A young designer stopped by the studio the other day and as he sheepishly showed work he was doing ‘on the job,’ I flashed back to the last such ‘job’ I held in Baltimore.

I remembered a particular project (one I should have never been working on in the first place) that had degenerated into a situation where the client—some middle manager at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Maryland—was standing behind me making me move type around etc…I remember insisting that we put a sunset on there just for spite.

I snapped out of it and told this designer to quit immediately, and that he would figure out how to pay his bills some other way. This is advice that I would have found difficult to follow when I was in a similar situation—making a steady paycheck—as I had to be fired before I finally made the decision to start working for myself.

I always wished I’d quit that last job, which is probably why I’ve held onto this piece-of-shit for 15 years.

Charles Krauthammer [op-ed, May 25] quotes Winston Churchill as saying, “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 20, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re 40, you have no head.”

This quotation is frequently but mistakenly attributed to Churchill. It is anyway unlikely that Churchill would subscribe to this philosophy: He was a swashbuckling soldier at 20, and a Conservative member of Parliament at 25. A couple of years later he switched to the Liberal Party (which was not liberal in the modern sense), and later went back to the Conservatives.

The phrase originated with Francois Guisot (1787-1874): “Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head.” It was revived by French Premier Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929): “Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of
want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head.”