Quotes about age
page 10

“It seemed to me that I, the spirit of so many worlds, the flower of so many ages, was the Church Cosmical, fit at last to be the bride of God. But instead I was blinded and seared and struck down by terrible light.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 163)

God, World, Flowers, Light

“Catholics in our age when confronted with dogma do not react or yield; they stay neutral, and receive it as one news item among others, as if it were a simple formality. It is as if they lacked the background needed in order to understand. It was the highest point of the Holy Year, the summit to be attained on that morning of All Saints. The prize, the great reward of those who had followed it in faith and fervor. The Pontiff's words flew over the square with a swish of wings, as if a multitude of doves had been released. One had only to close his eyes and let himself be carried away in an ecstasy of light. Instead, it became a perfect example of the contradiction inherent in our age, when man has learned to fly with his body only to forget the great flights of the soul. The people in Saint Peter's square looked like birds with severed wings.”

Aldo Palazzeschi book Roma

Page 182, "1950"
Roma (1953)

People, Faith, Soul, Understanding

“Multiculturalists encourage vagueness about 'contributions' to give the impression of equal participation, as in the 'new age' school sports where every player in the team must handle the ball before a goal can be scored. If one were to compose a more precise ethnic history it would read something like this: The English, Irish and Scots were the founding population; they and their children established the Australian nation.”

John Hirst (1942–2016) Australian historian

Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (2005)

Children, School, History, Sport

“In a revolutionary age talk of equality may well have represented a passion to provide full human dignity to those who had previously been denied it by systems of political and economic domination; but in the present age it softens the spiritual requirements that are an essential ingredient in human dignity. Thus the slogans of equality serve not so much to elevate individuals to the dignity of being human as to free them from the responsibility of rising to this vocation.”

Merold Westphal (1940)

Source: Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (1992), p. 49

Passion

“Another common, unspoken assumption is that spirituality is about calm and peace, and conflict is unspiritual. Which of course makes it hard to integrate the spiritual with the political, which is all about conflict.
In New Age circles, a common slogan is that "What you resist, persists." Truly spiritual people are never supposed to be confrontational or adversarial — that would be perpetuating an unevolved, "us-them" dualism.
I don't know from what spiritual tradition the "what you resist, persists" slogan originated, but I often want to ask those who blithely repeat it, "What's your evidence?" When it is so patently obvious that what you don't resist persists like hell and spreads all over the place. In fact, good, strong, solid resistance may be the only thing that stands between us and hell. Hitler didn't persist because of the Resistance — he succeeded in taking over Germany and murdering millions because not enough people resisted.”

Starhawk (1951) American author, activist and Neopagan

Toward an Activist Spirituality (2003)

People, Peace, Hell, Strong

“In spite of every sage whom Greece can show,
Unerring wisdom never dwelt below;
Folly in all of every age we see,
The only difference lies in the degree.”

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) French poet and critic

N'en déplaise à ces fous nommés sages de Grèce,
En ce monde il n'est point de parfaite sagesse :
Tous les hommes sont fous, et, malgré tous leurs soins,
Ne diffèrent entre eux que du plus ou du moins.
Satire 4, l. 37
Satires (1716)

Wisdom

“It is astonishing to witness the struggles of this city so shattered, so starved, so deprived of all those things that justify a city’s existence, to adapt itself to a collapse into conditions which must resemble life in the Dark Ages. People camp out like Bedouins in deserts of brick.”

Norman Lewis book Naples '44

Naples '44

Life, People

“Islam was not always so close minded. During the 'Golden age' – between the 9th and 11th century – there existed a tradition of critical thinking in the Muslim world.<!”

Irshad Manji (1968) Feminist from Canada, author, journalist, activist

World, Thinking

“Lamarck, after having first studied botany with success, had then turned his attention to conchology, and soon became aware that in the newer (or tertiary) strata of the earth's crust there were a multitude of fossil species of shells… He also observed that other shells were so nearly allied to living forms, that it was difficult not to suspect that they had been connected by a common bond of descent. He therefore proposed that the element of time should enter into the definition of a species, and that it should run thus: 'A species consists of individuals all resembling each other, and reproducing their like by generation, so long as the surrounding conditions do not undergo changes sufficient to cause their habits, characters, and forms to vary. He came at last to the conclusion, that none of the animals and plants now existing were primordial creations, but were all derived from pre-existing forms, which, after they may have gone on for indefinite ages reproducing their like, had, at length, by the influence of alterations in climate and in the animate world, been made to vary gradually, and adapt themselves to new circumstances, some of them deviating, in the course of ages, so far from their original type as to have claims to be regarded as new species.”

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.20, p. 389-390

World, Study, Change, Time

“Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense

Education, Imagination, Effort, Learning

“Of course the sands of Present Time are running out from under our feet. And why not? The Great Conundrum: 'What are we here for?' is all that ever held us here in the first place. Fear. The answer to the Riddle of the Ages has actually been out in the street since the First Step in Space. Who runs may read but few people run fast enough. What are we here for? Does the great metaphysical nut revolve around that? Well, I'll crack it for you, right now. What are we here for? We are here to go!”

Brion Gysin (1916–1986) Canadian artist

The Process Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, p. 49.

People, Fear, Time, Reading

“Tell mother that however dogs and samovars might behave themselves, winter comes after summer, old age after youth, and misfortune follows happiness (or the other way around). A person can not be healthy and cheerful throughout life. Losses lie waiting and man can not safeguard against death, even if he be Alexander of Macedonia. One must be prepared for anything and consider everything to be inevitably essential, as sad as that may be.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to his sister Maria Pavlovna Chekhov (November 13, 1898)
Letters

Life, Death, Happiness, Lie

“After being in legal practice for 67 years, I was at first reluctant to write about my professional life because of what C K Daphtary once told me when I pleaded with him to write his own memoirs. “What?” he said angrily, “shall I write one like Setalvad did?” He was referring to the autobiography of a great attorney general Motilal Setalvad — in part self eulogizing. But I was getting on in age and getting forgetful as well, exemplified in that Mathew Arnold quote at the very beginning of the book: “And we forget because we must, and not because we will.” So I compromised. I wrote out the story of my life at the Bar trying to keep the old ego strictly under control. If I have not wholly succeeded, it is only because a man’s ego just cannot be suppressed!”

Fali Sam Nariman (1929) Indian politician

On writing about his autobiography.
Fali Sam Nariman: An Interview

Life, Books, Quotes, Parting

“"There's nothing to beat these old English country houses." said Charlie, becoming lyrical. "All those parks and gardens and terraces and stuff. Makes you think of bygone ages and knights in armour and all like that. I saw one of these joints in a movie in Cicero once with Fred Astaire in it, and I remember thinking those guys have it pretty soft."”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

From P.G. Wodehouse's Do Butlers Burgle Banks? (1968).

Guy, Thinking, Housing, Country

“He and Marilyn were lovers, but this was never said in so many words. Explicitness about one’s romantic arrangements had apparently been deemed gauche. In my middle-class teen-age world, the whole apparatus of going steady, exchanging ID bracelets, smooching at dances, fighting, breaking up, submitting to the arbitration of friends — that was the point, the public drama.”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

My Women, The New Yorker, 6 June 2005
Articles and Interviews

World, Lovers, Dance, Fight

“I was still in Europe at the time. Truman said he had the authority to relieve him and he did it. I have never made up my mind whether he was right or not, but I happened to be with a British unit the night we learned of MacArthur's dismissal. The British had a brigade in Korea at the time and the British officers in the Mess were very anti-MacArthur and celebrating his demise. I think MacArthur was a magnificent general, but he became more and more insulated from the world by his staff, many of whom had been with him since the Bataan days. I think that was part of the problem. He was not a young man at the time of Korea. I think, perhaps, he got too dependent on his staff officers and certain things happened which were not in MacArthur's best interest… Even after MacArthur was relieved by the President of the United States he had a tickertape parade in New York City and he made two great speeches, one to Congress and one about Duty, Honor, Country. The Duty, Honor, Country speech is one of the greatest ever made by a military man, and he made it without a note at the age of seventy-five. I believe Douglas MacArthur in 1945 could have come home and run for president and won going away. He was worshiped at the end of the war.”

George S. Patton IV (1923–2004) U.S. Army general

Source: The Fighting Pattons (1997) by Brian M. Sobel, p. 67

War, World, Home, Problem

“'So then at forty-six years of age I came here to learn to live by cliches,' is what Day says to Charlotte Treat right after Randy Lenz asked what time it was, again, at 0825. 'To turn my will and life over to the care of cliches. One day at a time. Easy does it. First things first. Courage is fear that has said its prayers. Ask for help. Thy will not mine be done. It works if you work it. Grow or go. Keep coming back.' […] I walk around with my arms out straight in front of me and recite these cliches. In a monotone. No inflection necessary. Could that be one? Could that be added to the cliche-pool? "No inflection necessary"? Too many syllables, probably.'”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest (1996)

Life, Fear, Courage, Learning

“I saw how all the trembling ages past,
Moulded to her by deep and deeper breath,
Neared to the hour when Beauty breathes her last
And knows herself in death.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Death, Beauty, Past

“A change of world view not only brings about profound cultural changes, but also is responsible for what historians call a "change of age." An age is a period of time in which the prevailing world view has remained relatively unchanged.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1990s, Re-Creating the Corporation (1999), p. 4.

World, Change, Time

“But I am no longer trying to formulate a stylised version of anxiety such as we find in the Laocoon group and in so many other sculptures of the Silver Age of antiquity. I feel that these works are always a bit too melodramatic. If you really want to find the sources of my present style [1958] in antiquity, I must confess that you will find them in the remains of the life of the past rather than in those of its art. The fossilized corpses that have been unearthed in Pompeii.... if the whole earth is destroyed in our atomic age, I feel that the human forms which may survive as mere fossils will have become sculptures similar to mine.”

Marino Marini (1901–1980) Italian sculptor

Source: Interview with Edouard Roditi' (1958), p. 88

Life, Art, Feeling, Past

“But satire, ever moral, ever new,
Delights the reader and instructs him, too.
She, if good sense refine her sterling page,
Oft shakes some rooted folly of the age.”

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) French poet and critic

La satire, en leçons, en nouveautés fertile,
Sait seule assaisonner le plaisant et l'utile,
Et, d'un vers qu'elle épure aux rayons du bons sens,
Détromper les esprits des erreurs de leur temps.
Satire 9
Satires (1716)

Sense

“There have been applied sciences throughout the ages. … However this so-called practice was not much more than paper in nearly all of these cases, and the various applied sciences were only lacking a bagatelle, namely proper scientific practice. The applied sciences show the application of theoretic doctrines in existing events; but that is precisely what it does, it merely shows. Whereas the scientific practice autonomously puts to use these theories.”

Christian Doppler (1803–1853) mathematician, physicist

in his review of Joseph Beskiba's textbook, published in the Österreichische Blätter für Literatur und Kunst (September 7, 1844), as quoted by [Peter Schuster, Moving the stars: Christian Doppler, his life, his works and principle, and the world after, Living edition, 2005, 3901585052, 78]

Science

“You rebel against the tribal and look for the individual, for your own voice as against the stereotypical voice of the tribe or the tribe's stereotype of itself. You have to establish yourself against your predecessor, and doing so can well involve what they like to call self-hatred. I happen to think that—all those protestations notwithstanding—your self hatred was real and a positive force in its very destructiveness. Since to build something new often requires that something else be destroyed, self-hatred is valuable for a young person. What should he or she have instead—self-approval, self-satisfaction, self-praise? It's not so bad to hate the norms that keep a society from moving on, especially when the norms are dictated by fear as much as by anything else and especially when that fear is of the enemy forces of the overwhelming majority. But you seem now to be so strongly motivated by a need for reconciliation with the tribe that you aren't even willing to acknowledge how disapproving of its platitudinous demands you were back then, however ineluctably Jewish you may also have felt. The prodigal son who once upset the tribal balance—and perhaps even invigorated the tribe's health—may well, in his old age, have a sentimental urge to go back home, but isn't this a bit premature in you, aren't you really too young to have it so fully developed?”

Philip Roth book The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

Nathan Zuckerman to Philip Roth
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

Hate, Health, Fear, Home

“The Age of Insight is a product of my subsequent fascination with the intellectual history of Vienna from 1890 to 1918, as well as my interest in Austrian modernist art, psychoanalysis, art history, and the brain science that is my life's work. In this book I examine the ongoing dialogue between art and science that had its origins in fin-de-siècle Vienna…”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

The Age of Insight (2012)
Variant: The Age of Insight is a product of my subsequent fascination with the intellectual history of Vienna from 1890 to 1918, as well as my interest in Austrian modernist art, psychoanalysis, art history, and the brain science that is my life's work. In this book I examine the ongoing dialogue between art and science that had its origins in fin-de-siècle Vienna...

Life, Art, History, Science

“Music's golden tongue
Flatter'd to tears this aged man and poor.”

John Keats The Eve of St. Agnes

Stanza 3
Poems (1820), The Eve of St. Agnes

Music, Tear

“Art does not ask about the age, just expects a lot.”

Łukasz Pawlikowski (1997) Polish cellist

Sztuka nie pyta o wiek, tylko oczekuje wiele. A little cellist from Krakow conquers the world, warszawa.naszemiasto.pl, 2008-04-02, Polish http://warszawa.naszemiasto.pl/archiwum/1664386,maly-wiolonczelista-z-krakowa-podbija-swiat,id,t.html,

Art

“It is not size or age or childishness that separates children from adults. It is "responsibility."”

Jules Feiffer (1929) American cartoonist, screenwriter and playwright

The Great Comic Book Heroes http://books.google.com/books?id=zxbuAAAAMAAJ&q=%22It+is+not+size+or+age+or+childishness+that+separates+children+from+adults+It+is+responsibility%22&pg=PA75#v=onepage (1965)

Children

“My early work in newspaper comics and comic books allowed me to entertain millions of readers weekly, but I always felt there was more to say. I pioneered the use of comics for instructional manuals for American soldiers, covering three major wars, and later used comics to educate grade school children. Both were heady responsibilities that I took very seriously. But I yearned to do still more with the medium. At an age when I could have "retired," I chose instead to create literary comics, than a decidedly oxymoronic term. Acceptance has not always been easy, but I have seen it arrive in my lifetime. It has been most gratifying to see the graphic novel and many of its exceptional creators gradually become an accepted part of the book world. I couldn't find a major publisher to take A Contract With God only a quarter century ago, and now graphic novels represent the book industry's fastest growing genre.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

XIX-XX, December 2004
A Contract With God (2004)

God, War, Children, Books

“We will not be picking up axes and breaking into people's homes. But we will not remain silent either. Moderation in the face of evil is not what our age needs. As Ronald Reagan declared, "The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted." We must uncap our pens; we must speak words of truth. We are facing a determined enemy who is striving through all means to destroy the West and snuff out our traditions of free thought, free speech, and freedom of religion. Make no mistake: if we fail, we will be enslaved. We must not let the violent fanatics dictate what we draw, what we say, and what we read. We must rebel against their suffocating rules and thuggish demands at every turn. You can help the fight just by reading this book, which explains the many ways in which Islam has marked for death not just me, but all of Western civilization. We must, in the words of Revolutionary War veteran General John Stark, "Live free or die."”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Source: 2010s, Marked for Death (2012), Ch. 1, p. 6

Death, War, People, Truth

“I was not meant to be alone. I am not good at it. The years since Ruth's passing have ticked by with the kind of desparate silence known only to the elderly. It is a silence underscored by loneliness and the knowledge that the good years are already in the past, coupled with the complications of old age itself.
The body is not meant to survive nearly a century. I speak from experience when I say this…”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Ira Levinson, Chapter 28, p. 320-321
2009, The Longest Ride (2013)

Knowledge, Silence, Past, Loneliness

“Americans cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die,… They clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight. An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it before the roof is on; he will plant a garden and rent it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he will clear a field and leave others to reap the harvest; he will take up a profession and leave it, settle in one place and soon go off elsewhere with his changing desires. If his private business allows him a moment’s relaxation, he will plunge at once into the whirlpool of politics. Then, if at the end of a year crammed with work he has a little spare leisure, his restless curiosity goes with him traveling up and down the vast territories of the United States. Thus he will travel five hundred miles in a few days as a distraction from his happiness. Death steps in in the end and stops him before he has grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes him. At first sight there is something astonishing in this spectacle of so many lucky men restless in the midst of abundance. But it is a spectacle as old as the world; all that is new is to see a whole people performing in it.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Two, Chapter XIII.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Two

Death, Men, Happiness, People

“Why do people stop developing, or, like they stop the way you can rate their, psychologically, their development? Where they stop, and just from being children to maybe stopping at a very adolescent age, and they stay there until they die. Physically die. I mean, they react adolescently. They don't change. They don't develop. They don't — it's that continual read, that process which is is the total threat for the ego.”

Edie Sedgwick (1943–1971) Socialite, actress, model

Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)

Children, People, Way, Change

“We now live, as Earth always has (see my 1996 book Full House), in an Age of Bacteria. These simplest organisms will dominate our planet (if conditions remain hospitable for life at all) until the sun explodes. During our current, and undoubtedly brief, geological moment, they watch with appropriate amusement as we strut and fret our hour upon the stage. For we are, to them, only transient and delectable islands ripe for potential exploitation.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"War of the Worldviews", p. 352
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Life, Books, Sun, Housing

“[Among the Arapeh… both father and mother are held responsible for child care by the entire community…] If one comments upon a middle-aged man as good-looking, the people answer: 'Good-looking? Ye-e-e-s? But you should have seen him before he bore all those children.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 55; cited inWomen, History, and Theory : The Essays of Joan Kelly (1986), by Joan Kelly, p. 137

Children, People, Communication

“Native Americans would say that [the sight of a fox killed in a trap] was the moment when my fate was sealed. They say that you sign nature's unwritten contract to work with animals at a very young age as a result of some experience, either good or bad, that happens in early childhood. Looking back, there is no doubt that the shock of seeing that magnificent young fox-my friend-hanging from that tree left me with a feeling of revulsion for my own kind and a desire to distance myself from the human race.”

Shaun Ellis (1977) American football player, defensive end

The Man who lives with Wolves (2010)

Fate, Feeling, Nature, Tree

“We're all talking about the same thing, whether it's religious people or New Age spiritual people or Buddhists or scientists. We're all talking about having a sense of awe and wonder at something grander than ourselves.”

Michael Shermer (1954) American science writer

quoted in [Berger, Kevin, August 23, 2006, http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/08/23/shermer/print.html, "The joys of life without God", Salon.com, 2006-08-26]

People, Sense

“We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Les silences du colonel Bramble (The Silence of Colonel Bramble)

Love

“If I could fight anyone it would be Jack Johnson - he was so ahead of his time. I would like to have the opportunity to fight Tyson too and I'm sure it will arise if he can face me. I would not like to have fought Muhammed Ali as I have too much respect for him on a personal and professional level. Larry Holmes, Ali's ex-sparring partner, fought Muhammed Ali and hated himself after giving him an unnecessary beating after winning. The only reason he won was because of Ali's ageing boxing skills.”

Lennox Lewis (1965) British-Canadian boxer

Reply to a question while being interviewed. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/forum/566535.stm

Hate, Time, Fight, Personality

“Contemporary art -- the field we are usually working in because there's money -- is mostly concerned with systems or systematic concepts. In the context of their work, artists adapt models of individual art-specific or economic or political systems like in a laboratory, to reveal the true nature of these systems by deconstructing them. So would it be fair to say that by their chameleon-like adaptation they are attempting to generate a similar system? Well… the corporate change in the art market has aged somewhat in the meantime and looks almost as old as the 'New Economy'. Now even the last snotty brat has realized that all the hogwash about the creative industries, sponsoring, fund-raising, the whole load of bullshit about the beautiful new art enterprises, was not much more than the awful veneer on the stupid, crass fanfare of neo-liberal liberation teleology. What is the truth behind the shifting spheres of activity between computer graphics, web design and the rest of all those frequency-orientated nerd pursuits? A lonely business with other lonely people at their terminals. And in the meantime the other part of the corporate identity has incidentally wasted whole countries like Argentina or Iceland. That's the real truth of the matter.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

Interview on Furtherfield http://www.furtherfield.org/interviews/interview-johannes-grenzfurthner-monochrom-part-1

Money, People, Truth, Stupidity

“When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.” Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

"The Ethics of Elfland" https://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.vii.html in Delphi Works of G. K. Chesterton

Men, World, Faith, Boy

“I had by this time heard a number of his public speeches and was beginning to understand the pattern of their appeal. The first secret lay in his choice of words. Every generation develops its own vocabulary of catchwords and phrases, and these date thoughts and utterances. My own father talked like a contemporary of Bismarck, the people of my own age bore the stamp of Wilhelm II, but Hitler had caught the casual camaraderie of the trenches, and without stooping to slang, except for special effects, managed to talk like a member of his audience. In describing the difficulties of the housewife without enough money to buy the buy the food her family needed in the Viktualien Market he would produce just the phrases she would have used herself to describe her difficulties, if she had been able to formulate them. Where other national orators gave the painful impression of talking down to their audience, he had his priceless gift of expressing exactly their own thoughts.”

Ernst Hanfstaengl (1887–1975) German businessman

Quoted in "Hitler: The Missing Years" - Page 67 - by Ernst Hanfstaengl, John Toland - 1994

Money, Pain, People, Secret

“The information age has off-loaded a great deal of work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us.”

Daniel Levitin book The Organized Mind

The Organized Mind (2014)

People

“Whether I serve one or two terms in the Presidency, I will find myself at the end of that period at what might be called the awkward age — too old to begin a new career and too young to write my memoirs.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Quoted in A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, Arthur Schlesinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), page 1017. http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx According to a footnote in Schlesinger's manuscript (1st draft, page 1378), this was stated on February 13, 1961. Attributed

“They've worked out elaborate charts classifying all intellectual occupations and interests, with the methods and materials and tools, and especially the goals—the aims, the ideals, the moral purposes—that are suited to each of them. Really tremendous! Why, a musician or an engineer, for example, could look at his chart and tell accurately whether he was progressing fast enough, at his age, and if not, just what his trouble was, and the remedy.”

Sinclair Lewis book Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925), Ch. 40

“The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.”

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

History, Beer, Dance

“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.”

D.H. Lawrence book Lady Chatterley's Lover

Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

“Nobody ever comes back from a "missing" ship to tell how hard was the death of the craft, and how sudden and overwhelming the last anguish of her men. Nobody can say with what thoughts, with what regrets, with what words on their lips they died. But there is something fine in the sudden passing away of these hearts from the extremity of struggle and stress and tremendous uproar—from the vast, unrestful rage of the surface to the profound peace of the depths, sleeping untroubled since the beginning of ages.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 17

Death, Men, Peace, Sleep

“I work just as hard as any other actress around my age, like Scarlett Johansson, but I just don't get the opportunities that they get because people are so distracted by the mess that I created in my life. But that doesn't mean it's going to last forever.”

Lindsay Lohan (1986) American actress and pop singer

Interview interview (2009)

Life, People

“Just Discourse: Do not bandy words with your father, nor treat him as a dotard, nor reproach the old man, who has cherished you, with his age.”

Aristophanés The Clouds

tr. Athen. 1912, vol. 1, p. 359 http://books.google.com/books?id=9vpxAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Do+not+bandy+words+with+your+father%2C+nor+treat+him+as+a+dotard%2C+nor+reproach+the+old+man%2C+who+has+cherished+you%2C+with+his+age%22 Clouds, line 998-999 Clouds (423 BC)

“I didn't lie; nobody calls me a liar, I may have increased my age.”

Frank Buckles (1901–2011) United States Army soldier and centenarian

Joking on joining the Army at age 15.
CNN March 8, 2008.

Lie

“From my childhood, obedience was something I could not get out of my system. When I entered the armed services at the age of 27, I found being obedient not a bit more difficult than it had been during my life to that point. It was unthinkable that I would not follow orders.”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

Die Welt memoirs (1999)

Life, Childhood

“In a distant age and climate the tragic scene of the death of Hussyn will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader.”

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament

Vol. 5, pages:391–392.
The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire: Volume 1 (1776)

Death, Distant

“In youth, we run into difficulties. In old age, difficulties run into us.”

Beverly Sills (1929–2007) opera soprano

Josh Billings, as quoted in Mac's Giant Book of Quips and Quotes (1983) by E. C. McKenzie
Misattributed

Youth

“Old age doth in sharp pains abound;
We are belabored by the gout,
Our blindness is a dark profound,
Our deafness each one laughs about.
Then reason's light with falling ray
Doth but a trembling flicker cast.
Honor to age, ye children pay!
Alas! my fifty years are past!”

Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780–1857) French poet and chansonnier

Cinquante Ans, C. L. Betts' translation; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 13.

Pain, Children, Light, Past

“Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.”

Walter Pater (1839–1894) essayist, art and literature critic, fiction writer

Pico Della Mirandola The Renaissance http://www.authorama.com/renaissance-1.html (1873)

People

“It saddens me a great deal that, you know, so many kids turn around and say, 'My dad doesn't want me doing this.' It's this terrible image that some people have got of 'My son's going to dance' and 'Oh, my God, is he gay?' No. 1, if he is gay, then still be proud of him. What's wrong with being gay in this day and age? But No. 2, don't just associate dance with being gay. It's just so wrong, you know?”

Nigel Lythgoe (1949) Executive producer and television director

God, People, Dance

“The old laws of England — they
Whose reverend heads with age are gray,
Children of a wiser day;
And whose solemn voice must be
Thine own echo — Liberty!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

St. 82
(1819)

Children, Law

“We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries. The three or four years' course of lectures, the bachelor who knows some, the master who knows most, the doctor who knows all, are ideas that have come down unimpaired from the Middle Ages. Nowadays no one should end his learning while he lives and these university degrees are preposterous. It is true that we have multiplied universities greatly in the past hundred years, but we seem to have multiplied them altogether too much upon the old pattern.. [A] new university is just another imitation of all the old universities that have ever been. Educationally we are still for all practical purposes in the coach and horse and galley stage.”

H. G. Wells book World Brain

World Brain (1938)

Education, Way, Idea, Learning

“Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending.”

Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) Anglo-American poet

3.
Meditations Divine and Moral (1664)

Youth, Time

“I think that everything should be made available to everybody, and I mean LSD, cocaine, codeine, grass, opium, the works. Nothing on earth available to any man should be confiscated and made unlawful by other men in more seemingly powerful and advantageous positions. More often than not Democratic Law works to the advantage of the few even though the many have voted; this, of course, is because the few have told them how to vote. I grow tired of 18th century moralities in a 20th century space-atomic age. If I want to kill myself I feel that should be my business. If I go out and hold up gas stations at night to pay for my supply it is because the law inflates a very cheap thing into an escalated war against my nerves and my soul.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

"This Floundering Old Bastard is the Best Damn Poet in Town", interview by John Thomas, in LA Free Press (1967)
Interviews

Men, War, Law, Feeling

“In the end, I am morally bound to speak only to the things that command my allegiance, and to which I have dedicated my life's work: the Republican Party, and more importantly, the United States of America. I will not refrain from doing my utmost by those lights simply because it may benefit others with whom I disagree. I claim no moral superiority over Donald Trump. I have a long and well-known public and private record for which I will have to answer at the Final Judgment, and I repose my hope in the promise of mercy and the moderation of age. I challenge the nominee to set the example for what our country can and should represent.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

2010s, 2016, Statement regarding the Khan family (1 August 2016)

Life, Hope, Light, Country

“I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course — year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while, on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man. Many of them have no relation to him. The cycle of their existence has gone on independently of his, and is disturbed or broken by every advance in man’s intellectual development; and their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone, limited only by the equal well-being and perpetuation of the numberless other organisms with which each is more or less intimately connected.”

Alfred Russel Wallace book The Malay Archipelago

The Malay Archipelago (1869)

Love, Life, Death, Hate

“I said years ago that I would rather be the man who helped on a rational scheme which should secure the comfort of old age than I would be a general who had won ever so many victories in the field. These are, to me, the two most tragic sights in the world—a man who is able to work, and anxious to work, and who cannot get work; and the other tragic sight is that of a man who has worked until his eyes have become dim, and his natural force has become abated, and he is left to spend the declining years of a life that has been so nobly used, so honourably used, in straits, difficulties, and hardships.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Speech in Manchester (4 July 1895), quoted in 'Mr. Morley In Manchester', The Times (5 July 1895), p. 10.

Life, World, Nature, Victory

“It was a really interesting experience for me because, like I said, I had never seen a horror film. It was a very physical role. Wes was so specific and clear about what he wanted, such a good captain of a ship. He was very respectful, funny and smart. We were all so young making that movie, I think we were the near the same ages as his children at the time, and he was just so good with us, kind, supportive, and nurturing.”

Amanda Wyss (1960) American actress

INTERVIEW WITH AMANDA WYSS OF ‘A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET’ & ‘THE ID’ http://horrorgeeklife.com/2016/11/10/interview-amanda-wyss/ (November 10, 2016)

Children, Support, Thinking, Time

“In the metaphysical elements of aesthetics the various nonmoral feelings are to be made use of; in the elements of moral metaphysics the various moral feelings of men, according to the differences in sex, age, education, and government, of races and climates, are to be employed.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 58
The Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant (1904)

Men, Education, Sex, Feeling

“Ressentiment is always to some degree a determinant of the romantic type of mind. At least this is so when the romantic nostalgia for some past era (Hellas, the Middle Ages, etc.) is not primarily based on the values of that period, but on the wish to escape from the present. Then all praise of the “past” has the implied purpose of downgrading present-day reality.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 68

Reality, Nostalgia, Past

“Online dating versus traditional dating is like using an electronic calculator versus an abacus. They both can give you accurate results if used properly, but one of them is obviously faster and easier in the modern age.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2014

“Eye hath not seen, tongue hath not told,
And ear hath not heard it sung,
How buoyant and bold, though it seem to grow old,
Is the heart, forever young; —

Forever young, — though life's old age
Hath every nerve unstrung:
The heart, the heart, is a heritage
That keeps the old man young!”

Martin Farquhar Tupper (1810–1889) English writer and poet

The Song of Seventy.
A Thousand Lines (1846)

Life, Heart

“Years ago we discovered the exact point, the dead centre of middle age. It occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up to the net.”

Franklin Pierce Adams (1881–1960) United States humor writer

Nods and Becks (1944)

Dead

“My own view is that a vegetarian diet may in fact hasten the coming of Moshiach (the Messiah). The more we live as if this were the messianic age the closer we are to it.”

Rami M. Shapiro (1951) American rabbi

Reported in Judaism and Vegetarianism by Richard H. Schwartz (New York: Lantern Books, 2001), in the “ Statements of support https://archive.org/stream/JudaismAndVegetarianism#page/n3/mode/2up” section.

“In an age when immense technological advances have created lethal weapons which could be, and are, used by the powerful and the unprincipled to dominate the weak and the helpless, there is a compelling need for a closer relationship between politics and ethics at both the national and international levels. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations proclaims that 'every individual and every organ of society' should strive to promote the basic rights and freedoms to which all human beings regardless of race, nationality or religion are entitled. But as long as there are governments whose authority is founded on coercion rather than on the mandate of the people, and interest groups which place short-term profits above long-term peace and prosperity, concerted international action to protect and promote human rights will remain at best a partially realized struggle.”

Aung San Suu Kyi book Freedom from Fear

Freedom from Fear (1991)

People, Peace, Religion, Freedom

“I get that I’m a little bit of an anomaly in terms of a lawyer in that a lot of lawyers don’t do the things I do, aren’t interested in the things I’m interested in. What drew me to it initially was this idea of dissent online and moving protests forward to a new generation, a new way of thinking, a new philosophy, a way to redress our grievances to the government that was unique and novel, and to have them actually listen to us about the things that are important to us. Chief among them of course was the preservation of our privacies as we move forward into the digital age, into the complete ubiquity of digital technology pervading our lives.”

Jay Leiderman (1971) lawyer

As stated in The Sabu Effect: An Interview with Jay Leiderman BY RAINCOASTER on AUGUST 22, 2014 http://thecryptosphere.com/2014/08/22/the-sabu-effect-an-interview-with-jay-leiderman/

Way, Idea, Thinking

“In Islam's golden age, so much progress was made that it became the basis of the European Renaissance. We Muslims have to change ourselves, that's the main difference. We can't keep blaming America or Israel for our misery.”

Irshad Manji (1968) Feminist from Canada, author, journalist, activist

Süddeutsche Zeitung http://www.signandsight.com/intodaysfeuilletons/1346.html May 16, 2007

Change

“Until the age of twelve, then, I only lived on bread, milk-food, vegetables, and fruit. My health was not less robust on this account, nor my growth less rapid, and it was to this diet, perhaps, that I was indebted for that purity of feature, that exquisite sensibility of feeling, and that serene gentleness of humor and character which I had preserved up to that period.”

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) French writer, poet, and politician

Book IV, Note VIII, p. 61
Les confidences (1849)

Health, Food, Feeling

“If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

On the early rivalry between Macintosh and "IBM-compatible" computers based on Microsoft's DOS, as quoted in Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward (1987) by Jeffrey S. Young, p. 235
1980s

Feeling, Personality

“Not in vain is Ireland pouring itself all over the earth. Divine Providence has a mission for her children to fulfill; though a mission unrecognized by political economists. There is ever a moral balance preserved in the universe, like the vibrations of the pendulum. The Irish, with their glowing hearts and reverent credulity, are needed in this cold age of intellect and skepticism.”

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist

1840s, Letters from New York (1843) Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/57/12260.html, vol. 1, letter 33

Children, Universe, Heart

“In general, most animals are exclusively breast-fed until they have tripled their birth weight, which in human infants occurs around the age of one year. In no mammalian species, except for the human (and the domestic cat), is milk consumption continued after the weaning period. Calves thrive on cow milk. Cow milk is for calves.”

Frank Oski (1932–1996) American pediatrician

Source: Don't Drink Your Milk! (1983), p. 4

Cats, Birth, Animals

“He saw Hawks, grunted, hefted the bottle and said, “I hate the stuff. It tastes lousy, it makes me gag, it stinks, and it burns my mouth. But they keep putting it in your hands, and they keep saying ‘Drink up!’ to each other, and ‘What’s the matter, Charlie, falling a little behind, there? Freshen up that little drinkee for you?” Until you feel like a queer of some kind, and a bore for the times you say you don’t want another one, positively. And they fill their folklore with it, until you wouldn’t dream you were having a good time unless you’d swilled enough of the stuff to poison yourself all the next day. And they talk gentleman talk about it—ages and flavors and brands and blends, as if it wasn’t all ethanol in one concentration or another. Have you ever heard two Martini drinkers in a bar, Hawks? Have you ever heard two shamans swapping magic?””

Algis Budrys book Rogue Moon

Source: Rogue Moon (1960), Chapter 5, Section 6 (p. 112)

Hate, Dreams, Feeling, Drink

“Generous development of old age insurance through nationalisation of the life-annuity system. To every needy German national comrade an adequate pension will be guaranteed from a certain age or in the case of a premature occurrence of permanent inability to earn a living.”

Gottfried Feder (1883–1941) German economist and politician

Source: The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation (1923), p. 55

Life

“I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"Replying to Listeners" http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/replylisteners.html, broadcast on KPFA (January 1963).

Art, Thinking, Country

“I realised fairly early that the 'wisdom of the ages' - whether from 3000 years ago or yesterday - often was simply and perfectly adaptable to the context of the football arena, and immensely valuable. From my regular morning habit of reading, I would write down any wise, pragmatic and smart quotes and ideas that struck me, and that I felt could be of use in coaching.”

Jack Gibson (1929–2008) Australian rugby league player and coach

On how he displayed the ability to deliver a one-liner or quote that always perfectly summed up a situation.

Wisdom, Quotes, Idea, Reading

“School failed me, and I failed the school. It bored me. The teachers behaved like Feldwebel (sergeants). I wanted to learn what I wanted to know, but they wanted me to learn for the exam. What I hated most was the competitive system there, and especially sports. Because of this, I wasn't worth anything, and several times they suggested I leave. This was a Catholic School in Munich. I felt that my thirst for knowledge was being strangled by my teachers; grades were their only measurement. How can a teacher understand youth with such a system?... from the age of twelve I began to suspect authority and distrust teachers. I learned mostly at home, first from my uncle and then from a student who came to eat with us once a week. He would give me books on physics and astronomy. The more I read, the more puzzled I was by the order of the universe and the disorder of the human mind, by the scientists who didn't agree on the how, the when, or the why of creation. Then one day this student brought me Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Reading Kant, I began to suspect everything I was taught. I no longer believed in the known God of the Bible, but rather in the mysterious God expressed in nature.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: William Hermanns, Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man (1983), First conversation, p. 8

God, Hate, Books, Youth

“I’m vegan now. I’ve been vegan for a month. Wanting to eat cleaner. Also I was trying to play lighter this year, be easier on my joints and on my feet. Getting older and you don’t want to let that age sneak up on you where you just get in the habit of eating whatever you want to eat because I know I’m gonna burn it off when it’s time to play. So just creating better habits. I feel much better. I thought it was all hype. I thought people just said it just because it was a healthier food but I can feel it. I can definitely feel it.”

Damian Lillard (1990) American professional basketball player

"Trail Blazers' Damian Lillard ‘feels much better' after going on vegan diet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLZ-qndfGWA, video interview with OregonLive Sports (September 25, 2017).

People, Food, Feeling, Time

“Another of his sayings was, that education was the best viaticum of old age.”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Aristotle, 9.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 5: The Peripatetics

Education

“We live in a time when automation is ushering in a second industrial revolution, and the powers of the atom are about to be harnessed for ever greater production. We live at a time when even the ancient spectre of hunger is vanishing. This is the age of abundance! Never in history has there been such an opportunity to show what we can do to improve the quality of living now that the old, terrible, grinding anxieties of daily bread, of shelter and raiment are disappearing.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Statement at the Democratic National Convention, as quoted in Best Quotes of '54, '55, '56 (1957) edited by James Beasley Simpson, p. 58; later published in The New America (1957), p. 7

Hunger, History, Time

“it was the period I think of as the age of the pillow... What I wanted to bring out - is that which cannot be measured - I wanted to bring out the tired movement in the eyelids - the lips must look as though they are whispering - she must look as though she is breathing - I want life - what is alive.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

on his painting 'The sick Child'
As quoted in 'From my rotting body, flowers shall grow, and I am in them, and that is eternity', Potter P. Emerg Infect Dis, 2011
after 1930

Life, Thinking, Painting

“Duty reaches down the ages in its effects, and into eternity; and when the man goes about it resolutely, it seems to me now as though his footsteps were echoing beyond the stars, though only heard faintly in the atmosphere of this world.”

William Mountford (1816–1885) English Unitarian preacher and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 197.

World, Star

“I know very well that one must fight, for one is often in contradiction to the spirit of the age.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

As quoted in "Rodin freed human spirit" in The Des Moines Register (7 January 2007) http://www.dmregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070107/ENT01/701070305 21st century

Fight

“I used to be able to summon up scenes at will, but now aging memory is so busy weeding its own garden that, promiscuously, it pulls up roses as well as crabgrass.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: 1990s, Palimpsest : A Memoir (1995), Ch. 12: The Guest of the Blue Nuns, p. 162

Business, Memory

“I am about to take a rapid review of the history of the French Revolution, which began the era of new societies in Europe, as the English Revolution had begun the era of new governments. This revolution not only modified the political power, but it entirely changed the internal existence of the nation. The forms of the society of the Middle Ages still remained. The land was divided into hostile provinces, the population into rival classes. The nobility had lost all their powers, but still retained all their distinctions: the people had no rights, royalty no limits; France was in an utter confusion of arbitrary administration, of class legislation and special privileges to special bodies. For these abuses the revolution substituted a system more conformable with justice, and better suited to our times. It substituted law in the place of arbitrary will, equality in that of privilege; delivered men from the distinctions of classes, the land from the barriers of provinces, trade from the shackles of corporations and fellowships, agriculture from feudal subjection and the oppression of tithes, property from the impediment of entails, and brought everything to the condition of one state, one system of law, one people.”

François Mignet (1796–1884) French historian and journalist

History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 http://clc-library-org-docs.angelfire.com/hfrr.html, Introduction

Men, Hostility, People, Justice

“The most marvelous engineering feats have been performed each day, even more marvelous than they sometimes appear to our rather jaded sense of wonder. But how is it possible to appreciate these achievements when the very foundations of the profession are being attacked and appear to be crumbling? … The profession, for all its continuing technical achievements, finds itself at the present time in a Dark Age of the spirit.”

Samuel C. Florman (1925) American writer and civil engineer

Source: The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (1976), p. 11

Sense, Appearance, Time

“They [the true instructors of the people] will accustom children to the vegetable régime. The peoples living on vegetable foods, are, of all men, the handsomest, the most vigorous, the least exposed to diseases and to passions, and they whose lives last longest. Such, in Europe, are a large proportion of the Swiss. The greater part of the peasantry who, in every country, form the most vigorous portion of the people, eat very little flesh-meat. The Russians have multiplied periods of fasting and days of abstinence, from which even the soldiers are not exempt; and yet they resist all kinds of fatigues. The negroes, who undergo so many hard blows in our colonies, live upon manioc, potatoes, and maize alone. The Brahmins of India, who frequently reach the age of one hundred years, eat only vegetable foods. It was from the Pythagorean sect that issued Epaminondas, so celebrated by for his virtues, Archytas, by his genius for mathematics and mechanics; Milo of Crotona, by his strength of body. Pythagoras himself was the finest man of his time, and, without dispute, the most enlightened, since he was the father of philosophy amongst the Greeks. Inasmuch as the non-flesh diet introduces with many virtues and excludes none, it will be well to bring up the young upon it, since it has so happy an influence upon the beauty of the body and upon the tranquillity of the mind. This regimen prolongs childhood, and, by consequence, human life.”

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814) writer and botanist from France

Vœux d'un solitaire, pour servir de suite aux "Études de la nature", as quoted in The Ethics of Diet by Howard Williams (University of Illinois Press, 2003, p. 175 https://books.google.it/books?id=o9ugCcZ13BMC&pg=PA175)

Life, Men, Happiness, Children

“On the trip to Russia with the Harlem Globetrotters, we were in Lenin Stadium, and they assigned a dressing room to the team. The players were getting dressed for one of their games. They were in rather close quarters. Remember, these were young kids-Wilt was 23. The others were his age. They were like kittens. You bump me, i'll bump you back. And before you know it, two of the guys set on Wilt. They started playfully pushing and shoving him. And finally one of his teammates hit Wilt a little too hard. He took these two guys, twisted each of their shirts, and lifted both of them off the ground. Each of these guys weighed over 200 pounds. It looked like he had two little crackers in his hands. I thought he was going to hit their heads together. It was an amazing demonstration of strength.”

Wilt Chamberlain (1936–1999) basketball player

Dr. Stan Lorber, team doctor on the Globetrotters' Russian trip
Strength

Guy, Game

“Our age is an age of moderate virtue
And moderate vice”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

“The real emancipation of the Chinese people from age-long slavery would be impossible without the great, sincerely democratic enthusiasm which is rousing the working masses and making them capable of miracles, and which is evident from every sentence of Sun Yat-sen’s platform.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 18, pp. 163–169.
Collected Works

People, Sun, Sincerity

“It has been the White Race who has been the world builder, the maker of cities and commerce and continents. It is the White Man who is the sole builder of civilizations. It was he who build the Egyptian civilization, the great unsurpassed Roman civilization, the Greek civilization of beauty and culture, and who, after having been dealt a serious blow by a new Semitic religion, wallowed through the Dark Ages, finally extricated himself, and then build the great European civilization.”

Ben Klassen (1918–1993) American engineer, author and politician

Nature's Eternal Religion (1973), Ch. 2, Paragraph 2
Nature's Eternal Religion (1973)

World, Religion, Beauty

“I realized it might be possible to do such a thing, run for money, trot for wages on piece work at a bob a puff rising bit by bit to a guinea a gasp and retiring through old age at thirty-two because of lace-curtain lungs, a football heart, and legs like varicose beanstalks.”

Alan Sillitoe (1928–2010) British writer

"The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner", from New and Collected Stories (1958; repr. London: Robson, 2003), p. 24.

Money, Heart, Football

“The generation of young people that questioned the establishment in the '60s is now middle-aged, and has become the establishment itself. Moral absolutes have been eliminated, "feel-good" religions created, and free sex legitimized, paving the way for disposable marriages. The results of these tailor-made values are new strains of sexually transmitted diseases, more potent drugs, more broken families and out-of-wedlock pregnancy rates and worrisome suicide rates.”

Christine O'Donnell (1969) American Tea Party politician and former Republican Party candidate

Christine
O'Donnell
Opposite Attraction; Pitching Abstinence to the Young and the Restless at the HFStival
1997-06-15
The Washington Post
C1
2010-09-15
Remembering Christine O'Donnell: Praising Helms, Missing Lenny and Squiggy, and Worries of Rampant Satanism
Kyle
Right Wing Watch
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/remembering-christine-odonnell-praising-helms-missing-lenny-and-squiggy-and-worries-rampant-
2010-10-20

Marriage, People, Disease, Family

“Well, there’s always this human instinct about that, even from a very, very young age. I agreed that we are born with a sort of innate sexuality. But by like age 11, girls were talking about what they had and hadn’t done. I hadn’t even kissed a boy yet, so it always made me feel insecure, like I was never gonna be good or ready or know what to do — I didn’t even have boobs.”

Rihanna (1988) Barbadian singer, songwriter, and actress

A Very Revealing Conversation With Rihanna http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/12/t-magazine/rihanna-miranda-july-interview.html?_r=0 (2015)

Feeling, Girl, Boy, Kiss

“Science raises itself above all Ages and all Times, embracing and apprehending the ONE UNCHANGING TIME as the higher source of all Ages and Epochs, and grasping that vast idea in its free, unbounded comprehension.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 11

Idea, Science, Time

Quotes about age page 10

Quotes about age
page 10