Weinberg is the person who coined the saying “Don’t trust anyone over 30”.[21][22] The saying exists in several variants, such as “Never trust anybody over 30”. Origination of the saying has been wrongly attributed to Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, the Beatles, and others. In November 1964, Weinberg was interviewed by a reporter[23] for the San Francisco Chronicle working on a story about the Free Speech Movement. Weinberg tells the story like this:
I was being interviewed by a newspaper reporter, and he was making me very angry. It seemed to me his questions were implying that we were being directed behind the scenes by Communists or some other sinister group. I told him we had a saying in the movement that we don’t trust anybody over 30. It was a way of telling the guy to back off, that nobody was pulling our strings.[24]
On November 15, 1964, the Chronicle printed the story, quoting Weinberg as saying “We have a saying in the movement that you can’t trust anybody over 30.”[10]
A Chronicle columnist, Ralph J. Gleason, highlighted the saying in his column on November 18.[25] The saying then went viral, becoming a favorite for reporters and columnists wishing to ridicule the young, the New Left, or the hippie/Yippie movement. That annoyed Weinberg, who has said
I’ve done some things in my life I think are very important, and my one sentence in history turns out to be something I said off the top of my head which became completely distorted and misunderstood. But I’ve become more accepting of fate as I get older.[24]
