To squall in their new accents or to stammer, in my second cradle, the elemental sounds of their barbarous metaphysics

From Reflections On The Revolution in France by Edmund Burke.

From my heart I pity the condition of a respectable servant of the public like this war minister, obliged in his old age to pledge the Assembly in their civic cups, and to enter with a hoary head into all the fantastic vagaries of these juvenile politicians. Such schemes are not like propositions coming from a man of fifty years' wear and tear amongst mankind. They seem rather such as ought to be expected from those grand compounders in politics who shorten the road to their degrees in the state and have a certain inward fanatical assurance and illumination upon all subjects, upon the credit of which one of their doctors has thought fit, with great applause, and greater success, to caution the Assembly not to attend to old men or to any persons who valued themselves upon their experience. I suppose all the ministers of state must qualify and take this test — wholly abjuring the errors and heresies of experience and observation. Every man has his own relish. But I think if I could not attain to the wisdom, I would at least preserve something of the stiff and peremptory dignity of age. These gentlemen deal in regeneration; but at any price I should hardly yield my rigid fibers to be regenerated by them, nor begin, in my grand climacteric, to squall in their new accents or to stammer, in my second cradle, the elemental sounds of their barbarous metaphysics. Si isti mihi largiantur ut repuerascam, et in eorum cunis vagiam, valde recusem!

The quote is from Cicero, "If they should grant to me that I might become a child again, and that I might wail in their cradle, I would vigorously refuse!"

It made me think of the infantile social justice thinking which we see struggling mightily on campuses and in news rooms. Discarding the accumulated wisdom of culture in a faddish totalitarian striving to impose uniformity on everyone, achieve equality between everyone, and seize control of everyone. Nothing to be said, or even thought, that might upset anyone. Echoes of Benito Mussolini's vision:

All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.

The modern political thinker P.J. O'Rourke is probably closer to the Cicero and Burke view:

Age and guile beat youth, innocence, and a bad haircut.

Burke addresses from the grave what we see when we begin to look at the dreams and assumptions common among the dreamers of utopia.

The imbecility of any part of the puerile and pedantic system, which they call a constitution, cannot be laid open without discovering the utter insufficiency and mischief of every other part with which it comes in contact, or that bears any the remotest relation to it.