Aging & Wisdom Quote by Fisher Ames

He lands the insult with barnyard precision: the “gentleman” isn’t merely wrong, he’s ridiculous in the most domestic, instinct-driven way. Fisher Ames, a razor-tongued Federalist, likens a political opponent to a hen that keeps sitting on an empty nest after the eggs are gone. The image does two things at once. It paints stubbornness as something animal, automatic, and faintly pitiable, and it suggests that the opponent’s convictions aren’t principled so much as procedural - a habit of posture after the substance has vanished.

The specific intent is political diminishment. Ames isn’t debating; he’s stripping the other man of adult agency. “Persists” is the key verb: persistence is usually a virtue, but here it’s re-coded as blindness, a compulsion that outlives its purpose. The hen believes she’s incubating a future; in reality she’s performing motherhood over absence. That’s a brutal metaphor for a politician clinging to a policy, a faction, or a grievance that has already been defeated, repealed, or emptied of public support.

Contextually, Ames wrote and spoke in the fevered early republic, when Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans accused each other of endangering the experiment itself. His rhetoric often treated politics as a contest between sober governance and self-deluding populism. This line works because it’s vivid without being ornate: an accessible rural tableau that turns ideological stubbornness into a scene of comic futility. It’s not just contempt; it’s a warning that sentimentality and inertia can masquerade as conviction long after the “eggs” - the facts, leverage, or legitimacy - have been taken away.