Grumpy old men

"It is a rare thing to come across a man of sixty, living on the threshold of a great change, who had already come to regard a unique culture and a unique political institution as replaceable, in theory at least."

Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo:  a biography (Berkeley, CA:  The University of California Press, 1967), 266.  A bit later, though, Brown takes Augustine to task for having deliberately forgotten "that a culture requires a framework of rules and organized teaching" (268).