A correspondent who asked to remain anonymous taunted me today with this: “As Churchill among others said, any man who is not a liberal at 30 has no heart; any man who is not a conservative some twenty or thirty years later has no mind.”

So I copied him on a column I wrote in the summer of 2002 when another correspondent tried to zing me with, “As Winston Churchill said, ‘If you’re not a liberal at age 20, you have no heart. If you’re still a liberal at age 40, you have no head.’ ” —

There are many variations on this quote floating around the Internet. The age of naivete goes as low as 16, the age of wisdom as high as 60; the discarded philosophies include liberalism, communism and socialism, and the credit for the saying goes to a host of luminaries including Benjamin Disraeli, Wendell Wilkie, Woodrow Wilson, George Bernard Shaw, Otto von Bismarck and Bertrand Russell as well as Churchill.

Conservatives who fancy themselves highly evolved beneficiaries of the enlightenment that the years confer upon attentive people love the quote, of course. What’s not to love about an adage that suggests that you are both smarter and more mature than those with whom you disagree?