Robert Frost Quotes

Conservatives want to keep things as they are, while revolutionists turn things upside down.

If you haven't turned rebel by twenty you've got no heart; if you haven't turned establishment by thirty you've got no brains!

Generally young men are regarded as radicals. This is a popular misconception. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life.

Someone, I don't know who- it might have even been me- said, Any man at the age of twenty-five who is not a Communist has no heart: any man who is still is at the age of thirty-five has no head.

Age considers; youth ventures.

People that are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.

When you're young, you're very reckless. Then you get conservative. Then you get reckless again.

A young man who isn't a socialist hasn't got a heart; an old man who is a socialist hasn't got a head.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

Now that I'm over sixty I'm veering toward respectability.

Piety and virtue lie in obedience and conformity, while nothing is more repugnant than change and innovation.

All great Peoples are conservative; slow to believe in novelties; patient of much error in actualities.

Powerful imaginations are conservative.

Revolutionaries themselves are the last people to realize when, through force of time and circumstance, they have gradually become conservatives.

What is cowardice in the young is wisdom in the old, but all the same one can be ashamed of wisdom.”

A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted — in the air. A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest — at the command — of his head.

We have conferred a mystic popularity upon officials whose only virtue is their timidity; while our scorn of rebels and reformers is so great that we have ceased to persecute them. The capitals and governments of the world are in the hands of caution; and change comes over them only in the night, unseen.

Passion is a young man's game. Young people can be passionate. Older people gotta be more wise. I mean, you're around awhile, you leave certain things to the young. Don't try to act like you're young. You could really hurt yourself.

Anyone who is not a liberal in his youth has no heart. Anyone who remains so as he matures has no brain!

If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism—I don't know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.

Some rules are nothing but old habits that people are afraid to change.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

I do think about aging. I have those moments of panic and vanity, but life keeps getting better, so you can't worry about it too much.

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.