“Youth is a circumstance you can't do anything about. The trick is to grow up without getting old.”
Source: Me Talk Pretty One Day
“You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.”
Source: Attributed to Parker after her death, by Robert E. Drennan The Algonquin Wits (1968), p. 124. However the same quip appears anonymously fifteen years earlier, in the trade journal Sales Management (Chicago: Dartnell Corp., 1918-75), vol. 70 (Survey of Buying Power, 1953), p. 80: "Marxism never changes. You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks."
7:30 Report interview, May 8, 2006
Address at the National Plowing Match (18 September 1948); as quoted in Miracle of '48: Harry Truman's Major Campaign Speeches and Selected Whistle-stops (2003); edited by Steve Neal. Truman's mention of an "old political trick" is often quoted alone as if it were a strategy he was advising rather than one he was criticizing.
Context: On the one hand, the Republicans are telling industrial workers that the high cost of food in the cities is due to this government's farm policy. On the other hand, the Republicans are telling the farmers that the high cost of manufactured goods on the farm is due to this government's labor policy.
That's plain hokum. It's an old political trick: "If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em." But this time it won't work.
“Nick Machiavel had ne'er a trick,
Though he gave his name to our Old Nick.”
Canto I, line 1313
Source: Hudibras, Part III (1678)
“The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.”
Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 3
