Quotes on Years

People from the world's richest countries should be prepared to accept the burden of debt reduction for heavily indebted poor countries, and should urge their leaders to fulfill the pledges made to reduce world poverty, especially in Africa, by the year 2015.

Struggle hard and then if you do not succeed, you are not to blame. Let the world praise or blame you. Let all the wealth of the earth come to your feet, or let you be made the poorest on earth. Let death come this moment or hundreds of years hence. Swerve not from the path you have taken. All good thoughts are immortal and go to make Buddhas and Christs.

People aren't quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They're not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

We usually overestimate what we think we can accomplish in one year-but we grossly underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade.

To become an academic expert takes years of studying. Academic experts are experts in how and what others have done. They use case studies and observation to understand a subject.

Childhood constitutes the most important element in an adult's life, for it is in his early years that a man is made.

The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale. We have killed thousands of our fellow human beings because we believed they had signed a contract with the devil, and had become witches. We still kill more than a thousand people each year for witchcraft. In my view, there is only one hope for humankind to emerge from what Carl Sagan called "the demon-haunted world" of our past. That hope is science.

My only agenda for the next two years is the same as the one I’ve had since the day I swore an oath on the steps of this Capitol — to do what I believe is best for America.

I’ve worked in television for 10 years straight. If I were a man, it wouldn’t be considered strange [to have confidence] at all.

I know of no single formula for success. But over the years I have observed that some attributes of leadership are universal and are often about finding ways of encouraging people to combine their efforts, their talents, their insights, their enthusiasm and their inspiration to work together.

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.

We were staring at the origin of a piece of our own bodies inside this 375-million-year-old fish. We had a fish with a wrist.

Take the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the earth and scale it down to a single year, with January 1 being the origin of the earth and midnight on December 31 being the present. Until June, the only organisms were single-celled microbes, such as algae, bacteria, and amoebae. The first animal with a head did not appear until October. The first human appears on December 31. We, like all the animals and plants that have ever lived, are recent crashers at the party of life on earth.

A billion years or so into eternity, how many toys we accumulated during this life will not seem too terribly important.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn't know it then.

The universe is already programmed to give each of us a year of happiness. Our challenge lies in programming ourselves to receive it.

Cities are beautiful because they are created slowly; they are made by time. A city is born from a tangle of monuments and infrastructures , culture and market, national history and everyday stories. It takes 500 years to create a city, 50 to create a neighborhood.

I think people should be given a test much like driver's tests as to whether they're capable of being parents! It's an art form. I talk a lot. And I think a lot. And I draw a lot. But never in a million years would I have been a parent. That's just work that's too hard.

Today, we're taking a break from the concerns and the bustle of the work-a-day world. But we're also making a new beginning. As we gather around our dining room tables for the midday meal, let us thank God for life and the blessings He's put before us. High among them are our families, our freedom, and the opportunities of a new year.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.