“The Hiss Case has turned my wife and me into old people - not a disagreeable condition. But we who used to plan in terms of decades, now find a year, two years, the utmost span of time we can take in.”

In response to whether Anathem "reflects today's culture or politics," from an interview published Sept. 22, 2008 by MIT News http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/stephenson-qa-0922.html

2009, Speech: The Socio-Economic Peace Program of Senator Francis Escudero

Dedication
From the Danube to the Yalu (1954)

Source: Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Source: Magic Burns

Campaign speech http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/08/08/remarks-president-campaign-event, Grand Junction High School, Colorado, , quoted in
Furthermore compare what Obama said in 2009
2012
Context: Now, when we came together, we knew restoring that bargain — that deal, that compact — was not going to be easy. We knew it would take more than one year or one term or maybe even one President, because we had seen what had happened in the previous decade. Jobs had moved overseas. Folks were working harder and harder, but their wages or incomes, they were staying flat, sometimes even going down. The cost of everything from health care to college was going up. And then, it all culminated in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression — a crisis that robbed too many of our friends and our neighbors of jobs, the value of their homes, their savings. And all that pushed the American Dream even further out of reach for too many working people.

Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, 1998.

Source: Snow White (1967), p. 145.