Years Quotations | Page 4

One of the most important things that I have learned in my 57 years is that life is all about choices. On every journey you take, you face choices. At every fork in the road, you make a choice. And it is those decisions that shape our lives.

I think the 24-hour news cycle has helped exaggerate the differences between the parties. You can always find someone on TV somewhere carping about something. That didn't happen 20 years ago.

The difference between a 20-something and a 30-something man? Wisdom. At 20 years old, we dont really get how sensitive and beautiful women are. By 30, were finally starting to learn.

We must work to stabilize Social Security. We must not gamble with our nation's social insurance program, one of our most popular and effective federal programs that has remained dependable and stable for the past 70 years.

We are being challenged by Islam these years. There are some things for which one should display no tolerance. And when we are tolerant, we must know whether it is because of convenience or conviction.

Among the weeds choking out growth and good government are the hundreds of boards, commissions, and advisory committees that have sprouted over the years. They devour time, money, and energy far beyond any real contribution they make.

I have a 6-year-old niece who doesn't look like the majority of girls on the covers of magazines. I hope that by the time she's 16, the world will have changed.

As you become more successful, the gender barrier disappears. The credibility challenges you have during your growing up years starts disappearing when you start demonstrating success.

It hasn't been until the last couple years that I've started playing close to my age. But it's fun playing the younger roles because it takes you back to the teen years.

The scariest movie I have ever seen, and my favorite horror film is, 'The Exorcist.' It is a must-see horror/thriller classic. I watch it every couple of years.

We got a little waylaid along the way. The whole problem started about 10 years ago with management and legal battles, then still trying to make albums while I was doing all of that.

I did almost a year in prison, a year in prison, just because my name is Foxy Brown.

'One Hundred Years of Solitude' convinced me to drop out of Harvard graduate school. The novel reminded me of everything my Ph.D. program was trying to make me forget. Thank you, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Cricket makes no sense to me. I find it beautiful to watch and I like that they break for tea. That is very cool, but I don't understand. My friends from The Clash tried to explain it years and years ago, but I didn't understand what they were talking about.

I said publicly last year that I wanted 2012 to be a great season, not just a good season. We certainly had a very good season and perhaps exceeded a few expectations. But Broncos fans, you and I know what a great season looks like.

If trees can create art, if they can encircle the globe seven times in one year, if prisoners can grow plants and raise frogs, then perhaps there are other static entities that we hold inside ourselves, like grief, like addictions, like racism, that can also change.

It's only in relatively recent years that Hollywood became the playground of multinational corporations which regard movies and TV shows as a minor irritant to their overall activity.

Every life has its years in which one progresses as on a tedious and dusty street of poplars, without caring to know where he is.

In recent years, breweries and brew pubs have flourished across the Nation. And, as the Representative from Oregon's fourth district, I have enjoyed seeing the diversity that craft brewery has fueled across the Nation.

After so many cases of terror attacks related to Islamic militancy remaining unresolved in the last few years, the government has no moral authority to stay in power.

From Watergate we learned what generations before us have known; our Constitution works. And during Watergate years it was interpreted again so as to reaffirm that no one - absolutely no one - is above the law.

Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.

You know, when you get your first asparagus, or your first acorn squash, or your first really good tomato of the season, those are the moments that define the cook's year. I get more excited by that than anything else.

When it comes to hockey, it's been in my blood since I was 3 or 4 years old. I love coaching the kids, especially at that level.

Twenty-year-olds have a kind of emotional idealism about relationships and about the world that enables them to say, 'No, you lied to me. Goodbye.' When they see wickedness, they walk away.

As a society, I think older women are marginalized, but I think that has changed so much in the last twenty years.

Your personal life, your professional life, and your creative life are all intertwined. I went through a few very difficult years where I felt like a failure. But it was actually really important for me to go through that. Struggle, for me, is the most inspirational thing in the world at the end of the day - as long as you treat it that way.

In 40-odd years in show business, some years I could do no wrong, and some years I could do nothing right. Show business. I owe it everything - it owes me nothing.

If you think you know where you're going to be 10 years from now, that's where you're at now. You're just putting it off.

You feel a little weird, as a writer of scripted television for many years, to say you're a fan of reality TV. You feel like a traitor. But I am a total fan.

I never wanted to be an anchor for 25 years, and suddenly I wanted to be one.

I'm not a 21-year-old angsty self-destructive rapscallion anymore.

In all my years as an actor, I had never been me - I had always hidden behind my glasses, mustaches and funny voices.

Loads of chemicals and hazardous wastes have been introduced into the atmosphere that didn't even exist in 1948. The environmental condition of the planet is far worse than it was 42 years ago.

I've played heavies for years and years and years. I was bald. I came to Hollywood. I did a play about junk. I was a pusher, so I played pushers for years and years and years. I did war movies and things like that.

We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

I'm hopefully touring with Colin Baker next year in Perfect Strangers. I have performed with Sylvia Simms in poetry and music evenings. I would love to do those for the rest of my career - they are so fun and witty.

In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs.

There have been, in recent years, many Asian American pioneers in the public eye who've defied the condescendingly complimentary 'model minority' stereotype: actors like Lucy Liu, artists like Maya Lin, moguls like Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. They are known, often admired.

If I had an extra 20 or 50 years physically, I could have been the dancer of my dreams. But I never became that dancer.

Suddenly you're like a pirate, you're 65 years old and you've got an earring.

I don't want to be a passenger sitting on the bench not doing much, even in my older years.

I've studied astrology for many, many years, and I feel like it's an incredibly challenging art.

When I was 5 years old I started singing in church and I hated my voice because I sounded like a grown woman, not a child. I was ashamed of it.

If CEO compensation was performance-driven, which I believe it was in IBM's case, nobody would ever argue. If the shareholders didn't make billions and billions of dollars, I wouldn't make millions of dollars. My salary was the same for 10 years. It was all performance-based.

My ideas had been taking a socialistic shape for many years; but they were lacking in definite outline.

I can go into the wilderness and not see anyone for days and experience a kind of space that hasn't changed for tens of thousands of years. Having that experience was necessary to my perception of how photography can look at the changes humanity has brought about in the landscape. My work does become a kind of lament.

My experience has been in a short 77 years that in the end when you fight for a desperate cause and have good reasons to fight, you usually win.

When I was growing up, particularly during puberty in my teen years, I was so miserable because I elicited so much teasing and meanness from my teenage cohorts.

Hip-hop is an instant gratification, winners and losers circle, and often those who are losing give up after three or four, five years.

Inequality makes everyone unhappy, the poor most of all, and that is well within the remit of the state. More money gives less extra happiness the richer we get, yet we are addicted to earning and spending more every year.

The thing is, when you see your old friends, you come face to face with yourself. I run into someone I've known for 40 or 50 years, and they're old. And I suddenly realize I'm old. It comes as an enormous shock to me.

Everybody wants to be famous, but nobody wants to do the work. I live by that. You grind hard so you can play hard. At the end of the day, you put all the work in, and eventually it'll pay off. It could be in a year, it could be in 30 years. Eventually, your hard work will pay off.

Good economic policy requires not so much the bravado to implement drastic change as the strength and wisdom to make reasonable trade-offs over the many years it takes to transform a country's standard of living.

In the first 50 years of the filibuster, it was used only 35 times. But the last Congress alone had 112 cloture motions filed, plus threats of more. This is the tyranny of the minority.

I have behind me not only the splendid traditions and the annals of more than a thousand years but the living strength and majesty of the Commonwealth and Empire; of societies old and new; of lands and races different in history and origins but all, by God's Will, united in spirit and in aim.

Shakespeare wrote great plays that we're still watching all these years later. Charlie Chaplin made great comedies and they are still as funny today as they ever were.

For years, I stored my sweaters in the oven.

About seven years later I was given a book about the periodic table of the elements. For the first time I saw the elegance of scientific theory and its predictive power.

I spent two years living in London - I'd have stayed for ever if I could have got a work visa. It was there I started collecting vinyl and fell in love with the sounds of the 1970s.

When I started performing, I decided that if in five years I couldn't earn as much money acting as I could as a teacher, it would be unrealistic for me to continue on the stage.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

I got behind that pencil and nothing happened for many years, but since they put me in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, I've turned around. I took a good look at myself and said, I think it's time to get back at work.

I haven't been to a job interview since I was 16 years old. When I was approached by Givenchy it was more like a courtship.

Not until, years later, I found my true interest in life did I discover that I could master a subject, no matter how difficult, if it helped me in what I wanted to do.

My mother saw a movie when she was 14 years old. I forget the name of the movie, but one of the lead characters was named Lark. She decided then she would name me and she stuck to it, and here I am.

The person who takes the oath of office in the next four months will shape not just the next four years, but the next forty years of our nation. In these next four years, we need proven leadership, proven judgment and proven values. America needs four more years of President Barack Obama.

I didn't have any desire I might have had 10 years ago to shoot every single word that I wrote.

I had been living with dialysis for three years or so, and the new kidney felt like a reprieve, a new gift of life. I felt alive again and I guess that has had an effect on my use of colour.

I was forced to live far beyond my years when just a child, now I have reversed the order and I intend to remain young indefinitely.

History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness.

A study of economics usually reveals that the best time to buy anything is last year.

Over the years, God and St. Therese have kept me going no matter how bad things were.

I cannot be alone in being pretty nauseated by Red Nose Day, or at least its television manifestation. Do I think that wretchedly poor children in Africa should get food and life-saving drugs? Of course. Do I want to be hectored into contributing by celebrities who earn more in a 10-minute slot than many of these families get in a year? Nope.

Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.

I reread Mesrine's book every year because the way the story is told is fascinating. Today, we don't have gangsters like Mesrine - he had humor.

I grew up with horses when I was a kid in Argentina. I like them. I respect them. I'm careful around them. You never know what they're going to do. They're endlessly interesting. I've had some good acting partners that were horses over the years.

For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.

My parents were both in the army for 20 years and then worked in government departments; but they had gone through the Great Depression and known lean times. They always remained extremely frugal and lived far below their means.

And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove... instead of twenty.

Winning a gold medal is not easy but I believed in myself, especially over the last four years.

Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue.

Every year of my life I grow more convinced that it is wisest and best to fix our attention on the beautiful and the good, and dwell as little as possible on the evil and the false.

I'm in college at North Carolina State University. I'm about to start my sophomore year and have an apartment on campus with three buddies I've grown up with. I get to be normal when I'm there, and then I tour Thursday through Sunday.

I started my own little carpet and upholstery cleaning business. I've done it for 20 years. I live well

There's been a sea change in our focus on corporate ethics. We've made more progress in the last three years than the previous 30.

I worked at NBC and MTV for two years, and it was very interesting to see the comparisons of audiences and the way that I would have to present a story to the two different places.

An economy growing at 7 percent per year, can and must find the resources to improve the lives of its millions of poor.

And to do that not only for the war fighter, but also to help prepare the people in the acquisition, personnel and policy worlds who need to make adjustments in the department's business, which itself may take 10 or 15 years to accomplish.

My whole plan in my head has always been, if I go a year without acting, it's time to go home; it's time to go back to Montreal.

Singing and being truthful to a song... I've developed that skill, and I know how to do that real instinctively, that's all I've been doing for the last 25 years.

It was my Mum who got me into singing properly - she knew I had to do something with my voice because she knew I was talented. She was the one who pushed me into joining a choir all those years ago, when I was about 12. I remember she told me to start with the choir and just see where it took me.

During my 30 years on Wall Street, taxes on 'unearned income' have bounced up and down with regularity, and I've never detected any change in the appetite for hard work and accumulating wealth on the part of myself or any of my fellow capitalists.

There were a lot of people dreaming about making films, and they would finance maybe 6 films a year. Because they were funded by the government, the films sort-of had to deal with serious social issues - and, as a result, nobody went to see those films.

I never had the exposure to techniques and so forth that children have today with art workshops, but I always had crayons and pencils and still have work going right back to when I was five or six years old

For me, as an actor, one of the biggest fears on a TV show is getting stuck in something where you end up feeling like you're doing the same thing, every single year.

There are no shortcuts to victory. We must commit ourselves to the slow, painstaking work of foreign policy day by day and year by year.

The next four years, there won't be a week that goes by without a discussion of climate change. It's a naturally Conservative issue.

Two years work wasted, I have been breeding those flies for all that time and I've got nothing out of it.

I like movies where you can come back and re-watch them and admire the cinematography 25 years later.