“An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; and American thinks a hundred years is a long time”

Invented in * 2014-05-06
In Landmark Decision, Supreme Court Strikes Down Main Reason Country Was Started
Andy Borowitz
The Borowitz Report
The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2014/05/in-landmark-decision-supreme-court-strikes-down-main-reason-country-was-started.html
2014-05-18.
Satirizing his decision in Greece v. Galloway.
Misattributed

Source: Holes

God Is An Iron (1977)
Context: "It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand? That lemming drive you're talking about is there — but there's another kind of drive, another kind of force that's working against it. Or else there wouldn't still be any people and there wouldn't be the words to have this conversation and—" She paused, looked down at herself. "And I wouldn't be here to say them."

Source: The Last Continent

Address at Princeton University, "The Educated Citizen" (22 March 1954).
Variant: It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.
"If I Were Twenty-One" in Coronet (December 1955).
This has also been paraphrased "What matters most is not the years in your life, but the life in your years" and misattributed to Abraham Lincoln and Mae West
Context: All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions. All change is the result of a change in the contemporary state of mind. Don't be afraid of being out of tune with your environment, and above all pray God that you are not afraid to live, to live hard and fast. To my way of thinking it is not the years in your life but the life in your years that count in the long run. You'll have more fun, you'll do more and you'll get more, you'll give more satisfaction the more you know, the more you have worked, and the more you have lived. For yours is a great adventure at a stirring time in the annals of men.

Source: It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (2000), p. 1
Context: I want to die at a hundred years old with an American flag on my back and the star of Texas on my helmet, after screaming down an Alpine descent on a bicycle at 75 miles per hour. I want to cross one last finish line as my wife and my ten children applaud, and then I want to lie down in a field of those famous French sunflowers and gracefully expire, the perfect contradiction to my once anticipated poignant early demise.

Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi Reacts to the Murder of Four Americans in Al-Fallujah: 'How could you punish an entire people because four corpses were mutilated?' http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/31.htm April 2004.

1998, quoted in The IKEA Story by Bertil Torekull.

Joseph and Zuleika, p. 113
Poetry, Poetry from Joseph and Zuleika