Aging & Wisdom Quote by Lin Yutang

Lin Yutang is doing something deceptively old-fashioned here: treating vocabulary as a moral seismograph. The bite of the line comes from its insistence that our crisis isn’t primarily technological or political but linguistic, which is to say cultural. “Simple words” are framed as embarrassing in a modern register; we’ve trained ourselves to hear “goodness” and “mercy” as quaint, sentimental, maybe even naive. That embarrassment is the tell. He’s not nostalgic for antique diction so much as diagnosing how quickly a society learns to mock the language of restraint and care when it no longer trusts the ideals behind it.

The subtext is an attack on sophistication-as-cynicism. When kindness becomes a suspect category - when it must be justified as strategy, brand, or “self-care” - the moral imagination shrinks. Lin’s repetition (“good old words… good old values”) isn’t just rhetorical flourish; it mimics the way traditions are dismissed in bulk, with a wave of the hand, as if continuity itself were a con. He also slips in a collective “we,” making the indictment communal rather than finger-pointing: everyone participates in the cultural downgrade of decency into mere rhetoric.

Context matters: Lin wrote across Chinese and English worlds during a century of ideological fervor, war, and rapid modernization. Against that backdrop, the claim that “the world is sick” reads less like moral panic than a warning about what replaces shared virtues: coercion, speed, slogans, and performance. If mercy is only a word, power gets to define what’s practical. Lin is arguing that the health of a culture can be measured by whether it can still say “kindness” without wincing.