Quotes about year
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“As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

Communication

“Years of secret suffering had taught me superhuman self-control.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

Secret, Suffering

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Beauty, Success, Beauty

“I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Source: Rainer Maria Rilke's the Book of Hours: A New Translation with Commentary

God

“I live my life in growing orbits which move out over this wondrous world, I am circling around God, around ancient towers and i have been circling for a thousand years. And I still dont know if I am an eagle or a storm or a great song.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Source: Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Life, God, World

“And I circle ten thousand years long; And I still don't know if I'm a falcon, a storm, or an unfinished song.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“but what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?”

Terry Pratchett book Snuff

Source: Snuff

Hunger, Law

“The erosion of our confidence in the future is threating to destroy the Social and the Political fabric of America. The confidence that we have always had as a people, is not simply some romantic dream, or a proverb in a dusty book, that we read, just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea of which founded our nation and has guided us in our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else. We've always believed in a thing called, progress. We've always had a faith, that the days of our children, would be better than our own. Our people are losing that faith. Fopr the first time in the history of our country, a majority of our people believe, that the next five years, will be worse than the past five years. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor, unitl the shock of Watergate. We've got to stop crying and start sweating. Stop talking and start walking. Working together, with our common faith, we cannot fail.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Children, People, Books, Faith

“Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Soul, Effort, Light

“Nefertiti, the most beautiful calico in the world, chose me as her own six short years ago.”

P. C. Cast (1960) American writer

World, Beauty

“He said that there was death and taxes, and taxes was worse, because at least death didn’t happen to you every year.”

Terry Pratchett book Reaper Man

Source: Reaper Man

Death

“If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.”

Maurice Maeterlinck book The Life of the Bee

Source: The Life of the Bee

Bee

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Abraham Lincoln Address at Gettysburg

Source: 1860s, The Gettysburg Address (1863)
Context: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
Context: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Men

“Probably the last man who knew how it worked had been tortured to death years before. Or as soon as it was installed. Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent protection.”

Terry Pratchett book Small Gods

Source: Small Gods

Death

“After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Willy
Death of a Salesman (1949)
Source: Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman

Training, Dead

“Yes, I am a pirate two hundred years too late.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

“Anger and hatred, when left unfed, bleed away like air from a punctured tire, over time and days and years. Forgiveness is stealth.”

Barry Lyga (1971) American writer

Source: Boy Toy

Forgiveness, Time, Anger

“That does it," said Jace. "I'm going to get you a dictionary for Christmas this year."
"Why?" Isabelle said.
"So you can look up 'fun.' I'm not sure you know what it means.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Jace and Isabelle, pg. 155
Variant: "That does it, I'm going to get you a dictionary for Christmas this year."
"Why?"
"So you can look up 'fun.' I'm not sure you know what it means."
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)

Christmas

“We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Source: The Library at Night

Help

“People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

People

“History sometimes reproduces, at a distance of many years, the same combinations of circumstances that generate great achievements. But nothing ever repeats itself in exactly the same way.”

Valerio Massimo Manfredi (1943) Italian writer and archaeologist

Source: Alexander: Child of a Dream

Way, History

“I'll find you again. Even if it takes a hundred of those years.”

P. C. Cast book Burned

Source: Burned

“He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.

“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

People, Birth, Thinking

“We are born at a given moment, in a given place, and like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season in which we are born.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Wine, Season

“I’d a million times rather live and risk and have it all end badly than stay in the box I’ve been in for the past two years.”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Source: We Were Liars

Time, Past, Box

“Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed - while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.”

Vasily Grossman book Life and Fate

Source: Life and Fate

Life, Men

“New Year's Day is every man's birthday.”

Charles Lamb (1775–1834) English essayist

Birthday, New Year, Birthday

“Santa Claus has the right idea: visit people once a year”

Victor Borge (1909–2000) Danish and US-American comedian and musician

Christmas, People, Idea

“THAT’S MORTALS FOR YOU, Death continued. THEY’VE ONLY GOT A FEW YEARS IN THIS WORLD AND THEY SPEND THEM ALL IN MAKING THINGS COMPLICATED FOR THEMSELVES. FASCINATING.”

Terry Pratchett book Mort

Source: Mort

Death, World

“I discovered that seventeen-year-old girls have such huge verbal energy that their brain drives them to expend it every twenty seconds. On the third day I decided I had to find her a boyfriend -- if possible, a deaf one.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

Girl

“I wish to live to 150 years old, but the day I die, I wish it to be with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other.”

Ava Gardner (1922–1990) American actress

“You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to makes such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person I thought it was your secret pride."

"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor."

She didn't answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Love, Lie, Secret, Personality

“…I was born lazy. I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can't go beyond possibility.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 115

“If all the year were playing holidays; To sport would be as tedious as to work.”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

Source: King Henry IV, Part 1

Sport, Holiday

“Sweetheart, never listen to what my enemies say. They're very confused people. I know they are because I've spent years making them that way.”

Tamora Pierce book Mastiff

Source: Mastiff

People, Way

“I'd give all the wealth that years have piled,
the slow result of life's decay,
To be once more a little child
for one bright summer day.”

Lewis Carroll Three Sunsets and Other Poems

Solitude (1853), conclusion
Three Sunsets and Other Poems (1898)
Context: p>Ye golden hours of Life's young spring,
Of innocence, of love and truth!
Bright, beyond all imagining,
Thou fairy-dream of youth!I'd give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life's decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer-day.</p

Life, Summer, Wealth

“… for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Source: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

Housing

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 1

Distant

“Quite often somebody will say, 'What year do your books take place?' and the only answer I can give is, in childhood.”

Beverly Cleary (1916) American writer of children's books

Books, Childhood

“I act and react, and suddenly I wonder, ‘Where is the girl that I was last year? Two years ago? What would she think of me now?”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Girl, Thinking

“For the first half of your life each minute feels like a year, but for the second half, each year feels like a minute.”

Melanie Gideon (1964)

Source: Wife 22

Life, Feeling

“To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.”

Robert Harris (1957) novelist

“I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

Source: Lettres à Génica Athanasiou

Pain, Angels, Hell, Understanding

“To see the years touch ye gives me joy", he whispered, "for it means that ye live.”

Diana Gabaldon (1952) American author

Joy

“The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

World, Nature, Water

“People are islands,' she said. 'They don't really touch. However close they are, they're really quite separate. Even if they've been married for fifty years.”

Ian Fleming book Casino Royale

Source: Casino Royale

People

“Every day in the United States, seventeen children are killed by gunfire. That’s about 6,000 children each year who are killed by guns, as compared, for example, with about 3,000 a year who died at the height of the polio epidemic of the 1950s. We rose up as a society to fight against polio. Why do we not act more forcefully to halt today’s even greater scourge?”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Source: Sources of Strength: Meditations on Scripture for a Living Faith

Children, Fight

“When a woman thinks her husband is a fool, her marriage is over. They may part in one year or ten; they may live together until death. But if she thinks he is a fool, she will not love him again.”

Philippa Gregory book The Other Queen

Source: The Other Queen

For Wife, Love, Death, Marriage

“My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

World, Beauty, Autumn, Nature

“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Source: Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

Summer

“I waited for my thighs and butt to uncramp. Of course, they didn't know the loosening rule. They were screaming things like *Are you crazy? Do you know we're thirty-five years old? Sit down and feed us a Twinkie!”

P. C. Cast book Divine By Mistake

Source: Divine By Mistake

Waiting

“A baseball bat could not have hit me harder than that smile did. I was sixteen years old. In that time, how many thousands of smiles had been aimed at me? so why did this one feel like the first?”

Jerry Spinelli book Stargirl

Source: Stargirl

Smile, Feeling, Time

“I grabbed a pile of dust, and holding it up, foolishly asked for as many birthdays as the grains of dust, I forgot to ask that they be years of youth.”

Ovid Metamorphoses

Source: Metamorphoses

Birthday, Youth, Birthday

“Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.”

May Sarton (1912–1995) American poet, novelist, and memoirist

Time

“The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Victor Frankenstein in Ch. 5

Life, Health, Beauty, Dreams

“The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago now, and there has been no follow up.”

Douglas Adams Life, the Universe and Everything

Source: Life, the Universe and Everything

“A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Laughter in the Dark

Source: Laughter in the Dark

Fish, Sea

“I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up….

You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Source: I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections

Life, Search, Question, Forgetting

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Books, Time, Reading, Personality

“I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.”

Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

For Parents, Thinking, Parent

“Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, "So what." That's one of my favorite things to say. "So what." "My mother didn't love me." So what. "My husband won't ball me." So what. "I'm a success but I'm still alone." So what. I don't know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget.”

Andy Warhol book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 7: Time
Source: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

Love, People, Problem, Learning

“After all that I'd been through, after all that I'd learned and all that I'd been given, I was going to do what I had been doing every day for the last few years now: just show up and do the best that I could do with whatever lay in front of me.”

Michael J. Fox (1961) Canadian-American actor

Source: Lucky Man

Learning

“He doesn't need my help coming up with pranks. He's got too many ideas of his own.
- Daja referring to Briar in their first year at Discipline cottage”

Tamora Pierce Tris's Book

Source: Tris's Book

Idea, Help

“We haven’t met for many years, said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be.
"Five years next November."
The automatic quality set us all back at least another minute.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Source: Diaries of Adam & Eve

“Fairy Song
Shed no tear! oh, shed no tear!
The flower will bloom another year.
Weep no more! oh, weep no more!
Young buds sleep in the root’s white core.
Dry your eyes! oh, dry your eyes!
For I was taught in Paradise
To ease my breast of melodies,—
Shed no tear.

Overhead! look overhead!
‘Mong the blossoms white and red—
Look up, look up! I flutter now
On this fresh pomegranate bough.
See me! ’tis this silvery bill
Ever cures the good man’s ill.
Shed no tear! oh, shed no tear!
The flower will bloom another year.
Adieu, adieu—I fly—adieu!
I vanish in the heaven’s blue,—
Adieu, adieu!”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Flowers, Tear, Sleep, Flying

“Why do I get the feeling that if you give me a hard time, I'll tell all of our year-mates your family nickname is Meathead?”

Tamora Pierce (1954) American writer of fantasy novels for children

Family, Feeling, Time

“I had an epiphany a few years ago when I was out at a celebrity party and it suddenly dawned on me that I had yet to meet a celebrity who is as smart and interesting as any of my friends.”

Moby (1965) Activist, American musician, DJ and photographer

“True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

Source: The Pale King

World, Exercises

“I have discovered with advancing years that few things are entirely black or white, but more often different shades of grey.”

Jeffrey Archer book A Prisoner of Birth

Source: A Prisoner of Birth

“It's always hard to remember love - years pass and you say to yourself, Was I really in love, or was I just kidding myself? Was I really in love, or was I just pretending he was the man of my dreams? Was I really in love, or was I just desperate?”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Source: I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

Love, Dreams

“The thing about witchcraft," said Mistress Weatherwax, "is that it's not like school at all. First you get the test, and then afterward you spend years findin' out how you passed it. It's a bit like life in that respect”

Terry Pratchett book The Wee Free Men

Source: The Wee Free Men

Life, School

“Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.”

May Sarton (1912–1995) American poet, novelist, and memoirist

Source: Journal of a Solitude

Past, Personality

“Ah, my Belov'ed fill the Cup that clears
To-day Past Regrets and Future Fears:
To-morrow! — Why, To-morrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n Thousand Years.”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

The Rubaiyat (1120)

Fear, Past, Future

“When I was a boy a farmer's wife who lived five miles from our village had great fame as a faith-doctor—that was what she called herself. Sufferers came to her from all around, and she laid her hand upon them and said, "Have faith—it is all that is necessary," and they went away well of their ailments. She was not a religious woman, and pretended to no occult powers. She said that the patient's faith in her did the work. Several times I saw her make immediate cures of severe toothaches. My mother was the patient. In Austria there is a peasant who drives a great trade in this sort of industry, and has both the high and the low for patients. He gets into prison every now and then for practising without a diploma, but his business is as brisk as ever when he gets out, for his work is unquestionably successful and keeps his reputation high. In Bavaria there is a man who performed so many great cures that he had to retire from his profession of stage-carpentering in order to meet the demand of his constantly increasing body of customers. He goes on from year to year doing his miracles, and has become very rich. He pretends to no religious helps, no supernatural aids, but thinks there is something in his make-up which inspires the confidence of his patients, and that it is this confidence which does the work, and not some mysterious power issuing from himself.”

Mark Twain Christian Science

Source: Christian Science (1907), Ch. 4

Faith, Confidence, Boy, Business

“If I heeded all the advice I've had over the years, I'd have written 18 books about Rincewind.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Usenet

Books

“Later I had two green ones [alligator pears] — not so perfect. I painted them several times [c. 1920] when the men [American modernist artists, a. o. Marsden Hartley ] didn't think much of what I was doing. They were all discussing Paul Cézanne, with long involved remarks about the 'plastic quality' of his form and colour. I was an outsider. My colour and form were not acceptable. It had nothing to do with Cézanne or anything else. I didn't understand what they were talking about why one colour was better than another... Years later when I finally got to Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire in the south of France, I remember sitting there thinking, 'How could they attach all those analytical remarks to anything he did with that mountain?”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

All those entire words piled on top of that poor little mountain seemed too much.
1970 - 1986, Some Memories of Drawings (1976)

Men, Mountain, Understanding, Thinking

“The idea of atomic energy is illusionary but it has taken so powerful a hold on the minds, that although I have preached against it for twenty-five years, there are still some who believe it to be realizable.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

Quoted in 'Tesla, 75, Predicts New Power Source', New York Times (5 Jul 1931), Section 2, 1.

Idea

“Could you love a woman you didn't respect? Could you worship someone without believeing in her? Could you be madly in love with a woman you didn't admire? Well, you could. Not only that, it might be better that way. Easier. It took Paul almost forty years to learn that carnal platitude. Nevertheless, he always took Sonia to dinners where, sooner or later, her stupidity would explode, with the result that brighter souls would inevitably pick up on it right away and cast a sympathetic, albeit ironical, look in his direction, which only excited him all the more.”

Françoise Sagan (1935–2004) French writer

Un chagrin de passage (1994, A Fleeting Sorrow, translated 1995)

Love, Stupidity, Way, Soul

“The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Age, Star

“To those who oppose the steps I’m announcing today, let me say that I respect your passion and share your commitment to liberty and democracy. The question is how we uphold that commitment. I do not believe we can keep doing the same thing for over five decades and expect a different result. Moreover, it does not serve America’s interests, or the Cuban people, to try to push Cuba toward collapse. Even if that worked — and it hasn’t for 50 years — we know from hard-earned experience that countries are more likely to enjoy lasting transformation if their people are not subjected to chaos. We are calling on Cuba to unleash the potential of 11 million Cubans by ending unnecessary restrictions on their political, social, and economic activities. In that spirit, we should not allow U. S. sanctions to add to the burden of Cuban citizens that we seek to help.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, Statement on Cuban policy (December 2014)

People, Democracy, Question, Passion

“Back in the old days, when I was a child, we sat around the family table at dinner time and exchanged our daily experiences…. It wasn't very organized, but everyone was recognized and all the news that had to be told was told by each family member. We listened to each other and the interest was not put on; it was real. … A child needs to be listened to and talked to at 3 and 4 and 5 years of age … Parents should not wait for the sophisticated conversation of a teenager.”

Bob Keeshan (1927–2004) United States Marine

Essay in The New York Times (1979); as quoted in "Bob Keeshan, Creator and Star of TV's 'Captain Kangaroo,' Is Dead at 76" in The New York Times (24 January 2004) http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/24/arts/bob-keeshan-creator-and-star-of-tv-s-captain-kangaroo-is-dead-at-76.html?pagewanted=all

Age, Family, Parent, Time

“And rising inequality and declining mobility are also bad for our families and social cohesion -- not just because we tend to trust our institutions less, but studies show we actually tend to trust each other less when there’s greater inequality. And greater inequality is associated with less mobility between generations. That means it’s not just temporary; the effects last. It creates a vicious cycle. For example, by the time she turns three years old, a child born into a low-income home hears 30 million fewer words than a child from a well-off family, which means by the time she starts school she’s already behind, and that deficit can compound itself over time.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, Remarks on Economic Mobility (December 2013)

School, Family, Home, Study

“I intend shortly, God willing, a journey for Newfoundland to visit a plantation which I began there some few years since.”

George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore (1578–1632) English politician and coloniser

To Secretary of State Sir John Coke, cited by John D. Krugler in English & Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 16 August 2004).

God

“[…] despite how hard sometimes the world seems to be, and all you see on television is war and conflict and poverty and violence, the truth is that if you had to choose when to be born, not knowing where or who you would be, in all of human history, now would be the time. Because the world is less violent, it is healthier, it is wealthier, it is more tolerant and it offers more opportunity than any time in human history for more people than any time in human history. Now, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still terrible things happening around the world or in this region. We still have things like human trafficking. And we still have terrible abuse of children. And there are conflicts. And so these are things that we’re going to have to tackle and deal with. But you should know that with each successive generation things have improved just a little bit. And over time, that little bit adds to a lot. And it’s now up to you, the next generation, to make sure that 20 years from now, or 30 years from now, people look back and say, wow, things are a lot better now than they were back then. And there will still be problems 20 or 30 years from now also. But they will be different problems, because you will have solved many of the problems that exist today.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Town Hall (April 2014)

War, Children, People, Truth

“We're also increasing the number of Syrian and other refugees we admit to the U. S. to 100,000 per year for the next two years.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

President Barack Obama on Twitter at September 28, 2015 https://twitter.com/potus/status/648543139196743680 <br class="br">2015

“As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted 14 years ago…”

Ken Livingstone (1945) Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008

Victory speech on being elected first Mayor of London, 14 years after the abolition of the Greater London Council, of which he was leader. Friday 5 May 2000
Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/ken-reclaims-the-capital-279169.html

“You spend too much time alone, too much time watching television, and too little time cultivating the inner man. You live in a squalid little flat in what is referred to as a no-go zone from which your friends, of whom you see less and less, have all fled for the suburbs long ago with wives and sprogs in tow. You are exceedingly unlucky in love, having invested years in a romantic relationship which, as you know only too well, is neither romantic nor much of a relationship. In short, you have all the social prospects of a garden gnome.”

Stephen R. Lawhead (1950) American writer

Source: The Skin Map (2010), p. 12

Love, Time

“For nearly five years the present Ministers have harassed every trade, worried every profession, and assailed or menaced every class, institution, and species of property in the country. Occasionally they have varied this state of civil warfare by perpetrating some job which outraged public opinion, or by stumbling into mistakes which have been always discreditable, and sometimes ruinous. All this they call a policy, and seem quite proud of it; but the country has, I think, made up its mind to close this career of plundering and blundering.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Letter to Lord Grey de Wilton (3 October 1873), cited in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, Vol. 5 (1920), p. 262.

Thinking, Country