(Jack) Weinberg’s Credo
Don’t trust anybody over thirty.
Often credited by mistake to Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman or one of the other well known radicals of the 1960s, the slogan seems to have been articulated first in November of 1964 by Weinberg, then a student at the University of California at Berkeley in an interview with a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle. The reporter had come across the Bay to do a story on the free speech movement among students on the campus. Thinking that the newsman was trying to get him to say that the students were acting out a Communist-inspired conspiracy, Weinberg jabbed back with “We have a saying in the movement that we don’t trust anybody over thirty.” A quarter of a century later he told Ralph Keyes, author of They Never Said It (1992), that he believed the words were original to him. He had described them as a ‘movement saying’ merely to give them more zing.
Other high authorities have disagreed on the significance of reaching age thirty. Thus we have:
Emerson’s Corollary. After thirty, a man wakes up sad every morning except perhaps five or six until the day of his death (Journal 1834).
Catherine’s Consolation. Men make love more intensely at twenty but make love better, however, at thirty (Catherine the Great, letter to Voltaire in The Complete Works of Catherine II, Evdokimov ed.).
For more on the difficult subject of ageing, see Clarke’s Laws, the last of Shaw’s Maxims and Temple’s Law.
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