Quotes on Years

We were not just competitors and colleagues, we were friends. We had a lot of opportunities to reflect on this in the last year. It was a competitive brotherhood.

We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home to seek our own lives in peace.

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.

I mean, honestly, we have to be clear that the life for many Afghan women is not that much different than it was a hundred years ago, 200 years ago. The country has lived with so much violence and conflict that many people, men and women, just want it to be over.

In his wretched life of less than twenty-seven years Abel accomplished so much of the highest order that one of the leading mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century could say without exaggeration, "Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years." Asked how he had done all this in the six or seven years of his working life, Abel replied, "By studying the masters, not the pupils."

The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.

...There's a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them.

During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.

Any comic is a very good actor. Look at Don Rickles. He is saying the same joke every night for 20 years and making it look like he just thought of it.

A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.

It took me forty years of dealing with buddhism to finally realize that actually Buddha's discovery was happiness and bliss.

I remained a socialist for several years, even after my rejection of Marxism; and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society.

Money is not worth dying for. I know, because years ago, while nearly a million dollars in debt, suicide was an option. Rather than run, rich dad suggested I write down all the mistakes I made and then seek help. If I made accounting mistakes, I talked to an accountant. If there was a legal mistake, I talked to an attorney. That was my way out. That is how I got smarter.

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me.

In January we start saving money, getting out of credit card debt, funding our retirement accounts, and we're doing wonderful. Then, every single year like clockwork, starting in November, all of you fall into this trap that says, 'I have to buy this gift... I can't show up at this party and not have something for everybody.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. I fear the disease is incurable.

Writing is the hardest thing I know, but it was the only thing I wanted to do. I wrote for 20 years and published nothing before my first book.

It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.

We must appreciate the dignity of life in all its seasons, even the path of the elderly in the twilight of their years, to work toward the day when every child, born and unborn, is welcomed to life and protected by law.

It's really weird how your life changes. Tonight I'm drinking water. Four years ago? Opium. Night and day, you know?