Quotes about age
page 20

Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“613. An Hour may destroy what an Age was a building.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Peter Thiel photo

“Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started; it certainly could never be completed in three years. I am not aware of a single political leader in the U. S., either Democrat or Republican, who would cut health-care spending in order to free up money for biotechnology research — or, more generally, who would make serious cuts to the welfare state in order to free up serious money for major engineering projects. … Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost. Today's aged hippies no longer understand that there is a difference between the election of a black president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights parallels general progress everywhere. Because of these ideological conflations and commitments, the 1960s Progressive Left cannot ask whether things actually might be getting worse.”

Peter Thiel (1967) American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager

In an editorial http://www.nationalreview.com/article/278758/end-future-peter-thiel published by National Review (2011)

Charles Fort photo
Robert Sarah photo
Kent Hovind photo
Yi Hwang photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Saint Patrick photo
Saki photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Scooter Libby photo
Albert Pike photo
Robert Frost photo
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan photo

“In the mystic traditions of the different religions we have a remarkable unity of spirit. Whatever religion they may profess, they are spiritual kinsmen. While the different religions in their historic forms bind us to limited groups and militate against the development of loyalty to the world community, the mystics have already stood for the fellowship of humanity in harmony with the spirit of the mystics of ages gone by.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Words of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, quoted by Haile Selassie in an address http://www.jah-rastafari.com/selassie-words/show-jah-word.asp?word_id=radhakrishan during the Indian President's state visit to Ethiopia (13 October 1965), quoted in Foreign Affairs Record Vol. 11-12 (1965-1966) by India Ministry of External Affairs, p. 266; Radhakrishnan is also quoted as having made these remarks in The Visva-Bharati Quarterly Vol. 5 (1939-1940)

“I have frequently had men describe the following scenario to me: "If at the beginning of a relationship, I keep the woman at a distance and don't want to get too close, she feels that I am pushing her away and that I am not making a commitment—that I am afraid to be intimate. When I finally let down my guard and try to be intimate and close, when I really make myself vulnerable and give up control, which is uncomfortable for me, then I feel really inadequate. She blames me for things that she never blamed me for when I kept my distance. When I start to get close, that's when I am accused of saying the wrong thing or trying to control her. So I am better off staying at a distance and letting her complain about a lack of intimacy."Stewart, age thirty-six, described it this way: "Maryann was liberated on the surface, but the undertow was very different. I would find out a couple of evenings after I had been with her that she was very angry and I wouldn't even know that I had done something wrong. She would be angry because she said I wasn't really involved enough. I didn't care enough about her. The irony is that the women in my life whom I've made the greatest effort to get close to are the ones who always wind up saying they are angry because I wasn't getting close. When I made no effort to get close and really kept my distance, I never got any complaints. The moment I felt I was really opening myself up to be intimate, that was when I was found to be failing. That is the double bind for me."Another such truth was experienced by Alex. He said, "If you keep the control, the distance, then the woman is kept insecure; and so long as she is insecure about the relationship, she will be less inclined to attack. If she's interested in you, but you keep her at a distance, she will be careful about attacking you. She won't criticize you because she's afraid of you. The moment you cross the barrier and actually start to get committed, you find that she begins to feel that you are inadequate as a partner. You know then and there that you are never going to be able to satisfy her."I found this to be true sexually. At the times when I personally thought I was the most sensitive and the most involved and caring as a lover, I would find out often that I was a failure. At the times when I allowed myself to be totally selfish, without apology and didn't give one thought to what the woman experienced, I never got any complaints. I was never told I was selfish as a lover. In fact, I was often told that I was wonderful."”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

Why men and women can't talk to each other: the hidden unconscious messages of gender, pp. 39–40
The Inner Male (1987)

Ehud Barak photo
Muhammad bin Qasim photo

“At Brahmanabad, after many people were killed, “all prisoners of or under the age of 30 years were put in chains… All the other people capable of bearing arms were beheaded and their followers and dependents were made prisoners.””

Muhammad bin Qasim (695–715) Umayyad general

Chachnama, in Lal, K. S. (1994). Muslim slave system in medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3
Quotes from The Chach Nama

William O. Douglas photo

“We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting, Osborn v. United States, 385 U.S. 341 (1966)
Judicial opinions

Marshall McLuhan photo

“The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 14

Colin Wilson photo
Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo
Jane Austen photo
William Saroyan photo
Richard Dawkins photo

“All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/365473573768400896 (8 August 2013)
Twitter

Graham Greene photo
Peter Cain photo
Farrokh Tamimi photo
Constance Marie photo
Jane Fonda photo

“Women are not forgiven for aging. Robert Redford's lines of distinction are my old-age wrinkles.”

Jane Fonda (1937) American actress and activist

Michael Perry. Jane's wrinkled but Fonda herself now. Sydney Morning Herald, 22 December 1985 http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=2a1WAAAAIBAJ&sjid=e-gDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5135,3817429

Michelle Obama photo
Jonathan Franzen photo
Mark Heard photo
Quentin Crisp photo
Iain Banks photo
Alan Charles Kors photo
Mark Tully photo
William H. McNeill photo
Matthew Arnold photo
Heidi Klum photo

“Ask me again when I'm 65, but I'm proud to be able to say, in this day and age, I haven't done anything. Everyone has a view of what's pretty and what's not pretty, and it just doesn't look pretty to me.”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

Discussing plastic surgery, as quoted in Allure Magazine http://www.allure.com/celebrity-trends/cover-shoot/2012/heidi-klum, May 2012

George Henry Lewes photo

“The greatest problem about old age is the fear that it may go on too long.”

A.J.P. Taylor (1906–1990) Historian

An Old Man's Diary ([1981] 1984) p. 39

John Armstrong photo
Gideon Mantell photo
William Howitt photo

“The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame in any age of the earth.”

William Howitt (1792–1879) British writer

Colonization and Christianity. Quoted from The Capital by Karl Marx https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm, and https://books.google.com/books?id=Zajh1WZa-OoC

David Lloyd George photo

“Do these things for the sake of your country during the war. Do them for the sake of your country after the war. When the smoke of this great conflict has been dissolved in the atmosphere we breathe there will reappear a new Britain. It will be the old country still, but it will be a new country. Its commerce will be new, its trade will be new, its industries will be new. There will be new conditions of life and of toil, for capital and for labour alike, and there will be new relations between both of them and for ever. (Cheers.) But there will be new ideas, there will be a new outlook, there will be a new character in the land. The men and women of this country will be burnt into fine building material for the new Britain in the fiery kilns of the war. It will not merely be the millions of men who, please God! will come back from the battlefield to enjoy the victory which they have won by their bravery—a finer foundation I would not want for the new country, but it will not be merely that—the Britain that is to be will depend also upon what will be done now by the many more millions who remain at home. There are rare epochs in the history of the world when in a few raging years the character, the destiny, of the whole race is determined for unknown ages. This is one. The winter wheat is being sown. It is better, it is surer, it is more bountiful in its harvest than when it is sown in the soft spring time. There are many storms to pass through, there are many frosts to endure, before the land brings forth its green promise. But let us not be weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap if we faint not.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Loud cheers.
Speech in his constituency of Carnavon Boroughs (3 February 1917), quoted in The Times (5 February 1917), p. 12
Prime Minister

Alexis De Tocqueville photo
Sydney Smith photo

“He has spent all his life in letting down empty buckets into empty wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Vol. I, ch. 9
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

David Lloyd George photo
Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) photo
John Gray photo

“The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"The Taste of the Age," The Saturday Evening Post (1958-07-26) [p. 290]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Lois McMaster Bujold photo

“One learns better than to hand one's choices to fear. With age, with every wound and scar, one learns.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

Source: World of the Five Gods series, Paladin of Souls (2003), p. 296

Isaac Leib Peretz photo

“Youth is fair, a graceful stag,
Leaping, playing in a park.
Age is gray, a toothless hag,
Stumbling in the dark.”

Isaac Leib Peretz (1852–1915) Yiddish language author and playwright

Sewing the Wedding Gown, 1906. Nine One-Act Plays from Yiddish. Translated by Bessie F. White, Boston, John W. Luce & Co., 1932, p. 127.

Oliver Goldsmith photo
K. R. Narayanan photo
John Lancaster Spalding photo

“Love finds us young and keeps us so: immortal himself, he permits not age to enter the hearts where he reigns.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 39

Ryū Murakami photo

“We are millions. We just have to survive. We have an aging white America. They are not making babies. They are dying. It’s a matter of time. The explosion is in our population”

José Ángel Gutiérrez (1944) American academic

from videotape referenced in 16 April 2008 Washington Post article Mexican aliens seek to retake ‘stolen’ land https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/apr/16/20060416-122222-1672r/

William Foote Whyte photo

“Give me a half-tanker of iron, and I'll give you an ice-age.”

A new iron age, or a ferric fantasy, US JGOFS News, pp. 5, 11.

Stephen Fry photo

“I don't need you to remind me of my age, I have a bladder to do that for me.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

"Trefusis Returns!" in Paperweight (1993) p. 279.
Originally printed in The Daily Telegraph circa 1990.
1990s

Bernard Mandeville photo
Constantine P. Cavafy photo
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Thomas Warton photo
Cesare Pavese photo
William L. Shirer photo
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Shah Jahan photo
George William Russell photo

“Age is no more near than youth
To the sceptre and the crown.
Vain the wisdom, vain the truth;
Do not lay thy rapture down.”

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

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Lila Rose photo
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Otto Pfleiderer photo

“Here is the basis of the modern critical biblical science, which treats the documents of Christianity and Judaism according to the same principles of historical investigation which are valid in all other historical domains, particularly in that of the history of the ethnic religions.
The attempt has been crowned with brilliant success. Everywhere, where formerly miracles and oracles, the activity of supernatural persons, and the appearance on the scene of supernatural beings were thought to be discerned, there shows itself now a constant succession of events that are natural, i. e. in accord with the universal laws of human experience. The prophets appear no longer as media of supernatural oracles, but as men whose works and words are perfectly explicable from the character regarded in connection with the conditions of their age and environment. They stand, indeed, in a certain respect above their contemporaries, so far as they contest the modes of thought and action of the latter, and hold before them higher ideals of purer piety and morality; yet these ideals were not communicated to them from without by supernatural revelation, but sprang from their own spirit as products of an especially powerful and happy religious-moral nature, which, under the influence of historical relations, had been so developed that they saw clearly what was perverted in the mode of thought of others, and gave to the better a potent expression.”

Otto Pfleiderer (1839–1908) German Protestant theologian

Source: Evolution and Theology (1900), pp. 10-11.

Jim Henson photo

“Puppets have the same sort of graceful aging that cartoon characters have.”

Jim Henson (1936–1990) American puppeteer

Interview with Associated Press (1986)

William Jones photo
Sam Harris photo

“I'll tell you what harms the vast majority of Muslims that love freedom and hate terror: Muslim theocracy does. Muslim intolerance does. Wahabism does. Salafism does. Islamism does. Jihadism does. Sharia law does. The mere conservatism of traditional Islam does. We're not talking about only jihadists hating homosexuals and thinking they should die, we're talking about conservative Muslims. The percentage of British Muslims polled who said that homosexuality was morally acceptable was zero. Do you realize what it takes to say something so controversial in a poll that not even 1% of those polled would agree with it? There's almost no question that extreme that you will ever see in a poll that gets a zero, but ask British Muslims whether homosexuality is morally acceptable, and that's what you get. And the result is more or less the same in dozens of other countries. It's zero in Cameroon, zero in Ethiopia. 1% in Nigeria, 1% in Tanzania, 1% in Mali, 2% in Kenya, 2% in Chad. 1% in Lebanon, 1% in Egypt, 1% in the Palestinian territories, 1% in Iraq, 2% in Jordan, 2% in Tunisia, 1% in Pakistan. But 10% in Bangladesh. Bangladesh: that bright spot in the Muslim world where they are regularly hunting down and butchering secular writers with machetes. The people who suffer under this belief system are Muslims themselves. The next generation of human beings born into a Muslim community who could otherwise have been liberal, tolerant, well-educated, cosmopolitan productive people are to one or another degree being taught to aspire to live in the Middle Ages, or to ruin this world on route to some fictional paradise after death. That's the thing we have to get our heads around. And yes, some of what I just said applies with varying modifications to other religions and other cults. But there is nothing like Islam at this moment for generating this kind of intolerance and chaos. And if only a right wing demagogue will speak honestly about it, then we will elect right wing demagogues in the West more and more in response to it. And that will be the price of political correctness: that's when this check will finally get cashed. That will be the consequence of this persistent failure we see among liberals to speak and think and act with real moral clarity and courage on this issue. The root of this problem is that liberals consistently fail to defend liberal values as universal human values. Their political correctness, their multiculturalism, their moral relativism has led them to rush to the defense of theocrats and to abandon the victims of theocracy and to vilify anyone who calls out this hypocrisy for what it is as a bigot. And to be clear, and this is what liberals can't seem to get, is that speaking honestly about the ideas that inspire Islamism and jihadism, beliefs about martyrdom, and apostasy and blasphemy and paradise and honour and women, is not an expression of hatred for Muslims. It is in fact the only way to support the embattled people in the Muslim community: The reformers and the liberals and the seculars and the free thinkers and the gays and the Shiia in Sunni-majority context and Sufis and Ahmadiyyas, and as Maajid Nawaz said, the minorities within the minority, who are living under the shadow, and sword rather often, under theocracy. […] If you think that speaking honestly about the need for reform within Islam will alienate your allies in the Muslim community, then you don't know who your allies are.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, "Waking Up with Sam Harris Podcast #38 — The End of Faith Sessions 2" (15 June 2016) https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-end-of-faith-sessions-2
2010s