Quotes about age
page 18

Jorge Majfud photo
Enoch Powell photo

“The reality of the situation is obscured when population is expressed as a percentage proportion taken over the whole of the United Kingdom. The ethnic minority is geographically concentrated, so that areas in which it forms a majority already exists, and these areas are destined inevitably to grow. It is here that the compatibility of such an ethnic minority with the functioning of parliamentary democracy comes into question. Parliamentary democracy depends at all levels upon the valid acceptance of majority decision, by which the nation as a whole is content to be bound because of the continually available prospect that what one majority has decided another majority can subsequently alter. From this point of view, the political homogeneity of the electorate is crucial. What we do not, as yet, know is whether the voting behaviour of our altered population will be able to use the majority vote as a political instrument and not as a means of self-identification, self-assertion and self-enumeration. It may be that the United Kingdom will escape the political consequences of communalism; but communalism and democracy, as the experience of India demonstrates, are incompatible. That is the spectre which the Conservative party's policy of assisted repatriation in the 1960s aimed to banish; but time and events have swept over and passed the already outdated remedies of the 1960s. We are entering unknown territory where the only certainty for the future is the relative increase of the ethnic minority due to the age structure of that population which has been established.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Article on the 25th anniversary of his 'Rivers of Blood speech', The Times (20 April 1993), p. 18
1990s

Nicholas Negroponte photo
Knut Hamsun photo

“In old age… we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.”

Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) Norwegian novelist and Nobel Prize recipient

Wanderers (1909)

Derek Humphry photo
Barry Eichengreen photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Richard Walther Darré photo
Camille Pissarro photo

“I began to understand my sensations, to know what I wanted, at around the age of forty.... but only vaguely. At fifty, that is in 1880, I formulated the idea of unity, without being able to render it. At sixty, I am beginning to see the possibility of rendering it.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

(c. 1890); as quoted in Painting Outside the lines, Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art, David W. Galenson, Harvard University Press, 30 Jun 2009, p. 84
1890's

Leo Igwe photo
Robert T. Bakker photo

“Women are the right age for just a few years; men, for most of their lives.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Women & men

George Fitzhugh photo

“What a glorious thing to man is slavery, when want, misfortune, old age, debility and sickness overtake him.”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Source: Sociology For The South: Or The Failure Of A Free Society (1854), p. 68

Glen Cook photo

“I did not expect them to try anything but I am alive at my age because I make a habit of being ready for trouble when it seems most unlikely.”

Source: Soldiers Live (2000), Chapter 33, “Khatovar: Leave-taking” (p. 488)

John Milton photo

“Time will run back and fetch the Age of Gold.”

Hymn, stanza 14, line 135
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity (1629)

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston photo

“…he thinks that peace is, of all things, the best, and that war is, of all things, the worst. Now, Sir, I happen to be of opinion that there are things for which peace may be advantageously sacrificed, and that there are calamities which a nation may endure which are far worse than war. This has been the opinion of men in all ages whose conduct has been admired by their contemporaries, and has obtained for them the approbation of posterity. The hon. Member, however, reduces everything to the question of pounds, shillings, and pence, and I verily believe that if this country were threatened with an immediate invasion likely to end in its conquest, the hon. Member would sit down, take a piece of paper, and would put on one side of the account the contributions which his Government would require from him for the defence of the liberty and independence of the country, and he would put on the other the probable contributions which the general of the invading army might levy upon Manchester, and if he found that, on balancing the account, it would be cheaper to be conquered than to be laid under contribution for defence, he would give his vote against going to war for the liberties and independence of the country, rather than bear his share in the expenditure which it would entail.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1854/mar/31/war-with-russia-the-queens-message in the House of Commons on the debate on war with Russia (31 March 1854).
1850s

Georges Simenon photo

“You know, Fellini, I believe that, in my life, I have been more Casanova than you. I made the calculation a year or so ago that I have had 10,000 women since the age of thirteen and a half. It wasn't at all a vice. I have not the slightest sexual vice, but I have the need to communicate.”

Georges Simenon (1903–1989) Belgian writer

Fellini, je crois que, dans ma vie, j'ai été plus Casanova que vous! J'ai fait le calcul, il ya un an ou deux. J’ai eu dix mille femmes depuis l’âge de treize ans et demi. Ce n’ést pas du tout un vice. Je n’ai aucun vice sexuel, mais j’avais besoin de communiquer.
Interviewed by Federico Fellini in L'Express, February 21, 1977, and cited from Daniel Golay et al. Simenon, un autre regard (Lausanne: L'Hebdo, 1988) p. 104; translation from Fenton Bresler The Mystery of Georges Simenon (London: Heinemann, 1983) p. 239.

George Bird Evans photo
John Denham photo
Nora Ephron photo
Andrew Dickson White photo

“He [Paolo Sarpi] was one of the two foremost Italian statesmen since the Middle Ages, the other being Cavour.”

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) American politician

Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 3

John Gray photo
Thomas Guthrie photo
Marcel Duchamp photo
Renée Vivien photo
Warren Farrell photo
Hans-Georg Gadamer photo
Clive Staples Lewis photo
William Burges photo

“In our age, if a boy or girl is untalented, the odds are in favor of their thinking they want to write.”

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) American poet

Source: Poetry and Craft (1965), p. 89

Alexander Pope photo

“Father of all! in every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Stanza 1.
The Universal Prayer (1738)

Francisco De Goya photo

“Goya in gratitude to his friend Arrieta for the skill and great care with which he saved his [Goya's] life in his acute and dangerous illness, suffered at the end of 1819, at the age of seventy-tree years. He painted this in 1820.”

Francisco De Goya (1746–1828) Spanish painter and printmaker (1746–1828)

inscription by Goya, 1820
Goya painted this long inscription in 1820, - in the tradition of the ex-votos in the churches - in the double-portrait, [of his friend, and of Goya himself as the patient], he made of his doctor Eugenio Garciá Arrieta who helped him in 1819 with a severe illness
1820s

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“Age cannot Love destroy,
But perfidy can blast the flower,
Even when in most unwary hour
It blooms in Fancy’s bower.
Age cannot Love destroy,
But perfidy can rend the shrine
In which its vermeil splendours shine.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Untitled (1810); titled "Love's Rose" by William Michael Rossetti in Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1870)

Cassius Jackson Keyser photo

“The golden age of mathematics - that was not the age of Euclid, it is ours.”

Cassius Jackson Keyser (1862–1947) American mathematician and journalist of pronounced philosophical inclinations

Source: The Human Worth of Rigorous Thinking: Essays and Addresses, p. 268

“"Is the NIV the Feminist Bible for the New Age?" (August 1997).”

Texe Marrs (1944–2019) American writer

citation needed

Michel De Montaigne photo
Melania Trump photo
John Keats photo

“Time, that aged nurse,
Rocked me to patience.”

Bk. I, l. 705
Endymion (1818)

“Whatever you like at age 16, you will find boring at age 32.”

Mixmaster Morris (1965) English ambient DJ

Crossfade

Kent Hovind photo
Lima Barreto photo
Bill Moyers photo

“What has caused confusion and misunderstanding about his Hinduism is the concept of sarva-dharma-samabhAva (equal regard for all religions) which he had developed after deep reflection. Christian and Muslim missionaries have interpreted it to mean that a Hindu can go aver to Christianity or Islam without suffering any spiritual loss. They are also using it as a shield against every critique of their closed and aggressive creeds. The new rulers of India, on the other hand, cite it in order to prop up the Nehruvian version of Secularism which is only a euphemism for anti-Hindu animus shared in common by Christians, Muslims, Marxists and those who are Hindus only by accident of birth. For Gandhiji, however, sarva-dharma-samabhAva was only a restatement of the age-old Hindu tradition of tolerance in matters of belief. Hinduism has always adjudged a man’s faith in terms of his AdhAra (receptivity) and adhikAra (aptitude). It has never prescribed a uniform system of belief or behavior for everyone because, according to it, different persons are in different stages of spiritual development and need different prescriptions for further progress. Everyone, says Hinduism, should be left alone to work out one’s own salvation through one’s own inner seeking and evolution. Any imposition of belief or behaviour from the outside is, therefore, a mechanical exercise which can only do injury to one’s spiritual growth. Preaching to those who have not invited it is nothing short of aggression born out of self-righteousness. That is why Gandhiji took a firm and uncompromising stand against proselytisation by preaching and gave no quarters to the Christian mission’s mercenary methods of spreading the gospel.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Mo Yan photo
David Dixon Porter photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Garry Kasparov photo

“It's not common, in our age, for someone to retire while still at the top, but I'm a man who needs a goal, and who wants to make a difference.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

Source: 2010s, Winter is Coming (2015), p. 136

John Stuart Mill photo

“Whatever we may think or affect to think of the present age, we cannot get out of it; we must suffer with its sufferings, and enjoy with its enjoyments; we must share in its lot, and, to be either useful or at ease, we must even partake its character.”

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) British philosopher and political economist

"The Spirit of the Age, I", Examiner (9 January 1831), p. 20 Full text online http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/256/50650

Glen Cook photo
William Jennings Bryan photo

“Why, these men would destroy the Bible on evidence that would not convict a habitual criminal of a misdemeanor. They found a tooth in a sand pit in Nebraska with no other bones about it, and from that one tooth decided that it was the remains of the missing link. They have queer ideas about age too. They find a fossil and when they are asked how old it is they say they can't tell without knowing what rock it was in, and when they are asked how old the rock is they say they can't tell unless they know how old the fossil is.”

William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) United States Secretary of State

As quoted in "Osborn States the Case For Evolution", in The New York Times (12 Jul 1925), p. XX1; the tooth was misidentified as anthropoid by Osborn, who over-zealously proposed Nebraska Man in 1922; the tooth was shortly thereafter found to be that of a peccary (a Pliocene pig) when further bones were found. A retraction was made in 1927, correcting the scientific blunder.

Roger Waters photo
George W. Bush photo
Ellen Willis photo
Glen Cook photo

“A sign of advancing age. You start obsessing about how much you have to get done in the time that you have left.”

Source: Soldiers Live (2000), Chapter 43, “The Taglian Shadowlands: The Shadowgate” (p. 514)

Richard Burton photo
Pierre Hadot photo
Marshall McLuhan photo
Mortimer J. Adler photo
Jared Diamond photo

“Those numbers ay not sound like a bid deal until one reflects that average global temperatures were "only" 5 degrees cooler at the height of the last Ice Age.”

About global warming. Chapter "The world as a polder: what does it all mean to us today?", section "The most serious problems" (Penguin Books, 2011, page 493, ISBN 978-0-241-95868-1.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)

Dorothy Thompson photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo

“A man who marries at my age isn’t taking a wife, he’s indenturing a nurse.”

Source: I Will Fear No Evil (1970), Chapter 14, p. 224

Charles Darwin photo
Vincent Massey photo

“The age which we live in is not suited to idle complacency or to pleasant dreams of past greatness.”

Vincent Massey (1887–1967) Governor General of Canada

Address at the Convocation of the University of Manitoba, October 28, 1952
Speaking Of Canada - (1959)

“The long-range trend toward federal regulation, which found its beginnings in the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the Sherman Act of 1890, which was quickened by a large number of measures in the Progressive era, and which has found its consummation in our time, was thus at first the response of a predominantly individualistic public to the uncontrolled and starkly original collectivism of big business. In America the growth of the national state and its regulative power has never been accepted with complacency by any large part of the middle-class public, which has not relaxed its suspicion of authority, and which even now gives repeated evidence of its intense dislike of statism. In our time this growth has been possible only under the stress of great national emergencies, domestic or military, and even then only in the face of continuous resistance from a substantial part of the public. In the Progressive era it was possible only because of widespread and urgent fear of business consolidation and private business authority. Since it has become common in recent years for ideologists of the extreme right to portray the growth of statism as the result of a sinister conspiracy of collectivists inspired by foreign ideologies, it is perhaps worth emphasizing that the first important steps toward the modern organization of society were taken by arch-individualists — the tycoons of the Gilded Age — and that the primitive beginning of modern statism was largely the work of men who were trying to save what they could of the eminently native Yankee values of individualism and enterprise.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R. (1955), Chapter VI, part II, p. 233

Christopher Hitchens photo

“"Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age" was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals… But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed OUT of the Stone Age.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2001-11-15
Christopher Hitchens on why peace-lovers must welcome this war
The Mirror
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/WAR+ON+TERROR%3a+CHRISTOPHER+HITCHENS+on+why+peace-lovers+must+welcome...-a080078072: On the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan
2000s, 2001

Anthony Bourdain photo
Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

A Defence of Poetry http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html (1821)

Robert E. Howard photo
Theodore Dalrymple photo
Jonathan Miller photo
Sue Grafton photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Max Scheler photo
Stanisław Lem photo
Frances Willard photo
John Burroughs photo
Walter Cronkite photo
Hector Berlioz photo

“Poor devils! Where do these unfortunate creatures come from? On what butcher's block will they meet their end? What reward does municipal munificence allot them for thus cleaning (or dirtying) the pavements of Paris? At what age are they sent to the glue factory? What becomes of their bones (their skin is good for nothing)?”

Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) French Romantic composer

Pauvres diables!... D'où sortent ces malheureux êtres ?... À quel Montfaucon vont-ils mourir ?... Que leur octroie la munificence municipale pour nettoyer (ou salir) ainsi le pavé de Paris ?... À quel âge les envoie-t-on à l'équarrissage ?... Que fait-on de leurs os ? (leur peau n'est bonne à rien.)
Les Grotesques de la Musique (Paris: A. Bourdilliat, 1859) p. 89; Alastair Bruce (trans.) The Musical Madhouse (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003) pp. 54-56.
Of critics

Neal A. Maxwell photo
Jean-François Lyotard photo

“Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter the postmodern age.”

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) French philosopher

Source: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977), p.3

John Dryden photo
Arthur Green photo

“Vegetarianism: a kashrut for our age.”

Arthur Green (1941) American rabbi and theologian

Seek My Face, Speak My Name: A Contemporary Jewish Theology (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992), p. 87.

Curtis LeMay photo

“My solution to the problem would be to tell [the North Vietnamese Communists] frankly that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power—not with ground forces.”

Curtis LeMay (1906–1990) American general and politician

Mission With LeMay: My Story (1965), p. 565. In an interview two years after the publication of this book, General LeMay said, "I never said we should bomb them back to the Stone Age. I said we had the capability to do it. I want to save lives on both sides"; reported in The Washington Post (October 4, 1968), p. A8. Many years later LeMay would claim that this was his ghost writer's overwriting.

Peter Damian photo

“Let that ancient dragon, Cadalus, take note. Let this disturber of the Church, this destroyer of apostolic discipline, this enemy of man’s salvation understand. Let him beware, I say, this root of all sin, this herald of the devil, this apostle of Antichrist. And what else shall I call him? He is the arrow drawn from the quiver of Satan, the rod of the Assyrian, the son Belial, "the son of perdition, who rises in his pride against every god, so called, ever object of men’s worship" (2 Thess. 2:3-4), the whirlpool of lust, the shipwreck of chastity, the disgrace of Christianity, the ignominy of bishops, the progeny of vipers, the stench or the world, the filth of the ages, the shame of the universe. Still more epithets for Cadalus can be added, a list of darksome names: slippery snake, a twisting serpent, the dung of humanity, the latrine of crime, the dregs of vice, the abomination of heaven the expulsion from paradise, the fodder of hell, the stubble of eternal fire.”

Peter Damian (1007–1072) reformist monk

Letter 120:13. Damian to young King Henry IV, A. D. 1065 or 1066, wherein Damian exhorts Henry to use his sword against the disturber of the Church’s peace, Cadalus, the bishop of Parma, the antipope Honorius II (d. 1072):
The Fathers of the Church, Medieval Continuation, 1998, Letters 91-120, Owen J. Blum, Irven Michael Resnick, trs., Catholic University of America Press, ISBN 0813208165 ISBN 9780813208169, vol. 5, pp. 393-394. http://books.google.com/books?id=Vlspdtjmhd4C&pg=PA393&dq=%22Let+that+ancient+dragon,+Cadalus,+take+note%22&hl=en&ei=QVpiTIjeIIG88gaFq-SVCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22Let%20that%20ancient%20dragon%2C%20Cadalus%2C%20take%20note%22&f=false

John Stuart Mill photo
Dejan Stojanovic photo

“He had an answer to almost everything and he retired at an early age.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Early Retirement http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/early-retirement-2/
From the poems written in English

George William Russell photo
Nick Bostrom photo
Eugene V. Debs photo