wrote in message
...

Actually, it's another from Winston Churchill (who as I remember
changed political party himself, probably at age 30).

Actually, it's probably not. This from the authoritative Churchill Centre
website http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/...fm?pageid=112:

"If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not
a
conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain." There is no record
of anyone hearing Churchill say this. Paul Addison of Edinburgh University
makes this comment: "Surely Churchill can't have used the words attributed
to him. He'd been a Conservative at 15 and a Liberal at 35! And would he
have talked so disrespectfully of [his wife] Clemmie, who is generally
thought to have been a lifelong Liberal?"

And remember most people here are using the term Liberal in its modern
American meaning. It seems to have been coined on the spot by GHWB as an
intended insult against Dukakis and adopted by both sides as a shorthand
for, at best, "social democrat". If you want to use the term disparagingly
you also imply it includes fellow-travelers like socialists (again, not
using the contemporary European definition) and anarchists. It's very
confusing when we don't even agree on the lexicon.

The British inter-war Liberal party espoused elements of contemporary social
democracy, to be sure, without the overhead of being in thrall to the
unions. Today, they largely represent the rump of the British, umm, Social
Democratic party.

-- David Brooks