2 Year Quotes & Sayings

The Obama administration's attempted short-term fixes, even with unprecedented monetary easing by the Federal Reserve, produced average GDP growth of just 2.2% over the past three years, and the consensus outlook appears no better for the year ahead. — Glenn Hubbard

My goal is to buy a company at a low multiple to normal earnings power several years out and that the company earns good returns on capital at that level of normal earnings. A holding period of more than one year also works quite well as the factors are persistent in years 2 and 3. — Joel Greenblatt

There are 100,000 actors in the Screen Actors Guild. Only 2,000 of them make more than $75,000 a year. — Steve Guttenberg

Answer Professor Mandell's letter when you get a chance and the patience. Ask him not to send me any more poetry books. I already have enough for 1 year anyway. I am quite sick of it anyway. A man walks along the beach and unfortunately gets hit in the head by a cocoanut. His head unfortunately cracks open in two halves. Then his wife comes along the beach singing a song and sees the 2 halves and recognizes them and cries heart breakingly. That is exactly where I am tired of poetry. Supposing the lady just picks up the 2 halves and shouts into them very angrily "Stop that!" Do not mention this when you answer his letter, however. It is quite controversial and Mrs. Mandell is a poet besides. — J.D. Salinger

Much of my early career was spent working with two of the most toxic chemicals ever discovered, dioxin and aflatoxin. I initially worked at MIT, where I was assigned a chicken feed puzzle. Millions of chicks a year were dying from an unknown toxic chemical in their feed, and I had the responsibility of isolating and determining the structure of this chemical. After two and a half years, I helped discover dioxin, arguably the most toxic chemical ever found. This chemical has since received widespread attention, especially because it was part of the herbicide 2,4,5-T, or Agent Orange, then being used to defoliate forests in the Vietnam War. — T. Colin Campbell

There's a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them. — Michael Pollan

It's not that you don't make any money doing conscious rap music. You make a lot of money doing this, but if you're greedy and you're not satisfied with $500,000 a year, and you want $2 million a year, then you will suffer as a conscious rap artist. — KRS-One

It's turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old. — Alison Gopnik

Revelation, which is often associated with the end of things, also speaks of new beginnings - a new name (2:17); a new Jerusalem (3:12); a new heaven and a new earth (21:1); and all things new (21:5). It reads like a description of New Year's Eve. Ring out the old; ring in the new! — William J. Petersen

Where's my tax form? Where's the file that's supposed to hold my W-2 form and interest statement? Where's the mileage log I specifically asked be kept last year?? Where's the monthly check summary? And who's been stuffing Visa receipts in the aluminum foil drawer??!! How embarrassing. I'm surrounded by idiots and I'm the only one in the office. — Cathy Guisewite

The next parent who Googles Is my 2-year-old gifted? should get a curt response: Your 2-year-old is a gift. — Ron Fournier

1962 that "No data processing system, whether artificial or living, can process more than 2 x 1047 bits per second per gram of its mass," which means that a hypothetical supercomputer the size of the earth (= c. 6 x 1027 grams) grinding away for as long as the earth has existed (= about 1010 years, with c. 3.14 x 107 seconds/year) can have processed at most 2.56 x 2092 bits, which number is known as Bremermann's Limit. — David Foster Wallace

I fixed her a drink, then lowered myself on the spider's silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendia family. The scene where the prodigal Jose Arcadio hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, 'quartered her like a little bird' made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle marks the instant.
Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by ... And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message 'Mom 1/2', written in laundry pen, since no-one in our family ever stood on ceremony. — Mary Karr

The Mississippi River carries the mud of thirty states and two provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500 million tons of it there every year. The business of the Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico. — Charles Kuralt

From the perspective of the plan of salvation, one of the most serious abuses of children is to deny them birth. This is a worldwide trend. The national birthrate in the United States is the lowest in 25 years,2 and the birthrates in most European and Asian countries have been below replacement levels for many years. This is not just a religious issue. As rising generations diminish in numbers, cultures and even nations are hollowed out and eventually disappear.
One cause of the diminishing birthrate is the practice of abortion. Worldwide, there are estimated to be more than 40 million abortions per year.3 Many laws permit or even promote abortion, but to us this is a great evil. — Dallin H. Oaks

Since you (US "drug tsar" McCaffrey) control a federal budget that has just been increased from $17.8 billion last year to $19.2 billion this year, is asking people like you if we should continue with our nation's current drug policy like a person asking a barber if one needs a haircut? — James P. Gray

Thought Experiment: Imagine that you are Johnny Carson and find yourself caught in an intolerable one-on-one conversation at a cocktail party from which there is no escape. Which of the two following events would you prefer to take place: (1) That the other person become more and more witty and charming, the music more beautiful, the scene transformed to a villa at Capri on the loveliest night of the year, while you find yourself more and more at a loss; or (2) that you are still in Beverly Hills and the chandeliers begin to rattle, a 7.5 Richter earthquake takes place, and presently you find yourself and the other person alive and well, and talking under a mound of rubble.
If your choice is (2), explain why it is possible for a true conversation to take place under the conditions of (2) but not (1). — Walker Percy

If an inmate swears at a guard, fights, or hides contraband like cigarettes or candy [Sheriff Arpaio has banned coffee, cigarettes, hot lunches, girlie mags & TV], she's kicked out of the tents and sent to lockdown--a tiny cell 10x12 feet that houses 4 women, instead of the 2 it was built for. There's no tv, no phone, & no a/c. Even though most of these women have drug problems, programs like NA or AA are considered 'privileges' forbidden to those locked down. The only way to get out of lockdown is to volunteer for the chain gang--the first & only female chain gang in the United States (as of Aug 1997). Volunteers sign a paper that says they know & accept the conditions on the chain--cleaning Phoenix streets, painting the center strip of miles of highway, & burying AZ's indigent. The accusation of 'cruel & unusual punishment' is quashed by the argument that the chain gang is purely voluntary. After all, if you prefer, you can spend the whole year in lockdown. — Jane Evelyn Atwood

Mutual funds charge 2% per year and then brokers switch people between funds, costing another 3-4 percentage points. The poor guy in the general public is getting a terrible product from the professionals. I think it's disgusting. It's much better to be part of a system that delivers value to the people who buy the product. But if it makes money, we tend to do it in this country. — Charlie Munger

Though you may have never attended a funeral, two of the world's humans die every second. Eight in the time it took you to read that sentence. Now we're at fourteen. If this is too abstract, consider this number: 2.5 million. The 2.5 million people who die in the United States every year. — Caitlin Doughty

In 1994, Estonia became the first European country to adopt a flat tax, and its 26 percent flat tax dramatically energized what had been a faltering economy. Before adopting the flat tax, the Estonian economy was literally shrinking. In the eight years after 1994, Estonia experienced real economic growth - averaging 5.2 percent per year. — Arthur Laffer

Google's colourful, playful logo is imprinted on human retinas just under six billion times each day, 2.1 trillion times a year - an opportunity for respondent conditioning enjoyed by no other company in history. — Julian Assange

My rule of thumb is that if you spend 2 percent of your nest egg per year, adjusted upward for the cost of living, you are as secure as possible; at 3 percent, you are probably safe; at 4 percent, you are taking real risks; and at 5 percent, you had better like cat food and vacations very close to home. For example, if, in addition to Social Security and pensions, you spend $50,000 per year in living expenses, that means you will need $2.5 million to be perfectly safe, and $1.67 million to be fairly secure. If you have "only" $1.25 million, you are taking chances; if you are starting with $1 million, there is a good chance you will eventually run out of money. — William J. Bernstein

Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It's five-tens-nine. — Malcolm Gladwell

Patty knew that feeling, a dream hangover, like when she jumped up from a panicky sleep at 2 in the morning and tried to talk herself into thinking the farm was OK, that this year would pick up, and then felt all the sicker when she woke up to the alarm a few hours later, guilty and duped. It was suprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were OK, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that that simply wasn't so.' -Dark Places — Gillian Flynn

They argue that, if the governments of developed countries want a fifty-fifty chance of hitting the agreed-upon international target of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle between rich and poor nations, then wealthy countries need to start cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by something like 8 to 10 percent a year - and they need to start right now. The idea that such deep cuts are required used to be controversial in the mainstream climate community, where the deadlines for steep reductions always seemed to be far off in the future (an 80 percent cut by 2050, for instance). But as emissions have soared and as tipping points loom, that is changing rapidly. Even Yvo de Boer, who held the U.N.'s top climate position until 2009, remarked recently that "the only way" negotiators "can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy."48 — Naomi Klein

Between 2010 and 2050, the urban population of the more developed countries will increase by a mere 170 million people, growing at a rate of 0.6 percent per year. During that same period, the urban population of the less developed countries will increase by 2.6 billion people, 15 times that of the more developed countries, and at a rate of 2.4 percent per year, which is 4 times faster than that of the more developed countries (United Nations Population Division 2012, file — Shlomo Angel

Hey, gorgeous ... Guess where I woke up today?"
I smiled as Kellan's sultry voice met my ear.
"I have no idea." And I really didn't, I'd lost track of his exact location ages ago. Kellan chuckled , and I glanced over at Denny; his eyes were back on the road. It gave me a weird sort of guilt to be back in a situation that was eerily similar to last year. Different, though, since Denny and I weren't doing anything inappropriate.
"Kansas ... Know what's in Kansas?"
I leaned back in my seat and shook my head. "No."
"Nothing," he dryly said. "Miles and miles of nothing."
Stephens, S.C. (2012-08-16). Effortless (Thoughtless Book 2) (pp. 299-300). Gallery Books. Kindle Edition. — S.C. Stephens

There are 2,000 young-adult novels published a year, and hardly any of them ever break out. — Catherine Hardwicke

The Postal Service delivers mail six days a week to nearly 140 million addresses. Every year this number increases by 2 million. — Joe Baca

I'm sure a bunch of 15-year-old kids would way rather I do 'Superbad 2' than 'Moneyball.' But I would love to do movies like 'Superbad' and movies like 'Moneyball.' — Jonah Hill

Child mortality [since 2000 is] down by 2.65 million a year. That's a rate of 7,256 children's lives saved each day ... It drives me nuts that most people don't seem to know this news. — Edward De Bono

Isaiah 6 Isaiah's Cleansing and Call It was in the year King Uzziah died* that I saw the Lord. He was sitting on a lofty throne, and the train of his robe filled the Temple. 2 Attending him were mighty seraphim, each having six wings. With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. 3 They were calling out to each other, "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of Heaven's Armies! The whole earth is filled with his glory!" 4 Their voices shook the Temple to its foundations, and the entire building was filled with smoke. — Anonymous

To make 2013 (or any other)your year, keep it simple:
1) Count your blessings first
2) Whatever you did last year, Do it better
3) Go step by step, One day at a time.
4) Create/make your own opportunities.
5) Believe in your abilities at all times,
6) Qutting is not an option. Keep Going.
7) Finish what you started — Pablo

Although more than 500 million maritime containers move around the world each year, accounting for 90 per cent of international trade, only 2 per cent are inspected. Strengthening customs and immigration systems is essential. — Ban Ki-moon

in April 2011, the US Health Department's National Vaccine Injury Compensation Programme released its figures for 2010 the report showed that allegedly safe childhood vaccines officially killed or injured no less than 2,699 children in the year 2010 in America. — Vernon Coleman

Do not expect to master the Bible in a day, or a month, or a year. Rather expect often to be puzzled by its contents. It is not all equally clear. Great men of God often feel like absolute novices when they read the Word. The apostle Peter said that there were some things hard to understand in the epistles of Paul (2 — David Jeremiah

How to Win a Fight - Step 1: Always make eye contact. Step 2: Go ahead and use henchmen - these days it's unnecessary and frowned upon to fight your own battles, especially with so many henchmen out of work. Step 3: Run lots of attack ads - I have run about 500 attack ads this year, and I expect that I will buy even more air time next year, because my enemies are getting stronger. — John Hodgman

So you open your mouth and listen to yourself say, "I want eight thousand a day. Plus expenses."
This is the polite, industry-standard way of saying "piss off, I'm not interested." You did the math over your morning coffee: You want to earn 100K a year, what with those bonuses you've been pulling on top of your salary. (Besides, a euro doesn't buy what it used to.) There are 250 working days in a year, and a contractor works for roughly 40 per cent of the time, so you need to charge yourself out at 2.5 times your payroll rate, or 1000 a day in order to meet your target. Not interested in the job? Pitch unrealistically high. You never know ...
"Done," says Mr. Pin-Stripe, staring at you expressionlessly. And it is at that point that you realize you are well and truly fucked. — Charles Stross

The Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, estimated that the hedge fund loophole cost the government over $6 billion a year - the cost of providing health care to three million children. Of that total, it said, almost $2 billion a year from the tax break went to just twenty-five individuals. — Jane Mayer

Phyllis Tickle, in her book The Great Emergence,2 argues that we are undergoing the most recent of our every-500-year "rummage sales" - an upheaval in culture and worldview that will inevitably reshape our faith interpretations and institutions as surely as the Great Schism of the eleventh century and the Great Reformation of the sixteenth century. This tsunami of change is well under way, marked by the postmodern and post-Christian sensibilities of the millennial generation. — Marjorie, J. Thompson

Actually, Joe Biden looked pretty good. In fact, Joe's popularity has gone from 1% to 2% last week to 3% today. At this rate, he could win the nomination by the year 2032. — Jay Leno

Religion tries to give us maps of sexuality that are no better than a 2,000-year-old map of my hometown. — Darrel Ray

I think that the American diet is a very large part of the reason we're spending 2.3 trillion dollar per year on health care in this country. 75% of that money goes to treat chronic diseases, preventable chronic diseases, most of those are linked to diet. — Michael Pollan

I believe that human beings are designed to be physically active and that not doing so creates energy imbalances within the body that ultimately contribute to obesity and other health problems. As evidence, over 500,000 people die each year from diseases linked to physical inactivity and obesity. Furthermore, rates of hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, type 2 diabetes, and certain forms of cancer have all tripled over the past 30 years corresponding to decreasing levels of daily physical activity and increasing rates of obesity. — Nina Cherie Franklin

We can't even expect our immigration officials not to make citizens of convicted felons.1 Tens of thousands of immigrants have been granted citizenship after being convicted of crimes in the United States. And, no, you can't see their names or read about their crimes. A year before the 1996 presidential election, the Clinton White House worked feverishly to naturalize 1 million immigrants in time for Clinton's reelection. Criminal background checks were jettisoned for 200,000 applicants, so that citizenship was granted to at least 70,000 people with FBI criminal records and 10,000 with felony records.2 Murderers, robbers, and rapists were all made our fellow Americans so the Democrats would have a million new voters by the 1996 election. In 2013 alone, the Obama administration released 36,007 convicted criminal aliens with about 88,000 convictions among them - including 426 for rape and 193 for murder.3 They'll soon be your fellow citizens, too. — Ann Coulter

In the biographical novel, there's only one person involved. I, the author, spend two to five years becoming the main character. I do that so by the time you get to the bottom of Page 2 or 3, you forget your name, where you live, your profession and the year it is. You become the main character of the book. You live the book. — Irving Stone

Having a 2 year old is like having a blender that you don't have the top for. — Jerry Seinfeld

The Colonel explained to me that 1. this was Alaska's room, and that 2. she had a single room because the girl who was supposed to be her roommate got kicked out at the end of last year, and that 3. Alaska had cigarettes, although the Colonel neglected to ask whether 4. I smoked, which 5. I didn't. — John Green

Everyone says it's wrong, 'drinking and driving', don't they.
I can tell you two things that are far more dangerous than 'drinking and driving': 1. 'drinking'; 2. 'driving'.
Do you know how many people were killed last year in Britain as a direct result of alcohol abuse?--thirty-five-thousand!
Do you know how many people were killed as a direct result of driving a car?--twenty-two-thousand!
Do you know how many people were killed as a direct result of drinking _and_ driving?--five-hundred!
::pauses::
I'm not taking any fuckin' chances!
::swigs his beer:: — Lee Mack

During its first year of operation, Florida Virtual School had 77 students. The next year, it had 476 students; then 2,489 students the year after that. — Dan Webster

When you're 12, a 12-year-old girl is so out of your league, because they have no interest in you. You're like 10 years younger. You're 2 to them. — Michael Cera

TooDamn-Funky: It's a start, ok. Been thinking bout the boyz. 'member last year my bro did that immersion thing in Venezuela?
Kciker5525: Where he learned to speak Spanish???
TooDamn-Funky: Yeah! u go for 2 weeks talk nothing but Spanish u come back fluent.
Kicker5535: ... ????
TooDamn-Funky: Well this is like a guy immersion program!
Kicker5525: So ... what. I'm going 2 b fluent in GUY?
TooDamn-Funky: Exactly! u will c what they talk about alone. U will c how they r with each other. U will c how they THINK!! AND WHEN IT'S DONE YOU'LL BE ABLE TO WRITE A GUY GUIDE BOOK!!
Kicker5525: U r deranged. — Kate Brian

Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company - almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier. — Katie Hafner

Most studies find that each murder in America leads to costs of between $10 million and $12 million, including police and prison bills and social services for families of victims and perpetrators. The University of Chicago Crime Lab calculates that gun violence costs every Chicago household about $2,500 a year. Crime — Nicholas D. Kristof

A woman in Bower Bank, Jamaica, had eight children. The father was in jail in the United States, no longer sending remittances.

Her fourteen-year-old daughter "get burn up from her face, breast, chest, down to her legs with boiling water February 2 1999. That night just because I never have any money earlier to cook, me go town and get a money, buy something to cook cause them never eat from morning. Me daughter bend down, to pick up something near the stove and bounce off the pot of boiling water pan herself. Me tek her to hospital and me never have the money fe register her. Me beg somebody the money and register her. Me owe the hospital $10,500 for the bill, a caan [can't] pay it. She's to go back for treatment because her hand caan stretch out or go up, but the hospital will not see her if I don't pay the bill. — William Easterly

At 2 per cent growth a year, an economy doubles in size in just thirty years. — Paul Ormerod

The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them. So we ignore the elephant in the room and focus instead on good and evil nutrients, the identities of which seem to change with every new study. — Michael Pollan

There are guys bleeding to death who don't know it, they're smiling, they're talking, they don't feel pain because they're in shock, they ask you for some water and then they're dead. On D-day I ran past a guy lying on his spilled guts with his eyes closed and his thumb in his mouth. Eisenhower's speech had been read to us over the loudspeaker by our commander when we crossed the channel that morning. What valor and inspiration were in his words- all about how we were embarked on a great crusade, that the hopes and prayers of a liberty loving people were going with us ... I got gooseflesh when he asked for the blessing of almighty god on this great and noble undertaking. But how to reconcile that with spilled guts on a beach and flies in the eyes of some dead nineteen year old kid who traded his life for some words on paper? — Elizabeth Berg

You'd have to be living under a rock not to know that we are getting fatter and fatter every year despite all the information sold to us about how to stay slim and trim. You'd also be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn't know about our soaring rates of type 2 diabetes. Or the fact that heart disease is our number one killer, trailed closely by cancer. — David Perlmutter

When we founded Facebook, we put a lot of hours into it and worked hard every day. 'The Social Network' painted this picture that we were partying all the time, when really we only attended 2 or 3 parties during Facebook's first year. — Dustin Moskovitz

I want you back here now. I want you next to me now. I cannot believe that my family, your brother, all our friends, and an entire police force can't keep tabs on one twenty-six year old graphic designer who thinks he's fuckin' Batman.
Detective Sam Kage in A Matter Of Time (vol 2 or part 4) — Mary Calmes

I'd worked on leprosy and malaria in India [at the World Bank] and asked myself the question: Why do we let 2 million children die every year around the world for not having clean water? Because they're faceless and nameless. So, for me, Facebook looked like it was going to solve the problem of the invisible victim. — Sheryl Sandberg

I don't recommend that average iPad Air owners upgrade to the Air 2. But what about the vast majority of iPad owners who own older models? That's a different story. If you have an iPad 2, 3 or 4, the new Air 2 will make a big difference. Its thinness and lightness will be a dramatic change, and it will be faster and more fluid. However, here's the catch: Upgrading to last year's iPad Air would have pretty much the same effect, and that model is now, suddenly, $100 cheaper, starting at $399. — Walt Mossberg

Here are two facts that should not both be true:
- There is sufficient food produced in the world every year to feed every human being on the planet.
- Nearly 800 million people literally go hungry every day, with more than a third of the earth's population
2 billion men and women
malnourished one way or another, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. — Michael Dorris

Having a highly trained obstetrical surgeon attend a normal birth is analogous to having a pediatric surgeon babysit a healthy 2-year-old. — Marsden Wagner

Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store. — Charles Krauthammer

Almost 4.25 lakh toilets were built in 2.62 schools nationwide in one year; this gives self-confidence that we can do what we want. — Narendra Modi

Remember, 2000 was the year of the dot-com bust. The telecom industry lost about $2 trillion in market capital at that time. — Mo Ibrahim

THE 2,000-YEAR-OLD MAN'S SECRETS OF LONGEVITY 1. Don't run for a bus - there'll always be another. 2. Never, ever touch fried food. 3. Stay out of a Ferrari or any other small Italian car. 4. Eat fruit - a nectarine - even a rotten plum is good. — Mel Brooks

When you look at 'Obamacare,' the Congressional Budget Office has said it will cost $2,500 a year more than traditional insurance. So it's adding to cost. And as a matter of fact, when the president ran for office, he said that, by this year, he would have brought down the cost of insurance for each family by $2,500 a family. Instead, it's gone up by that amount. So it's expensive. Expensive things hurt families. So that's one reason I don't want it. — Mitt Romney

'Giving 2.0' frames giving as a learning experience and encourages everyone to make giving a part of your year-round life. — Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen

Families survive the Terrible Twos because toddlers aren't strong enough to kill with their hands and aren't capable of using lethal weapons. A 2-year-old with the physical capacities of an adult would be terrifying. — Paul Bloom

We're in a tough situation because of teenage children, and then we have a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old, so my family and my responsibilities is sort of a juggle. — Wayne Gretzky

Depending upon the accounting, approximately 4.3 or 17.6 percent of the plastic bags produced each year are recycled. The 4.3 number is the 2010 EPA number for plastic number 2 bags. These are what you think of as the typical grocery bag. — Michael SanClements

The God of Imagination lived in fairytales. And the best fairytales made you fall in love. It was while flicking through "Sleeping Beauty" that I met my first love, Ivar. He was a six-year-old bello ragazzo with blond hair and eyebrows. He had bomb-blue eyes and his two front teeth were missing.
The road to Happily Ever After, however, was paved with political barbed wire. Three things stood in my way.
1. The object of my affection didn't know he was the object of my affection.
2. The object of my affection preferred Action Man to Princess Aurora.
3. The object of my affection was a boy and I wasn't allowed to love a boy. — Diriye Osman

Brazil fell into recession in the first half of the year, according to official data which showed the economy shrinking by 0.6% in the second quarter and 0.2% in the first. The main reason was another big drop in investment. The government had said that it expects GDP to grow by 1.8% this year, but that now seems unlikely. — Anonymous

Exhibit 6.2 Cost of $1,000 in Monthly Lifetime Annuity Income, Starting at Age 65 Year Male Female 2004 $157,432 $167,818 2005 $157,255 $167,817 2006 $151,700 $161,363 2007 $151,524 $160,966 2008 $147,953 $155,843 2009 $156,500 $165,502 2010 $170,116 $178,410 2011 $174,828 $182,952 2012 $187,008 $195,216 2013 $183,728 $191,571 Average $163,804 $172,746 Source: CANNEX Financial Exchanges for non-COLA-adjusted qualified annuity income with a 10-year guarantee for California. — Moshe A. Milevsky

Each year over 2,500 commercial vessels enter the Port of Hampton Roads alone, so adequate funding for port security is a significant issue for those of us who live in Richmond and Hampton Roads. — Bobby Scott

A Conference Board survey released in January of 2010 found that only 45 percent of workers surveyed were happy at their jobs, the lowest in 22 years of polling.2 Depression rates today are ten times higher than they were in 1960.3 Every year the age threshold of unhappiness sinks lower, not just at universities but across the nation. Fifty years ago, the mean onset age of depression was 29.5 years old. Today, it is almost exactly half that: 14.5 years old. — Shawn Achor

If you took every single penny that Warren Buffett has, it'd pay for 4-1/2 days of the US government. This tax-the-rich won't work. The problem here is the government is way bigger than even the capacity of the rich to sustain it. The Buffett Rule would raise $3.2 billion a year, and take 514 years just to pay off Obama's 2011 budget deficit. — Mark Steyn

I feel humiliated that I live in a country that demands more already. Why do we cling to the notion that not only must we maintain the current level of consumption, but that it must continue to grow by an exponential factor of 2 to 7 percent every year? — David Suzuki

Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not. ... Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.5.2 — Charles Duhigg

I worked hard at my four-year M.A., but got a 2.1. That was a big disappointment, as I wanted to write about history and thought I needed a First. — Saul David

With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before c God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? 7 d Will the LORD be pleased with [1] thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? e Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? 8 He has told you, O man, what is good; and f what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, [2] and to g walk humbly with your God? — Anonymous

I'm very proud of Seungri. I worked over a year for my album, but one day YG told Seungri to make an album and he made one in just 2 weeks. Ah, maybe 3 weeks. He's a true genius. I'm jealous of his propulsion. — G-Dragon

They asked a bunch of ninety-five-year-olds, I don't know where they found them all, Florida I guess, but anyway they asked them if they could do it all over again and live their life again what would they do differently. The three things that almost all of them said were: (1) They would reflect more. Enjoy more moments. More sunrises and sunsets. More moments of joy. (2) They would take more risks and chances. Life is too short not to go for it. (3) They would have left a legacy. Something that would live on after they die. — Jon Gordon

Business 2.0 was hugely profitable last year, and will be profitable this year. — James Daly

In a 2007 study published in the Journal of Family Psychology,3 researchers asked eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds which criteria they felt were most indicative of adulthood. Their criteria were, in order of importance: (1) accepting responsibility for the consequences of your actions; (2) establishing a relationship with parents as an equal adult; (3) being financially independent from parents; and (4) deciding on beliefs/values independently of parents/other influences. — Julie Lythcott-Haims

One year of the world's military spending equals 700 years of the U.N. budget and equals 2,928 years of the U.N. budget allocated for women. — Zainab Salbi

AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee, before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people. — Sam Altman

ECONOMIC IMPACT - The United States buys almost three quarters of a trillion dollars ($738,000,000,000.00) more from overseas suppliers than it sells in exports (balance of trade deficit). Overall, the US buys about $ 2.5 trillion dollars in goods and services produced by the other nations of the world every year. With the United States gone as the world's economic engine, the remaining nations of the world will, in varying degrees, immediately suffer from staggering financial depression. The financial credit crisis that started in mid-September, 2008 in the United States, soon reverberated in stock markets across the world. — John Price

Bread baking is a daily activity for 2- year-olds in this Montessori infant community in Sweden and in many other places. — Susan Mayclin Stephenson

In 2013 Citigroup had profits of $6.4 billion in the United States. They paid no federal income tax and, in fact, received a rebate from the IRS of $260 million. That same year J.P. Morgan had $17.2 billion in profits in the U.S. They also paid no federal income tax. Do you think it's time for tax reform? — Bernie Sanders

We were giving advice for the single-worst idea to come forward from a group that's been rife with them, it would be this: The idea is this: Let's make the tax code of America better for very rich people; let's give substantial tax relief to the richest people we can find. Forget about the person making $40,000 a year and paying Social Security payroll tax. Forget about all those other people paying income tax; we're here to give tax relief to the richest 2% of America. — Barney Frank

Today, at twenty-five, Travis is the manager of two Starbucks where he oversees forty employees and is responsible for revenues exceeding $2 million per year. His salary is $44,000 and he has a 401(k) and no debt. He's never late to work. — Charles Duhigg

Five things I'd rather do than swatch for my new project
1. Get a spinal tap.
2. Scrub the bathtub after all three of my daughters have come home from "Sandbox day" at the park.
3. Babysit two-year-old triplets while simultaneously diffusing a bomb.
4. Bathe a cat.
5. KNIT MY NEW PROJECT. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

I am too sick to work and haven't money enough to last 2 months and pay income tax. I want to keep going but do not see quite how, and there is no alternative - rather than justify my mother's 25-year dread of my "coming back on her, sick", I must kill myself. If she has to pay funeral costs, at least she will cut them to the bone and I will not be here to endure her martyrdom and prolong it by living. — Rose Wilder Lane

I highly recommend Marci Alboher's One Person/ Multiple Careers. It includes lots of practical strategies for living the slash. Malcom Gladwell is also a constant source of inspiration for me. In his book Outliers, Gladwell proposes that there are three criteria for meaningful work - complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward - and that these can often be found in creative work.2 These criteria absolutely fit with what cultivating meaningful work means in the context of the Wholehearted journey. Last, I think everyone should read Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist3 - I try to read it at least once a year. It's a powerful way of seeing the connections between our gifts, our spirituality, and our work (slashed or not) and how they come together to create meaning in our lives. — Brene Brown

The truth is that health-care reform will always be a nuisance, with version 2.0 followed by next year's 2.1. As long as it boosts productivity, it's worth it. — Jim Cooper