Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and travelling in the common orbit of men’s opinions. I submit to this, as I would submit to gout or grey hair, as a concomitant of growing age or else of failing animal heat; but I do not acknowledge that it is necessarily a change for the better — I dare say it is deplorably for the worse.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet

Essay (1878-03), “Crabbed Age and Youth,” Cornhill Magazine, Vol. 38
    (Source)

Collected in Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers, ch. 2 (1881).