Twenty One Quotes

• Any young man who is unmarried at the age of twenty one is a menace to the community.

  Brigham Young

  Marriage, Men, Community

  12 Copy quote

• A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.

  Muhammad Ali

  Life, Motivational, Happy Birthday

  Muhammad Ali (2016). “Muhammad Ali Unfiltered: Rare, Iconic, and Officially Authorized Photos of the Greatest”, p.201, Simon and Schuster

  69 Copy quote

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• At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Birthday, Time, Growing Up

  'Poor Richard's Almanac' (1741) June

  74 Copy quote

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• When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

  Mark Twain

  Love, Funny, Motivational

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.121, Courier Corporation

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• [O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.

  Joan Didion

  Blessing, Twenties, Three

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Jul 07, 2011

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• What I did not know yet about hunger, but would find out over the next twenty-one years, was that brilliant theorists of economics do not find it worthwhile to spend time discussing issues of poverty and hunger. They believe that these will be resolved when general economic prosperity increases. These economists spend all their talents detailing the process of development and prosperity, but rarely reflect on the origin and development of poverty and hunger. A a result, poverty continues.

  Muhammad Yunus

  Believe, Years, Issues

  13 Copy quote

• I am strongly of the opinion that, after the age of twenty-one, a man ought not to be out of bed and awake at four in the morning. The hour breeds thought. At twenty-one, life being all future, it may be examined with impunity. But, at thirty, having become an uncomfortable mixture of future and past, it is a thing to be looked at only when the sun is high and the world full of warmth and optimism.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Morning, Past, Insomnia

  P. G. Wodehouse (2011). “The Little Nugget”, p.40, The Floating Press

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• I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves.

  Haruki Murakami

  Depressing, Moving, Rain

  "A Wild Sheep Chase". Book by Haruki Murakami, 1982.

  9 Copy quote

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• one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty−one that everything afterward savors of anti−climax.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Time, Men, Excellence

  55 Copy quote

• Now that I am alone, I don't have to hide it; I don't have to hide anything any longer. I can let my face go because no one can see me; because there's twenty-one thousand feet between me and them... No, I don't have to press my teeth together or tighten the muscles of my jaw.

  Roald Dahl

  Feet, Together, Twenties

  Roald Dahl (1991). “Collected Stories”, Everyman's Library

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• I've always been fascinated by numbers. Before I was seventeen years old, I had lived in twenty-one different houses. In my mind, each of those houses had a number.

  Robert Indiana

  Years, Numbers, House

  15 Copy quote

• I was tired of an outlaw's life. I have been hunted for twenty-one years. I have literally lived in the saddle. I have never known a day of perfect peace. It was one long, anxious, inexorable, eternal vigil. When I slept it was literally in the midst of an arsenal. If I heard dogs bark more fiercely than usual, or the feet of horses in a greater volume of sound than usual, I stood to arms. Have you any idea of what a man must endure who leads such a life? No, you cannot. No one can unless he lives it for himself.

  Frank James

  Dog, Horse, Tired

  13 Copy quote

• It is a rule of mine never to ask unsolicited questions of people over twenty-one. I am only giving them the option of lying if they choose to. They would tell me the truth without my asking if they wanted me to know. To me that's fair enough.

  Dorothy West

  Lying, People, Giving

  Dorothy West (1996). “The Richer, the Poorer: Stories, Sketches, and Reminiscences”, Anchor

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• I've told youngsters not to write their autobiographical novel at the age of twenty-one; to save it for the time when they're fifty-one or sixty-one. They should write other novels first, to learn their craft; they shouldn't cut their teeth on the valuable material of childhood because they'll never have better material, ever, to work with.

  Laura Z. Hobson

  Writing, Cutting, Childhood

  5 Copy quote

• When I learnt, however, that in 1911 there had been twenty-one regular feminist periodicals in Britain, that there was a feminist book shop, a woman's press, and a woman's bank run by and for women, I could no longer accept that the reason I knew almost nothing about women of the past was because there were so few of them, and they had done so little.

  Dale Spender

  Running, Book, Past

  8 Copy quote

• You have twenty-one days to shoot a whole movie and sometimes you go into that thinking ugh, this could potentially be really, really difficult and it turns out to be the most incredible experience.

  Kathleen Robertson

  Thinking, One Day, Twenties

  "Kathleen Robertson - Chameleon of the Big and Small Screen". Interview with Todd Konrad, www.ifqmag.com.

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• with a country of rare picturesqueness for a background, a people of rare beauty for actors, everybody more or less permeated with the artistic instinct and everybody more or less writing poetry - California has a pageant for breakfast, a fiesta for luncheon and a carnival for dinner. They are always electing queens. In fact any girl in California who hasn't been a queen of something before she's twenty-one is a poor prune.

  Inez Haynes Irwin

  Girl, Country, Queens

  10 Copy quote

• Everybody in America is a part of this big herd of cattle being led to the marketplace, not to be sold, which is usual with cattle, but to do the buying. And everyone is branded. You see the brands - Nike, Puma, Coke - all over their bodies. Pretty soon you'll go to a family and say, "$100,000 if we can tattoo Pepsi on your child's forehead, and we'll have it removed when he's twenty-one. A hundred grand."

  George Carlin

  Tattoo, Nike, Children

  9 Copy quote

• I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man's housekeeper. When I was young, if a girl married poverty, she became a drudge; if she married wealth, she became a doll. Had I married at twenty-one, I would have been either a drudge or a doll for fifty-five years. Think of it!

  Susan B. Anthony

  Marriage, Girl, Freedom

  3 Copy quote

• When one is five-and-twenty, one has not chalk-stones at one's finger-ends that the touch of a handsome girl should be entirely indifferent.

  George Eliot

  Girl, Twenties, Stones

  George Eliot (2012). “The Mill on the Floss”, p.308, Courier Corporation

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• So you play your albums and you smoke your pot And you meet your girlfriend in the parking lot Oh, but still you're aching for the things you haven't got, What went wrong? And if you can't understand why your world is so dead And why you've got to keep in style and feed your head Well, you're twenty one and still you mother makes your bed And that's too long.

  Billy Joel

  Mother, Girlfriend, Play

  3 Copy quote

• Twenty-one years ago, when I first heard Mia Farrow had accused me of child molestation, I found the idea so ludicrous I didn't give it a second thought. We were involved in a terribly acrimonious breakup, with great enmity between us and a custody battle slowly gathering energy. The self-serving transparency of her malevolence seemed so obvious I didn't even hire a lawyer to defend myself. It was my show business attorney who told me she was bringing the accusation to the police and I would need a criminal lawyer.

  Woody Allen

  Breakup, Children, Self

  "Woody Allen Speaks Out". www.nytimes.com. February 7, 2014.

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• 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, Twenties, Littles

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

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• We have the heaviest concentration of lawyers on Earth -- one for every five-hundred Americans; three times as many as are in England, four times as many as are in West Germany, twenty-one times as many as there are in Japan. We have more litigation, but I am not sure that we have more justice. No resources of talent and training in our own society, even including the medical care, is more wastefully or unfairly distributed than legal skills. Ninety percent of our lawyers serve 10 percent of our people. We are over-lawyered and under-represented.

  Jimmy Carter

  Japan, West Germany, Skills

  Remarks at 100th Anniversary Banquet of the Los Angeles County Bar Association, Los Angeles, Cal., 4 May 1978

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• FACE THE NATION is the second oldest program on television. It began in 1954, fifty-eight years ago. I've been here at the table for the last twenty-one.

  Rodney Erickson

  Eight, Years, Lasts

  3 Copy quote