“But life is just a party, and parties weren't meant to last.”

1999
Song lyrics, 1999 (1982)

"Enough Is Enough: Donna Rice Hughes" Interview by Ramona Cramer Tucker, Christianity Today International/Christian Reader Woman magazine, September/October 1996, Vol. 18, No. 5, Page 42

Source: Train to Pakistan

Source: Dark Flame

France Before The Consulate, Chapter I: "How the Republic was ready to accept a master", in Memoir, Letters, and Remains, Vol I (1862), p. 266 http://books.google.com/books?id=ilm0jHyQQM0C&pg=PA266&vq=%22last+thing+abandoned%22&source=gbs_search_r&cad=1_1
Variant translation: The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary. This is because, in party politics as in other matters, it is the crowd who dictates the language, and the crowd relinquishes the ideas it has been given more readily than the words it has learned.
As quoted in The Viking book of Aphorisms : A Personal Selection (1962) by W. H. Auden, and Louis Kronenberger, p. 306.
Variant translation: The last thing that a party abandons is its language.
1850s and later
Context: The last thing abandoned by a party is its phraseology, because among political parties, as elsewhere, the vulgar make the language, and the vulgar abandon more easily the ideas that have been instilled into it than the words that it has learnt.

The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)

1990s, Speech to the Council for National Policy (1997)

Quoted in [Garnett, Richard, Life of Emerson, 1888, http://www.poemhunter.com/john-arbuthnot/quotations/poet-32922/page-1/, 1888, Chapter 7]