Thirty Quotes - page 19
My father was a violinist, my mother a pianist. I was born into a world of music... The practicing of my father's pupils accompanied every thought and action of my childish life.... Then when I was thirty [c. 1906], my career as musician was brought to an end by Vollard [art-dealer in Paris] who bought all the pictures I possessed, pictures which I had painted over several years with unbounded enthusiasm during such hours of freedom as I was able to spare between [music]-lessons to my pupils.
Maurice de Vlaminck
I am not a man who believes that we Germans bled and conquered thirty years ago...in order to be pushed to one side when great international decisions call to be made. If that were to happen, the place of Germany as a world power would be gone for ever, and I am not prepared to let that happen. It is my duty and privilege to employ to this end without hesitation the most appropriate and, if need be, the sharper methods.
Wilhelm II of Germany
We're all trapped. It's always 1734. All of us, we're stuck in the same time capsule, the same as those television shows where the same people are marooned on the same desert island for thirty seasons and never age or escape. They just wear more makeup. In a creepy way, those shows are maybe too authentic.
Chuck Palahniuk
I had always found Colonel Qaddafi hilarious. I wanted to do a character that was inspired by him. And you had all these other ludicrous characters, like Turkmenbashi, who was the President and dictator of Turkmenistan, who renamed, I think, the day Thursday and the word for "bread” after his mother. And when his doctor told him to give up smoking, he banned smoking from the whole country, because he didn't want to be reminded of cigarettes. And then you have someone like Kim Jong-il, you know, who claimed to have hit nine holes-in-one in his first-ever game of golf, and also Colonel Qaddafi, who had these sort of thirty virgin guards, dressed unintentionally like a sixty-year-old women, and who would break wind when being interviewed by the BBC, as you know.
Sacha Baron Cohen
It has taken biologists some 230 years to identify and describe three quarters of a million insects if there are indeed at least thirty million, as Erwin (Terry Erwin, the Smithsonian Institute) estimates, then, working as they have in the past, insect taxonomists have ten thousand years of employment ahead of them. Ghilean Prance, director of the Botanical Gardens in Kew, estimates that a complete list of plants in the Americas would occupy taxonomists for four centuries, again working at historical rates.
Richard Leakey
I've been looking into the issue for more than thirty years, and I have never seen a hint of genuine evidence of species-to-species transitional forms in the fossil record. The theory stands or falls on the supposed links between species. Even if you came up with what you believe is evidence, time would prove it to be another hoax, as it has so often in the past.
Ray Comfort
The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.
George Orwell
Unlike most, a ball player must confront two deaths. First, between the ages of thirty and forty he perishes as an athlete. Although he looks trim and feels vigorous and retains unusual coordination, the superlative reflexes, the major league reflexes, pass on. At a point when many of his classmates are newly confident and rising in other fields, he finds that he can no longer hit a very good fast ball or reach a grounder four strides to his right. At thirty-five he is is experiencing the truth of finality. As his major league career is ending, all things will end. However he sprang, he was always earthbound. Mortality embraces him. The golden age has passed in a moment. So will all things. So will all moments.
Roger Kahn
Thirty years of lax budget policy (the Trente Dispendieuses) marked by soaring public spending in the 1980's, the happy-go-lucky attitude of the 1990's and finally, a policy of procrastination in the 2000's characterised by the development of creative budgetary marketing strategies exclusively destined to delay the (always) socially and politically painful moment of addressing the accounts.
Éric Pichet
