Twenties Quotes - Page 35

• It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.

  Willa Cather

  Mad, Littles, Vain

  Willa Cather (1988). “Not Under Forty”, p.24, U of Nebraska Press

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• We are all born with a rut radar. Mine is finely wired, a little oversensitive maybe. Perhaps just a bit hyperactive. Twenty steady boyfriends before turning 16, a new best friend 12 times a year, switched college majors every time I met someone who seemed exactly like the sort of person I really, really wanted to be. I'm not fickle. I'm just never there yet.

  Fran Lebowitz

  College, Years, Fickle

  Fran Lebowitz (2011). “Tales From A Broad: An Unreliable Memoir”, p.6, Monsoon Books

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• Whether we ever get to know about them or not, there are very probably alien civilizations that are superhuman, to the point of being god-like in ways that exceed anything a theologian could possibly imagine. Their technical achievements would seem as supernatural to us as ours would seem to a Dark Age peasant transported to the twenty-first century. Imagine his response to a laptop computer, a mobile telephone, a hydrogen bomb or a jumbo jet.

  Richard Dawkins

  Dark, Civilization, Hydrogen Bomb

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.98, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I remind young people everywhere I go, one of the worst things the older generation did was to tell them for twenty-five years "Be successful, be successful, be successful" as opposed to "Be great, be great, be great". There's a qualitative difference.

  Cornel West

  Successful, Years, Differences

  "Democracy Matters". Speech in San Francisco, October 01, 2004.

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• Let me be reborn. I would like to be born again twenty-five times to spread Lord Buddha's Dhamma.

  Anagarika Dharmapala

  Lord, Born Again, Reborn

  Anagarika Dharmapala (1965). “Return to Righteousness: A Collection of Speeches, Essays, and Letters of the Anagarika Dharmapala”

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• But while my inner voice was clearly telling me I was at my core an entrepreneur, it's inconvenient to decide at twenty-three that you can't really work for other people.

  Kelly Cutrone

  Business, Voice, People

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• When I started looking for pointed shoes, I used to go to Fairfax on Orchard Street in New York City, one of those little pushcart guys. I'd say, 'You got any pointy shoes?' They would go way, way in the back and come back with a dusty box, blow the dust off the top, and say, 'What do you want with these things? Give me twenty bucks. Go on, get outta here!' And that was the beginning.

  Tom Waits

  New York, Blow, Dust

  "One for the (Style) Hall of Fame: Tom Waits's Pointed Shoes". www.esquire.com. March 15, 2011.

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• It's one thing to be twenty and touring the world, but doing it in your forties, you wake up with aches and pains.

  Jane Wiedlin

  Pain, Wake Up, World

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• After twenty years you can begin to be sure of what camera will do.

  Brassai

  Years, Cameras

  Brassaï (1968). “Brassaï”

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• You're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don't. I think that's old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east. And there are a lot of new members. And if you just take the list of all the members of NATO and all of those who have been invited in recently -- what is it? Twenty-six, something like that? -- you're right. Germany has been a problem, and France has been a problem.

  Donald Rumsfeld

  Thinking, Europe, Germany

  Briefing at Foreign Press Center, Washington, D.C., 22 Jan. 2003

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• A man in love will jump to pick up a glove or a bouquet for a silly girl of sixteen, whilst at home he will permit his aged mother to carry pails of water and armfuls of wood, or his wife to lug a twenty-pound baby, hour after hour, without ever offe

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Love, Girl, Mother

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Ida Husted Harper (1889). “History of woman suffrage”

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• It's important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

  Toni Morrison

  Art, Years, Racism

  "Black Studies Center public dialogue. Pt. 2 (A Humanist View)", May 30, 1975.

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• In my generation, this was not the first occasion when the strong had attacked the weak.Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier. I felt certain that if South Korea was allowed to fall, Communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own shores.

  Harry S. Truman

  Strong, Fall, Communist Leaders

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• I quit smoking well over twenty years ago.

  Shelley Berman

  Marijuana, Years, Smoking

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• I've whipped the Harvard graduate's ass. Nothing against Harvard - it's a hell of a school - but there I was, twenty five yards behind, wrapped in leg irons, and I beat him.

  Don King

  School, Iron, Boxing

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• Decades from now, people will look back and wonder how societies could have acquiesced in a sex slave trade in the twenty-first century that is... bigger than the transatlantic slave trade was in the nineteenth. They will be perplexed that we shrugged as a lack of investment in maternal health caused half a million women to perish in childbirth each year.

  Sheryl WuDunn

  Sex, Years, People

  Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn (2010). “Half The Sky: How to Change the World”, p.243, Hachette UK

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• We don't understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it and admit it

  Jules Renard

  Birthday, Midlife, Forty

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• Time, we know, is relative. You can travel light years through the stars and back, and if you do it at the speed of light then, when you return, you may have aged mere seconds while your twin brother or sister will have aged twenty, thirty, forty or however many years it is, depending on how far you traveled. This will come to you as a profound shock, particularly if you didn't know you had a twin brother or sister.

  Douglas Adams

  Sister, Time, Brother

  Douglas Adams (2012). “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five”, p.706, Pan Macmillan

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• When you play this game twenty years, go to bat ten-thousand times, and get three-thousand hits, do you know what that means? You've gone zero for seven-thousand.

  Pete Rose

  Sports, Zero, Mean

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• If you want to live a long time, don't fool with nothing old but money, nothing big but a bank roll, nothing black but a Cadillac, nothing over twenty-two years, nothing that weighs over 130. If you do, you're in trouble. 'Cause when you're getting old and your cells gettin' low, you'll need a Delco battery to boost ya.

  Satchel Paige

  Cells, Years, Two

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• For more than twenty years by my own work and personal initiative, I have gathered from all the old streets of Vieux Paris photographic plates, 18 x 24 format, artistic documents of the beautiful civil architecture of the 16th to the 19th century: the old hôtels, historic or curious houses, beautiful facades, beautiful doors, beautiful woodwork, door knockers, old fountains This vast artistic and documentary collection is today complete. I can truthfully say that I possess all of Vieux Paris.

  Eugene Atget

  Beautiful, Doors, Years

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• My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers.

  Edward Abbey

  Years, Computer, Five

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.11, RosettaBooks

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• I wait.  Now the night flows back, the mighty stillness embraces and includes me; I can see the stars again and the world of starlight.  I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness.  Loveliness and a quiet exultation.

  Edward Abbey

  Stars, Loneliness, Night

  Edward Abbey (1988). “Desert Solitaire”, p.15, University of Arizona Press

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• Had the news of salvation by Jesus Christ been inscribed on the face of the sun and the moon, in characters that all nations would have understood, the whole earth had known it in twenty-four hours, and all nations would have believed it; whereas, though it is now almost two thousand years since, as they tell us, Christ came upon earth, not a twentieth part of the people of the earth know anything of it, and among those who do, the wiser part do not believe it.

  Thomas Paine

  Jesus, Believe, Character

  Thomas Paine (1858). “The works of Thomas Paine: a hero in the American revolution”, p.272

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• I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Brother, Taken, Color

  Harold Bloom, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (2009). “Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-five”, p.47, Infobase Publishing

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