's why the punishment isn't external; it's a shrinking of range. You stop revising, stop being surprised, stop growing.

The context matters: Lippmann made a career out of diagnosing how modern mass society manufactures consent and how easy it is to outsource thinking to institutions, newspapers, parties, and "common sense". A journalist in the age of propaganda and professionalized politics, he saw how quickly public opinion hardens into identity, and how incentives reward the tidy, repeatable stance.

The intent isn't to romanticize youthful rebellion; it's to demand intellectual adolescence as a permanent condition: the willingness to change your mind before the world forces you to.