“The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.... Certainly it would be difficult to imagine any committee of relatively young men, of thirty or thirty-five, showing the unbroken childishness, ignorance and lack of humor of the Supreme Court of the United States. The average age of the learned justices must be well beyond sixty, and all of them are supposed to be of finished and mellowed sagacity. Yet their knowledge of the most ordinary principles of justice often turns out to be extremely meager, and when they spread themselves grandly upon a great case their reasoning powers are usually found to be precisely equal to those of a respectable Pullman conductor.”

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 24
Early career years (1898–1929)

There Only Was One Choice
Song lyrics, Dance Band on the Titanic (1977)

The God of Small Things (1997)

Lady Bracknell, Act III
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

Source: The Importance of Living (1937), Ch. I : The Awakening, p. 5

Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 2
Context: At the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had not only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all equally vain. Literature was a farce. The night after reading Greene's Visit to a Nobleman in the Country, he burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven poetical works, only retaining 'The Oak Tree', which was his boyish dream and very short. Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush were the whole of it.

Reimaging India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower

Book VII, 1335a.27
Politics

Source: A Short History Of The English Law (First Edition) (1912), Chapter XIX, Modern Civil Procedure, p. 364