Quotes about young
page 23

“The point where he does resemble his ideal is in his faithfulness. I am fully prepared to allow the shy young man that virtue: he is constant in his love. But the reason is not far to seek. The fact is it exhausts all his stock of courage to look one woman in the face, and it would be simply impossible for him to go through the ordeal with a second. He stands in far too much dread of the whole female sex to want to go gadding about with many of them. One is quite enough for him.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Love, Faith, Sex, Courage

“Thou breeze,
That mak'st an organ of the mighty sea,
Obedient to thy wilful phantasies,
Provoke him not to scorn; but soft and low,
As pious maid awakes her aged sire,
On tiptoe stealing, whisper in his ear
The tidings of the young god's victory.”

Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) British poet, biographer, essayist, and teacher

Sylphs
Poems (1851), Prometheus

God, Age, Victory, Sea

“The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Life, School, Dreams, Hope

“In summertime village cricket is a delight to everyone. Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the young men play and the old men watch. In the village of Lintz in the County of Durham they have their own ground, where they have played these last 70 years. They tend it well. The wicket area is well rolled and mown. The outfield is kept short. It has a good clubhouse for the players and seats for the onlookers. The village team plays there on Saturdays and Sundays. They belong to a league, competing with the neighbouring villages. On other evenings they practice while the light lasts. Yet now after these 70 years a judge of the High Court has ordered that they must not play anymore. He has issued an injunction to stop them. He has done it at the instance of a newcomer who is no lover of cricket. This newcomer has built, or has had built for him, a house on the edge of the cricket ground which four years ago was a field where cattle grazed. The animals did not mind the cricket, but now this adjoining field has been turned into a housing estate. The newcomer bought one of the houses on the edge of the cricket field. No doubt the open space was a selling point. Now he complains that when a batsman hits a six the ball has been known to land in his garden or on or near his house. His wife has got so upset about it that they always go out at weekends. They do not go into the garden when cricket is being played. They say that this is intolerable. So they asked the judge to stop the cricket being played. And the judge, much against his will, has felt that he must order the cricket to be stopped: with the consequence, I suppose, that the Lintz Cricket Club will disappear. The cricket ground will be turned to some other use. I expect for houses or a factory. The young men will turn to other things instead of cricket. The whole village will be much poorer. And all this because of a newcomer who has just bought a house there next to the cricket ground.”

Alfred Denning, Baron Denning (1899–1999) British judge

Miller v. Jackson [1977] QB 966 at 976.
Judgments

Men, Lovers, Light, Animals

“He felt neither guilt nor distress at the pleasure with which he was now filled by the proximity of this young creature, and when he discovered in himself even physical symptoms of his inclination he did not take fright, but continued cheerfully and serenely to see Nick whenever the ordinary run of his duties suggested it, congratulating himself upon the newly achieved solidity and rational calm of his spiritual life.”

Iris Murdoch book The Bell

The Bell (1958) p. 91

Life, Pleasure

“In writing this book, I hope I have offered some guidance to those—the young especially—trying to articulate their objections to our way of life. However, this is not enough. As citizens of a free society, we have a duty to look critically at our world. But if we think we know what is wrong, we must act upon that knowledge. Philosophers, it was famously observed, have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Ill Fares the Land (2010), Conclusion: What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?

Life, Books, World, Hope

“Into that world comes a young William Wilberforce — a young Parliamentarian — who saw this and said this is evil, this is wrong, I will do what I can to fight it. In some ways, it's very similar to our situation here with regard to abortion because that's a multi-million dollar industry. You know the money that even our own Congress gives to Planned Parenthood is reminiscent of the evil that was expressed in that day because other Parliament members didn't want to touch that very lucrative business. And so here you've got Wilberforce standing up and saying "this is wrong" and he was vilified and attacked and discredited and marginalized. It sounds kind of familiar to what happens to pro-life people today.”

James Dobson (1936) Evangelical Christian psychologist, author, and radio broadcaster.

William Wilberforce’s Courageous Stand for Life
2011-02-28
11:09
Family Talk with Dr. James Dobson
http://www.myfamilytalk.com/Broadcasts/Broadcast?i=17c6be97-7215-48c4-8168-6de584cc1da1
2011-08-06
Comparing abortion to the slave trade
2011

Life, Money, People, World

“When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying, but now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It’s like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

As quoted in "Ingmar Bergman, Master Filmmaker, Dies at 89" by Mervyn Rothstein in The New York Times (31 July 2007) http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/movies/31bergman.html?hp.

Thinking, Light

“Angus Young's frantic over-the-top soloing has sparked many of AC/DC's biggest tunes. But beneath the reckless theatrics and naughty schoolboy images lurks a skilled guitarist.”

Angus Young (1955) Scottish Australian guitarist

Askold Bulk[citation needed]
Related

“Civil rights for all Americans, black, white, red, yellow, the rich, poor, young, old, gay, straight, et cetera, is not a liberal or a conservative value. It’s an American value that I would think that we pretty much all agree on.”

Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) American evangelical pastor, televangelist, and conservative political commentator

"The Situation with Tucker Carlson" on MSNBC (5 August 2005) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8870977/

Thinking

“I would never have become an animal rights advocate if I had not first been a human rights advocate, especially for those humans (the very young and the very old, for example) who lack the understanding or power to assert their rights for themselves.”

Tom Regan book Empty Cages

Prologue
Empty Cages (2004)

Understanding, Animals

“If the young vegan kids of our nation
Are at school and can't get vegan bites,
Then the school staff need food education
Because safe food are one of our rights.”

Benjamin Zephaniah (1958) English poet and author

The Little Book Of Vegan Poems (2001)

Education, School, Food

“As a young man, Bill Clinton was one of thousands of leftist students who benefited from KGB funds, earning one of those trips to the USSR which were the preferred means for the recruitment of Soviet agents in the universities of the West. In the 60s, that would be deterrent enough for any application for town mayor of the interior. In the 90s, after three decades of Gramscian cultural revolution, the dangerous links did not prevent Clinton from being elected US president with the support of the American Communist Party. Thanks to a well-calculated "politically correct" speech, the new ruler became an idol of the left, which moved heaven and earth to keep him in office despite a range of charges, including sexual frivolities, financial imbroglios and a multitude of small Watergates, including something perfectly serious and terrifying: the suspicion of favoring Chinese nuclear espionage. The well-thinking press resisted any investigation of the matter.”

Olavo de Carvalho (1947) Brazilian journalist, essayist and professor of philosophy

Censored article, originally to República Magazine - Clinton, a guerra e a China http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/textos/clinton.htm (2 May 1999)

Support, Thinking, Universe

““Try to be a man about whom nothing is known,” our father said, when we were young. Our father said several other interesting things, but we have forgotten what they were. “Keep quiet,” he said. That we remember. He wished more quiet. One tends to want that, in a National Park. Our father was a man about whom nothing was known. Nothing is known about him still. He gave us the recipes. He was not very interesting. A tree is more interesting. A suitcase is more interesting. A canned good is more interesting. When we sing the father hymn, we notice that he was not very interesting. The words of the hymn notice it. It is explictly commented upon, in the text.”

Donald Barthelme book Snow White

Source: Snow White (1967), pp.18–19.

Tree, Singing

“The line "because you're mine, I walk the line." It kept coming to me, you know? But I was — I was … young and not been married too long. Yes, it kept coming to me. Because you're mine, I walk the line. And then the words just naturally flowed. It was an easy song to write.”

Johnny Cash (1932–2003) American singer-songwriter

CNN interview (2002)

Nature

“While not a single Marxist ‘charismatic leader’ in the twentieth century made revolution in an advanced capitalist country (as Marx prescribed), or undertook the ‘withering away of the state’ (as both Marx and Engels insisted), or insured against the rule of elites (that both Marx and Engels identified as an essential of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’), or provide for the obligatory ‘rotation in office’ (again, as both Marx and Engels insured would be a post-revolutionary feature of socialist society), or resolved the problem of human ‘alienation’ (so emphatically lamented by the young Marx)—Western academics have never hesitated to directly associate Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Castroism, and even the barbarism of the Khmer Rouge, with the philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, (2001), p. 80

Problem, Country

“Would you define Good for me, Citizen Abbot?”
“Certainly. Good is that force within us which inspires men to acts of conformity and subservience. The worship of Good is essentially the worship of oneself, and therefore the only true worship. The self which one worships is the ideal social being: the man content in his niche in society, yet ready to creatively advance his status. Good is gentle, since it is a true reflection of the loving and pitying universe. Good is continually changing in its aspects, although it comes to us in the… You have a strange look on your face, young man.”

Robert Sheckley book The Status Civilization

“I’m sorry, Citizen Abbot. I believe I heard that sermon, or one very much like it.”
Source: The Status Civilization (1960), Chapter 27 (p. 115)

Love, Men, Universe, Change

“It is exciting and inspiring to see young women stand up and say 'we know that we have rights, and we intend to assert them.”

Gloria Allred (1941) American civil rights lawyer

December 6, 2014, Gloria Allred: The Battle Over Sexual Assault is the ‘Civil Rights Movement of Our Time’, May 15, 2014, Time magazine, Gloria Allred http://time.com/100055/campus-sexual-assault-gloria-allred/,

Women

“Jim Morrison was a well-built boy, larger than average, and young enough to maintain the engorged silent connection right through the residue of chemicals.”

Grace Slick (1939) American musician, writer and painter

Somebody to Love? (1998)

Boy

“The massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

1970s, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 (1973)

Cars, Idea

“Young people must break machines to learn how to use them; get another made!”

Henry Cavendish

when he was told that one of his valuable instruments was broken by a young man, as quoted in Biographical Memoir of Henry Cavendish, by Georges Cuvier, The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal (1828), p. 222.

People, Learning

“How few of our young English impressionists knew the difference between a palette and a picture! However, I believe that Walter Sickert did”

Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) English illustrator and author

sly dog!
Table Talk" p. 64
Under the Hill and Other Essays (1904)

Dogs

“In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o’ the mounded years—
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.”

Francis Thompson The Hound of Heaven

St. 4.
The Hound of Heaven (1893)

Life, Youth, Sun, Dead

“Often since I have, in some sort, shot an Iguana, and have remembered that one in the reserve. Up at Meru I saw a young Native girl with a bracelet on, a leather strap two inches wide, and all embroidered over with very small turquoise-coloured beads which varied little in colour and played in green, light blue and ultra-marine. It was an extraordinarily live thing; it seemed to draw breath on her arm, so that I wanted it for myself, and made Farah buy it from her. No sooner had it come upon my arm that it gave up the ghost. It was nothing now, a small, cheap, purchased article of finery. It had been the play of colors, the duet between the turquoise and the "negre", — that quick, sweet, brownish black, like peat and black pottery, of the Native's skin, — that had created the life of the bracelet. …I stood in Meru and looked at my pale hand and the dead bracelet, it was as if an injustice had been done to a noble thing, as if truth had been suppressed. So sad did it seem that I remembered the saying of the hero in a book that I had read as a child: "I have conquered them all, but I am standing amongst graves."”

Karen Blixen book Out of Africa

Out of Africa (1937)

Life, Truth, Books, Sadness

“If you find many people who are hard and indifferent to you in a world that you consider to be unhospitable and cruel—as often, indeed, happens to a tender-hearted, stirring young creature—you will also find there are noble hearts who will look kindly on you, and their help will be precious to you beyond price.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1860s, On The Choice Of Books (1866)

People, World, Help, Heart

“The young tend to be more curious and critical as they seek to understand life and make sense of their experiences. But as they grow older they start questioning less and try to conform. The young people tend to hold liberal positions on issues such as abortion or gay sex because they are not in positions of authority and not necessarily interested in the maintenance of law and order. The youths are not interested in things or in issues as established, but in issues as they think. So, they can afford to challenge existing norms. However, as they grow older and get into positions of authority, the maintenance of law and order becomes paramount — and they become more conservative.”

Leo Igwe (1970) Nigerian human rights activist

An Interview with Dr. Leo Igwe — Founder, Nigerian Humanist Movement (2017)

Life, People, Youth, Law

“This enterprise is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to its consummation.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

1810s, Letter to Edward Coles (1814)

“He went to Paris, looking for answers
To questions that bothered him so.
He was impressive, young and aggressive,
Saving the world on his own.
But the warm Summer breezes,
The French wines and cheeses
Put his ambition at bay.
And Summers and Winters
Scattered like splinters,
And four or five years slipped away.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

He Went to Paris
Song lyrics, A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean (1973)

World, Question, Wine, Winter

“I, then a young and omniscient student (alas, I was soon to lose both these virtues)…”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

Metaphysical Horror (1988)

“Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen's eye.
I am sick, I must die:
Lord, have mercy on us.”

Thomas Nashe (1567–1601) English Elizabethan pamphleteer and poet

Source: Summer's Last Will and Testament http://www.elizabethanauthors.com/summ1.htm (1600), lines 1590-1594.

“He’s not that young, he’s turned twenty-three, and what makes him feel foolish among these people, he’s married. Nobody else here looks married. There is sure nobody else pregnant, that it shows. It makes him feel put on display, as a guy who didn’t know better.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Rabbit is Rich (1981)

People, Guy, Feeling

“Politics seems much less important today. When you see your young daughter smiling as she was, and moving around, it's a superb feeling.”

Gordon Brown (1951) British Labour Party politician

Colin Wills, "'This will be a big change in my life .. politics is now less important' says new dad Gordon Brown", Sunday Mirror, 30 December, 2001, p. 4.
Press conference on the birth of his first daughter, Jennifer Jane Brown, 29 December 2001; she died nine days later.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Smile, Feeling, Daughters

“It was like the game that young girls play beside a sandy beach, when they roll their skirts up to their waists on either side and toss a ball round to one another, throwing it high in the air so that it never touches the ground. Thus, though the water swirled and seethed around them, these sea-nymphs kept Argo from the Rocks.”

Apollonius of Rhodes book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book IV. Homeward Bound, Lines 948–955

Girl, Game, Water, Sea

“When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions — such as merit, such as past, present, and future — our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment. We identify, label, and interpret our surroundings as abstract concepts, quite separate from another concept, which is our own separate identity and ego.”

Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014) American novelist

Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982 (1986)

Life, Children, World, Beauty

“Speaking involves inflection, it involves an understanding of the language. Too many young people today play their instruments most wonderfully – they have such command of their instrument – but it’s as though they’re speaking a foreign language, phonetically. They pronounce all the words, but they have no idea of what they’re saying. And I think that’s one of the big differences between the great artists of the time and this level of expertise that is constantly expanding and rising. As I’ve said for a long time, the level of mediocrity is constantly rising.”

Leon Fleisher (1928) American conductor and pianist

Interview with pianist Leon Fleisher http://www.examiner.com/article/interview-with-pianist-leon-fleisher by Elijah Ho (October 1, 2014)

People, Idea, Understanding, Thinking

“If a young girl is being forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation the word would sound ludicrously inadequate.”

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

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Human Personality (1943), p. 63

Girl

“In many ways, schools and universities remain our culture's most tangible embodiment of public space and collective responsibility. University campuses in particular —with their residences, libraries, green spaces and common standards for open and respectful discourse - play a crucial, if now largely symbolic, role: they are the one place left where young people can see a genuine public life being lived. And however imperfectly we may have protected these institutions in the past, at this point in our history the argument against transforming education into a brand-extension exercise is much the same as the one for national parks and nature reserves: these quasi-sacred spaces remind us that unbranded space is still possible.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

Source: No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies 1999, Chapter Four: "The Branding of Learning"

Life, People, Education, School

“A young woman can live off the folly of men; a man of any age can live off the folly of women.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

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

Women, Men, Age

“What is the shortest way to travel from Rotterdam to Groningen, in general: from given city to given city. It is the algorithm for the shortest path, which I designed in about twenty minutes. One morning I was shopping in Amsterdam with my young fiancée, and tired, we sat down on the café terrace to drink a cup of coffee and I was just thinking about whether I could do this, and I then designed the algorithm for the shortest path. As I said, it was a twenty-minute invention. In fact, it was published in ’59, three years late. The publication is still readable, it is, in fact, quite nice. One of the reasons that it is so nice was that I designed it without pencil and paper. I learned later that one of the advantages of designing without pencil and paper is that you are almost forced to avoid all avoidable complexities. Eventually that algorithm became, to my great amazement, one of the cornerstones of my fame.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (2001), in an interview with Philip L. Frana. (OH 330; Communications of the ACM 53(8):41–47)
2000s

Way, Travel, Coffee, Drink

“A novelist has to enter deeper exile still. In most outward ways the experience was depressive, as many young would-be writers and painters who have ever gone to Greece have discovered. We used to have a nickname for the sense of inadequacy and accidie it produced – the ‘Aegean blues’. One has to be a very complete artist to create good work among the purest and most balanced landscapes on the planet…The Greece of the Islands is Circe still; no place for the artist-voyager to linger long, if he cares for his soul.”

John Fowles book The Magus

Introduction (1977 edition)
The Magus (1965)

Way, Soul, Sense

“It is a sin of the soul to force young people into opinions … but it is culpable neglect not to impel young people into experiences.”

Kurt Hahn (1886–1974) German educator

John Gookin, NOLS Wilderness Wisdom: Quotes for Inspirational Exploration (2003), ISBN 0811726460, p. 45.
Attributed

People, Soul

“All I know is that I'm young and your rules they are old
If I've got to kill to live then there's something left untold
I'm no statesman I'm no general. I'm no kid I'll never be
It's the rules not the soldier that I find the real enemy.”

Bob Seger (1945) American singer-songwriter

2 + 2 = ?.
Song lyrics, Ramblin' Gamblin' Man (1969)

“Notwithstanding the hope that my friend [Cobden], who has just addressed you, has expressed, that it may not become a war of classes, I am not sure that it has not already become such, and I doubt whether it can have any other character. I believe this to be a movement of the commercial and industrial classes against the Lords and great proprietors of the soil…Since the time when we first came to London to ask the attention of Parliament to the question of the Corn Law, two millions of human beings have been added to the population of the United Kingdom…I see them now in my mind's eye ranged before me, old men and young children, all looking to the Government for bread; some endeavouring to resist the stroke of famine, clamorous and turbulent, but still arguing with us; some dying mute and uncomplaining. Multitudes have died of hunger in the United Kingdom since we first asked the Government to repeal the Corn Law, and although the great and powerful may not regard those who suffer mutely and die in silence, yet the recording angel will note down their patient endurance and the heavy guilt of those by whom they have been sacrificed…”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in Covent Garden (19 December 1845), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 141-142.
1840s

Men, Hunger, War, Children

“The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of remarkable Christian forbearance among men--were it not for a mawkish humanitarianism, coupled with imperfect digestive powers, we should devour our young, as Nature intended.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Town Crier http://books.google.com/books?ei=65MyT4yGB6bJ0QGg9p3mBw&id=GqUOAQAAMAAJ&q=&quot;The+fact+that+boys+are+allowed+to+exist+at+all+is+evidence+of+a+remarkable+Christian+forbearance+among+men+were+it+not+for+a+mawkish+humani-tarianism+coupled+with+imperfect+digestive+powers+we+should+devour+our+young+as+Nature+intended&quot;&pg=PA74#v=onepage column in the San Francisco News-Letter (c. 1870)

Men, Boy, Nature

“President Bush owes more than one apology. On the list of those he let down are the young soldiers who are themselves apparently culpable, but who were clearly put into a moral cesspool. The perpetrators as well as the victims were both placed in their relationship to one another by the policies of George W. Bush.
How dare the incompetent and willful members of this Bush/Cheney Administration humiliate our nation and our people in the eyes of the world and in the conscience of our own people. How dare they subject us to such dishonor and disgrace. How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein's torture prison.”

Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States

Quotes, NYU Speech (2004)

People, World

“Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
And where have you been, my darling young one?”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Compare: "O where ha' you been, Lord Randal, my son? And where ha' you been, my handsome young man?" Lord Randall, no. 12.
Song lyrics, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall

“Was this the trick of it? Secrets so dire as to be unspeakable, thoughts so frightening as to make clear young voices mute, kicked out into the open with blunt ironic humor. And suddenly the dire didn't loom so darkly any more, and fear shrank, and anyone could say anything. And the unbearable seemed a little easier to lift.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, A Civil Campaign (1999)

Secret, Fear

“I believe India today is potentially poised for another even more stupendous leap on its upward trajectory. India’s relative weight in the global economy and in world affairs in general, is bound to grow for many reasons. By 2030, India is projected to overtake China as the most populous country in the world, with the third largest economy in US dollar terms. Furthermore India is a very young nation with nearly two thirds of its population below the age of thirty-five.”

Mukesh Ambani (1957) Indian business magnate

Reimaging India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower

Age, World, Country

“Currently, young Christians reach adulthood bored with church experience, and with little or no sense of their calling as missionaries.”

Alan Hirsch (1959) South African missionary

Source: The Faith of Leap (2011), p. 119

Sense, Adulthood

“Empowering those moderate and reforming voices who speak for the vast majority of Muslims that want to reclaim their religion. And addressing the identity crisis that some young people feel by bringing our communities together and extending opportunity to all.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

2010s, 2015, Speech on extremism (20 July 2015)

People, Religion, Feeling, Communication

“They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.”

Kim Stanley Robinson (1952) American science fiction writer

thoughts of Frank Chalmers
Red Mars (1992)

Women, Men, Stupidity, Education

“So he imports this special breed of scorpions and feeds them on metal meal and the scorpions turned a phosphorescent blue color and sort of hummed. “Now we must find a worthy vessel,” he said. So we flush out this old goof ball artist and put the scorpion to him and he turned sort of blue and you could see he was fixed right to metal. These scorpions could travel on a radar beam and service the clients after Doc copped for the bread. It was a good thing while it lasted and the heat couldn’t touch us. However all these scorpion junkies began to glow in the dark and if they didn’t score on the hour metamorphosed into scorpions straight away. So there was a spot of bother and we had to move on disguised as young junkies on the way to Lexington. Bill and Johnny we sorted out the names but they keep changing like one day I would wake up as Bill the next day as Johnny. So there we are in the train compartment shivering junk sick our eyes watering and burning.”

William S. Burroughs book The Soft Machine

Source: The Soft Machine (1961), Chapter One: "Dead on Arrival"

Color, Way, Travel, Water

“Young conductors talk too much.”

Pierre Monteux (1875–1964) French conductor

From Monteux, Doris G (1965). It's All in the Music: The Life and Work of Pierre Monteux. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. OCLC 604146, p. 196

“The world is never again as it was before anyone you love has ever died; never so innocent, never so fixed, never so gentle, never so pliant to your will. But these are afterthoughts. Generations vie and the young recover swiftly, or believe they do.”

Roger Kahn (1927–2020) American baseball writer

Source: The Boys Of Summer, Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 30

Love, World

“There's a southern accent, where I come from.
The young 'uns call it country, the Yankees call it dumb.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Southern Accents
Lyrics, Southern Accents (1985)

Country

“When I was exposed to brighter lights, I began noticing prettier things, faster cars, motorbikes…girls! Then just like any young man I wanted it all!”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

Cars, Girl, Light

“I believe that the harm which Mill has done to the world by the passage in his book on Political Economy in which he favours the principle of Protection in young communities, has outweighed all the good which may have been caused by his other writings.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Said to Sir Louis Mallet by Cobden on his death bed within two days before his death, quoted in Richard Gowing, Richard Cobden (London: Cassell, 1890), p. 130.
1860s

Books, World, Communication

“Oh very young,
What will you leave us this time?
There’ll never be a better chance to change your mind
And if you want this world to see better days
Will you carry the words of love with you?
Will you ride the great white bird into heaven?
And though you want them to last forever
You know they never will — you know they never will”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Oh Very Young
Song lyrics, Buddha and the Chocolate Box (1974)

Love, World, Bird, Change

“A young man who had been troubling society with impalpable doctrines of a new civilization which he called "the Kingdom of Heaven" had been put out of the way; and I can imagine that believer in material power murmuring as he went homeward, "it will all blow over now." Yes. The wind from the Kingdom of Heaven has blown over the world, and shall blow for centuries yet.”

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

The Economics of Ireland and the Policy of the British Government (1921)

World, Way, Imagination

“Art is always at peril in universities, where there are so many people, young and old, who love art less than argument, and dote upon a text that provides the nutritious pemmican on which scholars love to chew.”

Robertson Davies book The Cunning Man

Part 2, section 11.
The Cunning Man (1994)

Love, People, Art, Universe

“I suppose he had the good luck to be executed, no? I had an hour's chat with him in Buenos Aires. He struck me as a kind of play actor, no? Living up to a certain role. I mean, being a professional Andalusian… But in the case of Lorca, it was very strange because I lived in Andalusia and the Andalusians aren't a bit like that. His were stage Andalusians. Maybe he thought that in Buenos Aires he had to live up to that character, but in Andalusia, people are not like that. In fact, if you are in Andalusia, if you are talking to a man of letters and you speak to him about bullfights, he'll say, 'Oh well, that sort of this pleases people, I suppose, but really the torero works in no danger whatsoever. Because they are bored by these things, because every writer is bored by the local color in his own country. Well, when I met Lorca, he was being a professional Andalusian… Besides, Lorca wanted to astonish us. He said to me that he was very troubled about a very important figure in the contemporary world. A character in whom he could see all the tragedy of American life. And then he went on in this way until I asked him who was this character and it turned out this character was Mickey Mouse. I suppose he was trying to be clever. And I thought, 'That's the kind of thing you say when you are very, very young and you want to astonish somebody.' But after all, he was a grown man, he had no need, he could have talked in a different way. But when he started in about Mickey Mouse being a symbol of America, there was a friend of mine there and he looked at me and I looked at him and we both walked away because we were too old for that kind of game, no? Even at that time.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Richard Burgin, Conversation with Jorge Luis Borges, pages 92-93.
Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (1968)

Life, People, World, Color

“What struck him was not sadness or remorse or pity but the wonder of it. How can it be? How can it happen that one day you are young, you marry, and then another day you come to yourself and your life has passed like a dream? They looked at teach other curiously and wondered how they could have missed each other, lived in the same house all those years and passed in the hall like ghosts.”

Walker Percy book The Second Coming

The Second Coming (1980)

Life, Sadness, Dreams, Housing

“In every human society of which we have any record, there are those who teach and those who learn, for learning a way of life is implicit in all human culture as we know it. But the separation of the teacher's role from the role of all adults who inducted the young into the habitual behavior of the group, was a comparatively late invention. Furthermore, when we do find explicit and defined teaching, in primitive societies we find it tied in with a sense of the rareness or the precariousness of some human tradition.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

"An Anthropologist Looks at the Teacher's Role" http://varenne.tc.columbia.edu/bib/texts/med00marg42anthlook.html, in Educational Method, Vol 21, (1942) p. 219-223 1940s

Life, Way, Behavior, Sense

“The years had a way of piling themselves one atop the next, unnoticed and uncounted; that was how young men turned into old ones.”

Keith Roberts book Pavane

First measure “The Lady Margaret” (pp. 15-16)
Pavane (1968)

Men, Way

“I told my constituents when I ran for office that the most important vote I would ever take would be on sending their men and women — the boys and girls, the young men and women in my state — or anywhere else in the United States — to war. To me, it's an amazing thing, an amazing thing that we would do this so lightly, without any consideration by this august body. To send our young men and women to war without any congressional approval.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

Senate floor, 2011-03-30
regarding US participation in enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya
2010s

Women, Men, War, Girl

“That most human and American of presidents—of Americans—Abraham Lincoln, said as a young man: “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.” It’s a hard heart, and a dull one, that doesn’t go out to that sentence. The man who will make us see what we haven’t seen, feel what we haven’t felt, understand what we haven’t understood—he is our best friend. And if he knows more than we do, that is an invitation to us, not an indictment of us. And it is not an indictment of him, either; it takes all sorts of people to make a world—to make, even, a United States of America.”

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

“The Intellectual in America”, p. 15; conclusion
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

People, Books, World, Feeling

“As an auxiliary to all of this," he said, "I have found myself speculating upon a world in which no one ever grew up. I admit, of course, that it is a rather acrobatic feat of thinking, not entirely consistent, to leap from the one idea to the other. In a world where one was able to package his experiences, he merely would be able to relive at some future time the experiences of the past. But in a world of the eternally young he'd have no need of such packaging. Each new day would bring the same freshness and the everlasting wonder inherent in the world of children. There would be no realization of death and no fear born of the knowledge of the future. Life would be eternal and there'd be no thought of change. One would exist in an everlasting matrix and while there would be little variation from one day to the next, one would not be aware of this and there'd be no boredom…”

Clifford D. Simak book Cemetery World

Cemetery World (1973)

Life, Death, Children, World

“Even where Marx did not soften his main drive to a "revolutionary development," it was still aimed at capitalism alone (a relatively young and derivative cancer) and not equally at the age-old, lasting core of all enslavement, cruelty and exploitation: at militarism, feudalism and the supremacist world at large.”

Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) German philosopher

Source: Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (1959), p. 38

Age, World

“On the Continent and elsewhere in the West, native populations are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic.”

Mark Steyn book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It

Source: America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (2006), p. 33

Age

“I think the difference between me and some of the other YBAs [Young British Artists] was that I was ambitious for the work, and not ambitious for myself.”

Rachel Whiteread (1963) British sculptor

As quoted in "Still breaking the mould" by Gordon Burn in The Guardian (11 October 2005)

Thinking

“The flat tax I got on my first meeting with Margaret Thatcher, who I admired very much and who was a great admirer of Milton Friedman. I met her first when I had been prime minister I think for some months and so on, and when I told her what I am planning to do, she looked at me with these big eyes and said “you are one brave young man.” And then a little bit introduced me on the realities of the Western world on which I was not very well informed. But I didn’t stop.”

Mart Laar (1960) Estonian politician and historian

Interview with Stephen J. Dubner, for 'Freakonomics Radio' podcast (24 March 2010), when asked how he learned the fate of Friedman's policies in the Western world.

World, Thinking, Reality

“Four guys could get together and make their own movie, in a year, but nobody does it 'cause they got bills to pay. What I'm saying is, that's what I would do, if I was young. I wouldn't even get a job. I'd get a couple of computers and a bunch of guys, we'd eat crap for a year, millionaires the next year if we did a good film. It's so extraordinary. Instead of crying about getting a job at Disney or "things are falling apart", things the old animators were doing when I was a kid, "it's all crumbling!" It's not crumbling, you're crumbling! You got these computers that could do this stuff for nothing! What do you do with it? You try to get a job for some asshole studio. It's so dumb.”

Ralph Bakshi (1938) Animator, filmmaker

Guy, Animals, Cry

“If the sewing societies, the avails of whose industry are now expended in supporting and educating young men for the ministry, were to withdraw their contributions to these objects, and give them where they are more needed, to their advancement of their own sex in useful learning, the next generation might furnish sufficient proof, that in intelligence and ability to master the whole circle of sciences, woman is not inferior to man.”

Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) American abolitionist

Letter 15 (October 20, 1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

Men, Education, Sex, Intelligence

“One stroke of his almighty rod
Shall send young sinners quick to hell.”

Isaac Watts (1674–1748) English hymnwriter, theologian and logician

Song 13: "The Danger of Delay".
1710s, Divine Songs Attempted in the Easy Language of Children (1715)

Hell

“Do you think (leaning towards the German Nationals) that any member of the Reich Government regards the Young Plan as something ideal? Do you think that anyone in the whole world expects a guarantee from us in relation to it? It was even said among the experts that it was only possible to look ahead for the next decade”

Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) German politician, statesman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Interruption from the Right: 'Yet you signed for fifty-one years'
Speech in the Reichstag (24 June 1929), quoted in W. M. Knight-Patterson, Germany. From Defeat to Conquest 1913-1933 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1945), p. 438
1920s

World, Thinking

“In Beauty's dwelling all things fair,
And rich, to win her sweet smiles strove;
But still young Beauty's only care
Was, to watch o'er the lamp of Love.”

Eliza Acton (1799–1859) Poet, cook

Song (1826)

Love, Smile, Beauty

“Whenever I had an opportunity to address the people in different parts of our province, I told them clearly that indeed, I was of the opinion that India should not be divided because today in India we have witnessed the result. Thousands and thousands of young and old, children, men, and women were massacred and ruined. But now that the division is an accomplished fact, the dispute is over. " I delivered many speeches against the division of India, but the question is: has anybody listened to me? You may hold any opinion about me, but I am not a man of destruction but of construction. If you study my life, you will find that I devoted it to the welfare of our country. We have proclaimed that if the Government of Pakistan would work for our people and our country the Khudai Khidmatgars would be with them. I repeat that I am not for the destruction of Pakistan. In destruction lies no good. "Neither Hindus nor Muslims, nor the Frontier, not Punjab, Bengal or Sindh stands to gain from it. There is advantage only in construction. I want to tell you categorically I will not support anybody in destruction. If any constructive programme is before you, if you want to do something constructive for our people, not in theory, but in practice, I declare before this House that I and my people are at your service…”

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890–1988) Indian independence activist

February 1948
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan: A True Servant of Humanity by Girdhari Lal Puri pp -188 ? 190

Life, Women, Men, Children

“Now such an one for daughter Creon had
As maketh wise men fools and young men mad.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

Life and Death of Jason, Book xvii, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Men, Fools, Daughters, Madness

“Go, then, young men, where glory waits you. The field is the world. Go where the abjects wander, and gather them into the fold of the sanctuary. Go to the lazarettos where the moral lepers herd, and tell them of the healing balm. Go to the haunts of crime, and float a gospel message upon the feculent air. Go wherever there are ignorant to be instructed, timid to be cheered, and helpless to be succored, and stricken to be blessed, and erring to be reclaimed. Go wherever faith can see, or hope can breathe, or love can work, or courage can venture. Go and win the spurs of your spiritual knighthood there.”

William Morley Punshon (1824–1881) English Nonconformist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 131.

Love, Men, World, Faith

“If I could offer one piece of advice to young people thinking about their future, it would be this: Don't preconceive. Find out what the opportunities are.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

1980s–1990s, Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)

People, Thinking, Future

“Barack Obama being young, handsome and sun-tanned is going to get along with you swimmingly.”

Silvio Berlusconi (1936) Italian politician

On the US president-elect to Dmitry Medvedev, as quoted in 'Italy's Berlusconi hails "suntanned" Obama' in Reuters (6 November 2008) http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUKTRE4A562120081106, "Berlusconi faces race row as he calls America's first black president 'suntanned'" in Mail on Sunday (6 November 2008) http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1083664/Berlusconi-faces-race-row-calls-Americas-black-president-suntanned.html 2008

Sun

“In the mind of a young man from a middle-class family, the concept of human life is associated with that of a career, and in early youth the career is that of Napoleon I.”

Italo Svevo book Zeno's Conscience

Nella mente di un giovine di famiglia borghese il concetto di vita umana s'associa a quello della carriera e nella prima gioventù la carriera è quella di Napoleone I.
Source: La coscienza di Zeno (1923), P. 51; p. 61.

Life, Youth, Family

“In old age it is no longer possible to credit the sheer, almost physical agony which is caused in youth by the passage of time, when the turning of spring into summer arouses pain as lively as the pain of toothache. The succession of the seasons is like a recurrent inescapable catastrophe, which sweeps away what is young and beautiful, and what is beautiful because it is young.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Source: Collected Poems (1990), p. vii

Pain, Youth, Age, Beauty

“There are in France some fifty thousand young men of good birth and fairly well off who are encouraged to live a life of complete idleness. They must either cease to exist or must come to see that there can be no happiness, no health even, without regular daily labor of some sort … The need of work is in me.”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

As quoted in Contemporary Portraits (1920) by Frank Harris, p. 263

Life, Men, Happiness, Health

“One of my first sculptures was made of bicycle parts. I was living at that time in a attic in the red light section of Amsterdam. I started to work without any specific materials. I was looking in the street like when I was a young boy, in the garbage cans, for ropes, wires, and paint. I left my parents in 1940. Years later I saw an exhibition of Kurt Schwitters at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam curated by Willem Sandberg and there I saw the real 'objet trouvé'; until then I had never heard about it. Schwitters was a shattering experience.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Source: Karel Appel – the complete sculptures,' (1990), p. 79 'Quotes', K. Appel (1989)

Boy, Parent, Light, Time

“Drink: the immortal waters quench the spirit's longing.
Art thou not now, bright one, all sorrow past, in elation,
Made young with joy, grown brother-hearted with the vast,
Whither thy spirit wending flits the dim stars past
Unto the Light of Lights in burning adoration.”

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

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Art, Star, Drink, Light

“I used to do Grade Exams, but my mum will tell you I didn't over-practise for them at all. I never practised, just played. I loved to play. I loved to play a lot* If one mistake is made with young children, it is trying to make them practise rather than just letting them play.' She played hymns at church ('My parents were very religious when we were young') and 'all the Top of the Pops number ones next morning at school. Things like David Bowie's "Life On Mars". That's got a very good piano part. And ever since I was six or seven years old, I always liked Bach - that's why I recorded the Anna Magdalene Notebook, little 16-bar preludes that Bach wrote for children.' I was amazed at how serious the other kids were about the whole thing, much more disciplined than I was, and with this attitude of "Ooh, I can't play sports because I might hurt my fingers" or "I can't listen to pop music because that's really terrible.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

Childhood

Love, Life, Children, School

“On young love* "Here is a fulfillment of long centuries of civilization and culture; here, in romantic love, more than the triumph of thought or the victories of power is the topmost reach of human beings."”

Will Durant book The Story of Civilization

Source: The Story of Civilization (1935–1975), VI - The Reformation (1957), p.g. 8

Love, Victory

“Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

St. 2 1840s, Poems (1847), The Problem http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/problem.htm

“John F. Kennedy's death was as personal a body blow to most of the nation's young people. Why? It seems to me that the answer is simple: He was the symbol of the new generation grasping the tiller of the ship of state for the first time, and finding it exhilarating, exciting, challenging. He knew that there is an element of danger in accepting a challenge — in taking a risk that is beyond what is expected of you, beyond what you may expect of yourself.”

Leo Ryan book Understanding California Government and Politics

Understanding California Government and Politics (1966), Preface, p. v.

Death, People, Time, Personality

“I was brought up to look upon falling in love as something natural…something that was pleasant and natural and amusing. I've been in love before, casually, the way young Frenchmen are…but in earnest, too, because a Frenchman can't help surrounding a thing like that with sentiment and romance. He can't help it. If it were just … just something shameful and nasty, he couldn't endure it. They don't have affairs in cold blood the way I've heard men talk about such things since I've come here. It makes a difference, Mrs. Pentland, if you look at things in the light they do. I've learned now, and it is a thing which needs learning, the most important thing in all life. The French are right about it. They make a fine, wonderful thing of love.”

Louis Bromfield (1896–1956) American author and conservationist

Early Autumn : A Story of a Lady (1926)

Love, Life, Men, Way

“[T]he older I get the more I realise that the world is not as varied as we thought it was when we were young. Most places are much alike.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville: Using words to paint pictures of "magical" Prague (2006)

World

“But this same process of the old teaching the young can also cause errors and false conclusions to accumulate with the passage of time. One should therefore study ancient writings, not so much in the hope of finding lost wisdom as in the hope of locating the origin of errors that have been, and still are, accepted truths.”

Carl Eckart (1902–1973) American physicist

Source: Our Modern Idol: Mathematical Science (1984), p. 3.

Wisdom, Truth, Hope, Error

“The best careers advice given to the young … is "Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it."”

Katharine Whitehorn (1928) British writer

"The Ten-Hour Week is Here to Stay," http://search.proquest.com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/hnpguardianobserver/docview/476248113/fulltextPDF/2EA0FBE19E60470DPQ/1 from The Observer (London, January 19, 1975 http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/guardian/doc/476248113.html)