Top 100 Quotes About Decades
#1. Throughout the 1970s, '80s and '90s, federal mandatory minimum laws were implemented that forced judges to deliver sentences far lengthier than they would have if allowed to use their own discretion. The result has been decades of damage, particularly to young people.
Rand Paul
#2. Although being economics editor sounds impressive, it does not mean I actually edit anything. It mainly reflects two decades of title-inflation at the BBC, which has given ever more status to senior reporters, presumably because it is cheaper to do that than to offer higher pay.
Evan Davis
#3. Over four decades of pastoral ministry - I got started early - you make mistakes. But the mistakes you most regret are the ones that obscure the gospel and hurt the people you love, by saying in effect, "You do not belong," to those for whom Christ died to provide a place of belonging.
Ken Wilson
#4. Public policy has been a passion of mine. For three decades, I've had some involvement in the political process.
Nigel S. Wright
#5. I'm happy. I've had a great career. I adore my family. My closest friends from decades ago remain my closest friends.
Cristina Saralegui
#6. Leave the body in such a way that the Supreme Power gets notified and becomes aware, attentive and receptive to receive us, the way a child returns back home after decades of touring.
Vishal Chipkar
#7. She knew of a woman who had entered such a bargain at a large automobile manufacturer in 1973 and successfully managed to keep her accounting position for over four decades.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
#8. By 1970, the first stirrings of the revolt against Modernist orthodoxy in architecture had been felt, although it would be several years more until Postmodernism was widely accepted and made classical motifs permissible in high-style building design for the first time in decades.
Martin Filler
#9. At midlife, I think a woman has more in common with her teenage children than anybody else. We all are kind of uncertain. We realize for the first time in either our lives or decades that we're in charge now.
Jane Pauley
#10. If you're saving for the long run, it's actually a good thing when the market is down because the more shares you have, the more you can potentially make when markets rise. And over time - decades, not months - the markets rise more than they fall.
Suze Orman
#11. We weren't trying to just go public and get rich. There was no near-term thing. It always was this many-decades thing where there were no shortcuts and we'd sort of put one foot in front of the other.
Bill Gates
#12. Paul Ryan's love for Rage Against The Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades
Tom Morello
#13. We suggest that in the next decades fisheries management will have to emphasize the rebuilding of fish populations embedded within functional food webs, within large 'no-take' marine protected areas.
Daniel Pauly
#14. After two decades of reconstruction work, I want to work on projects that lay at the intersection of cultural diplomacy and national identity - ones that empower local communities to define progress, not have it sanctioned by others.
Cameron Sinclair
#15. I often yearn to regress into a state that's slightly more atavistic than my decades of conditioning generally allow, but it's difficult to let go of those reigns.
Keith Murray
#16. We often discuss housing refugees, but not how you help return refugees back to their home countries. As a result, in a post-disaster or post-conflict situation, we end up with intractable refugee camps that end up staying for decades.
Cameron Sinclair
#17. 'James and the Giant Peach' magnificently starts out Dahl's career as a blithe and droll Bad Uncle corrupter and affirmer of youth. Its influence can be subsequently traced down the decades in everything from Maurice Sendak to Lemony Snicket to J. K. Rowling.
Paul Di Filippo
#18. Some five decades later, writer Terry Sullivan was inspired by Mary's life story to compose the popular tongue twister : She sells seashells on the seashore The shells she sells are seashells, I'm sure So if she sells seashells on the seashore Then I'm sure she sells seashore shells.
Shelley Emling
#19. Epidemic obesity is unquestionably a health crisis in the United States, and for that matter, in much of the world. But it is a crisis in slow motion, one that has crept up on us over years, and even decades.
David L. Katz
#20. You can't not be a little different from others and be successful for three decades.
Charlie Sheen
#21. Building trust takes long- years, sometimes decades. It takes a second, a word, or a misstep to lose it. Regaining trust takes even longer.
Assegid Habtewold
#22. I think that over the last few decades, we have seen better economic outcomes than in the past.
Martin Feldstein
#23. Often motivated by a desire to maintain the existing status quo, sloth almost cost the U.S. its auto industry, as it refused for decades to build fuel-efficient cars to compete with Japanese, Korean and European imports.
Simon Mainwaring
#24. Tom Kizzia hasn't just observed and written about Alaska for three-plus decades, he's lived it. 'Pilgrim's Wilderness' is a story that needed to be told by the only man who could tell it.
Tom Bodett
#25. For three or four decades, we've been sitting here in front of this TV consuming a one-way medium that we had no control over.
Jason Calacanis
#26. There are certain moments in the history of a nation when the choices made define the decades to come.
George Papandreou
#27. [I]n the past two decades anthropologists have gathered data on life and death in pre-state societies rather than accepting the warm and fuzzy stereotypes. What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong.
Steven Pinker
#28. Don't be closer to twice a friend's weight than to her actual weight, I told myself. This little mantra has helped me stave off obesity for more than two decades.
Mindy Kaling
#29. Evil is never in a rush. It creeps up slowly. It doesn't hide, but confronts you in broad daylight. It gives decades of warnings, even centuries at times. Time is never the problem when you battle Evil. The problem is the will to fight it.
Amish Tripathi
#30. Ever since I left Greece more than two decades ago, it has been my dream to return and perform at the Acropolis. This project took more than a year and a half to plan and accomplish, and I would like to thank my band and crew and the scores of people involved in helping my dream become a reality.
Yanni
#31. My work with AIDS patients started right at the beginning of the epidemic, totally unplanned and spontaneous, as all my work had proceeded in the previous two decades, if it were not already my whole life-style! In the early eighties, we knew very little about this peculiar disease.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#32. Cost is the spectre haunting health reform. For many decades, the great flaw in the American health-care system was its unconscionable gaps in coverage.
Atul Gawande
#33. Medicare is a promise we made to seniors more than four decades ago. When President Johnson signed Medicare into law, one in three seniors lived in poverty. Half of seniors had no health coverage at all.
John Garamendi
#34. An adult has the opportunity to enjoy the wisdom gleaned from previous decades of living and experience.
Henry Rollins
#35. For decades, the men at Area 51 thought they'd take their secrets to the grave. At the height of the Cold War, they cultivated anonymity while pursuing some of the country's most covert projects. Conspiracy theories were left to popular imagination.
Annie Jacobsen
#36. To our horror, the very neighbor whom we had for decades thought of as the best natured and hardest working and, we always thought, the most contented of all our neighbors has turned out to be a murderer.
Thomas Bernhard
#37. Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.
Angela Davis
#38. I am a scholar of religions with four degrees, including one in the New Testament and fluency in Biblical Greek, who has been studying the origins of Christianity for two decades, who also happens to be Muslim.
Reza Aslan
#39. What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting location from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up.
Naomi Klein
#40. We do not believe voters gave President Bush a mandate to turn back the clock decades on so many of our legal protections.
Ralph G. Neas
#41. The ability to take data - to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it - that's going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades.
O'Reilly Radar Team
#42. Edith (the future Mrs. Teddy Roosevelt) developed a lifelong devotion to drama and poetry. "I have gone back to Shakespeare, as I always do," she would write seven decades later.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#43. Disney's House of the Future had the clean simplicity prized in the 1950s as relief from decades of frayed patchwork, jury-rigging, and make-do clutter caused by Depression and war.
P. J. O'Rourke
#44. You could sell crack on the street and go to jail for decades. Or you could sell a woman, and be back out by morning.
J. Courtney Sullivan
#45. I have been a practitioner of tough politics for many decades. There is little that amazes me and even less that shocks me.
Ed Rollins
#46. Call my cell." He whipped out a card and passed it over. "Here's my number." I didn't bother to look at it. "I'm guessing 666- 6666." "Oh, right. As if that number weren't snatched up decades ago.
Rob Thurman
#47. When I came out publicly, some photo editors had a field day searching for pictures of me with a limp wrist or some other stereotypical gay signifier - as though, after decades in the public eye, they'd suddenly come across a trove of shots where I looked like a Cher impersonator.
James McGreevey
#48. Sri Lankans of every kind, overwhelmingly the poorest, have been bombed by one side or the other for decades.
Romesh Gunesekera
#49. You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a Lonely Place; and when you touch down, you half expect a cabin attendant to announce, We have now landed in Lonely Place's Down-at-Heels Airport, where the local time is 1943 and the temperature is ... frozen.
Pico Iyer
#50. Wimbledon 2014 will be my last slam. To be honest, I am already starting to miss professional tennis, having played at the highest level for two decades. It is what has given me my identity, and I will miss every bit of the action. The thought that I will not be playing anymore is daunting.
Mahesh Bhupathi
#51. On the surface, there is something peculiar about turning a portion of one's happiness over to a collection of ballplayers, and perhaps more peculiar still is concerning oneself about ball games played decades before one's birth.
Tom Swift
#52. Clearly, products for women are not as well scrutinized as products for men. It appears they never tested the implants in breast tissue and that they received decades of complaints from women. It's the kind of stuff that makes you want to scream!
Emily Martin
#53. Time rushes by and yet time is frozen. Funny how we get so exact about time at the end of life and at its beginning. She died at 6:08 or 3:46, we say, or the baby was born at 4:02. But in between we slosh through huge swatches of time
weeks, months, years, decades even.
Helen Prejean
#54. Older couples bring obligations such as support payments and debt as well as decades of financial experience to a marriage.
Jean Chatzky
#55. Our resources will diminish in the coming decades at a time when hunger for energy grows dramatically in China and other parts of Asia. Eventually, it will just be impossible to fly - normal flights will become as expensive as flying with the Concorde.
Hermann E. Ott
#56. This house has endured three of my Dad's four wives, and so over the last few decades it's been a home-size mood ring, changing to the styles and temperaments of its female inhabitants.
Matthew Norman
#57. Whatever you think matters - doesn't. Follow this rule, and you will add decades to your life.
Roger Rosenblatt
#58. The liberals in the House strongly resemble liberals I have known through the last two decades in the civil rights conflict. When it comes time to show on which side they will be counted, they excuse themselves.
Shirley Chisholm
#59. Where journalists have gotten themselves in trouble over the last few decades is that their skepticism often extends only to American officials, the U.S. military and Republican politicians.
Linda Chavez
#60. I have lived twice as long as I should have," the oldest one said, his voice crackling like an old radio because decades were rubbing up against each other around his vocal chords, "and I've never seen so many people so cheerful in such a bad time. It is the Devil's work.
Salman Rushdie
#61. The human rights community has focused very narrowly on political and civil rights for many decades, and with reason, but now we have to ask how can we broaden the view.
Paul Farmer
#62. And like that, the decades disappeared and the memory of that night came to life again. The way John had known it would. He didn't fight it, didn't work to stay in the here and now. If he was going to go back, then he wanted to relive it. All of it.
Karen Kingsbury
#63. The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later, the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan.
Pankaj Mishra
#64. This resemblance became clear in the Bush the father's visits to the region. He wound up being impressed by the royal and military regimes and envied them for staying decades in their positions and embezzling the nation's money with no supervision.
Osama Bin Laden
#65. There is no other genre that deals with America better, in a subtextual way, than the Westerns being made in the different decades. The '50s Westerns very much put forth an Eisenhower idea of America, whereas the Westerns of the '70s were very cynical about America.
Quentin Tarantino
#66. I wouldn't be doing motherfu**ing films for almost three decades if every time I did something that someone didn't like I went in a fu**ing cocoon and just hid there and didn't make my art.
Spike Lee
#67. Sometimes a line of mathematical research extending through decades can be thought of as one long conversation in which many mathematicians take part. This is fortunately true at present.
Barry Mazur
#68. My grandmother and my mom and my aunt Aurelia, my grandmother Juanita, my mom Lucia - we lived on the outskirts of a barrio in Mexico City called Tepito, and Tepito for many, many decades was the largest barrio in Mexico and perhaps even Latin America.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#69. Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority.
Mike Lofgren
#70. We will either defend the rights of people and the earth, and for that we have to dismantle the rights that corporations have assigned to themselves, or corporations will in the next three decades destroy this planet, in terms of human possibilities.
Vandana Shiva
#71. The lightbulb was the kind of innovation that comes together over decades, in pieces. There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb.
Steven Johnson
#72. The good news is that women's roles have changed so dramatically over the past three decades that women now expect to have careers, balance work and family, express their individual autonomy.
Michael Kimmel
#73. If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties
or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.
Julian Barnes
#74. As you get older, you see how rapidly the years and decades fly by, so I would encourage anyone, no matter the age, to seize their life and be fully present.
Theo Rossi
#75. The greatest problem in Japanese politics over the last two decades is that we put off what needed to be done. We have to overcome that.
Yoshihiko Noda
#76. In the mid-1980s, the ratio of debt to personal disposable income for American households was 65 percent. During the next two decades, U.S. household leverage more than doubled, reaching an all-time high of 133 percent in 2007.
Katherine Porter
#77. And I'd say one of the great lessons I've learned over the past couple of decades, from a management perspective, is that really when you come down to it, it really is all about people and all about leadership.
Steve Case
#78. There is a growing awareness that we're losing our technological competitive edge. I think there's an awareness that we're losing our leadership, and that maybe our self image over the past several decades has been a little bit delusional.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#79. While we may lose track of certain goals intermittently throughout the decades, I think we as a nation can be nimble when we need to be. All the buzz today is on the need for science literacy. That is on the agenda in ways it hasn't been in previous decades.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#80. The luster of an experience can actually go up with time. So, learning to play a new instrument, learning a new language - those sorts of things will pay dividends for years or decades to come.
Dan Buettner
#81. We can study files for decades, but every so often we are tempted to throw up our hands and declare that history is merely another literary genre: the past is autobiographical fiction pretending to be a parliamentary report.
Julian Barnes
#82. Civilisation is very fragile. All it takes is a few decades of chaos for us to forget humanity and turn into animals.
Amish Tripathi
#83. Eden Robinson is one of those rare artists who comes to writing with a skill and maturity that has taken the rest of us decades to achieve.
Thomas King
#85. It is amazing to think after all that has happened in this country in the last few years, the last few decades, that so many people have this blind faith that government is our friend and therefore, so we don't need protections against it.
James Bovard
#86. Children are seriously children for about a decade. But for five or more decades after that, they will be your friend - if you're fortunate to like each other.
Elaine N. Aron
#87. Political ideas that have dominated the public mind for decades cannot be refuted through rational arguments. They must run their course in life and cannot collapse otherwise than in great catastrophe ...
Ludwig Von Mises
#88. Labour long ago realised it could no longer automatically assume that it would win elections in Glasgow and other places where it has taken people's votes for granted for decades - as we have seen across Scotland at local council and Holyrood elections.
Nicola Sturgeon
#89. Kortchnoi's heritage is many-faceted - over the decades he has several times corrected and changed his style. But the main thing has invariably remained his search for chess truth.
Garry Kasparov
#90. Our concepts of aging really should be blurring because there are plenty of people who make it to older ages who aren't really any different in many ways than people who are decades younger.
S. Jay Olshansky
#91. The Financial Times is pro-British membership of the European Union. We have taken that position for decades. But we are not starry-eyed about the European Union. And we do not believe and have not believed for at least 10 years that Britain should be part of the euro.
Lionel Barber
#92. We know that the abilities of European Union member states are not infinite. As such, it makes little sense for us to criticize each other.All of us accepted Sweden's decision to introduce border controls too. And that is a country that was for decades the most open to immigration.
Wolfgang Schauble
#93. Decades can pass,
You can move countries,
Wars can be fought,
People can die,
People can change,
But the stars stay the same.
They stay constant,
They are really the only reliable things in life
NorthByNorth
#94. Mother's particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth's direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.
Mary Karr
#95. In 1973, America imported 30 percent of its crude oil needs. Today, that number has doubled to more than 60 percent. Gas prices are as high as they are now in part because we've had no comprehensive national energy policy for the past few decades.
Gary Miller
#96. Astonishingly, in spite of decades of research, there is no agreed theory of cancer, no explanation for why, inside almost all healthy cells, there lurks a highly efficient cancer subroutine that can be activated by a variety of agents - radiation, chemicals, inflammation and infection.
Paul Davies
#97. I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.
David Mamet
#98. What I have found most surprising is the amount of damage we have done to environment in the course of my lifetime - not even five and a half decades.
Pat Cadigan
#99. A sharp and familiar pang pierced his heart, rattled around his ribs, and then settled in his stomach like a rotting, dead weight. He took a swig of his Jack on the rocks, the burn not quite dulling the ache that had haunted him for two decades. God, he missed Anna. Enforcer's Redemption
Carrie Ann Ryan
#100. Too many people are missing their destiny a year at a time because they're too scared to think in decades!"
(p. 127)
Pete Greig
