Aging & Wisdom Quote by Don Rickles

Nostalgia gets about three seconds of reverence here before Rickles shoves it off the stage. "The old days were the old days" is deliberately redundant, a comic throat-clear that deflates the grand mythmaking we attach to the past. He grants the audience its sentimental fix - "they were great days" - then yanks the mic back with the blunt pivot: "But now is now". That last clause is so plain it feels like a scold, which is exactly the point. Rickles' persona was the affectionate bully: he’d insult you to snap you back to reality, and you’d laugh because the punch landed on a truth you were already flirting with.

The intent isn’t to deny that the past mattered; it’s to mock how we use it as a hiding place. By repeating "old days", he turns the phrase into a cliché you can hear creaking. The subtext: stop fetishizing an era you’ve edited into a highlight reel. Every generation claims it had better music, better manners, better everything. Rickles treats that reflex as a soft target, a comfort blanket that also doubles as an excuse - for not adapting, for not paying attention, for refusing the messiness of the present.

Context matters: Rickles came up in a mid-century entertainment world that changed radically - from nightclub circuits and network TV to cable, late-night, and comedy that increasingly policed its own boundaries. This line reads like a veteran’s shrug at cultural whiplash. Not bitterness, not worship: a pragmatic punchline about time’s one unfunny rule. The past can get applause. The present gets the bill.