Thirty Years Quotes & Sayings

Every person killed or injured was a personal friend of mine; and you can imagine how grieved I am, and how glad I was to be of service in a special way - being a registered pharmacist. "I feel that I justified my entire thirty-one years as a pharmacist, by this one night of horror, and I should like to have you make a special appeal to young women whose parents have given their life to pharmacy, thus giving them proper background, to go on from there and study pharmacy. "Mrs. Margaret Strickler — John Finlayson

It rarely snows because Antarctica is a desert. An iceberg means it's tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. (This is why you must love life: one day you're offering up your social security number to the Russia Mafia; two weeks later you're using the word calve as a verb.) I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; airplane hangars carved by Louise Nevelson; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world's fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman's shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit's cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidding black. — Maria Semple

The odd superstitions touched upon were all prevalent among children and slaves in the West at the period of this story - that is to say, thirty or forty years ago. Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in. THE AUTHOR. HARTFORD, 1876. CHAPTER I "TOM!" No answer. "TOM!" No answer. "What's gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM! — Mark Twain

I knew Frank Herbert for more than thirty-eight years. He was a magnificent human being, a man of great honor and distinction, and the most interesting person at any gathering, drawing listeners around him like a magnet. To say he was an intellectual giant would be an understatement, since he seemed to contain all of the knowledge of the universe in his marvelous mind. He was my father, and I loved him deeply. — Frank Herbert

I never liked hearing anyone say I was the new George Gershwin, because I knew I could have never even carried that man's music case. If George Gershwin hadn't died when he was thirty-nine years old, there is no knowing how much more great music he would have written. — Burt Bacharach

All across America public libraries were, and are, being shut down, while prisons-with libraries-were, and are, being built. This has been a choice the American public has been making for over thirty years. — Avi Steinberg

Before I had studied Zen for thirty years,
I saw mountains as mountains,
and waters as waters.
When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains,
and waters are not waters.
But now that I have got its very substance
I am at rest.
For it's just that
I see mountains once again as mountains,
and waters once again as waters. — Li Ching-Yuen

Yes, Boss?'
Dorcas, the last twenty or thirty years I've been a worthless, no-good parasite.'
She yawned again. 'Everybody knows that.'
Nevermind the flattery. There comes a time in every man's life when he has to stop being sensible
a time to stand up and be counted
strike a blow for liberty
smite the wicked.'
Ummm ... '
So quit yawning, the time has come.'
She glanced down. 'Maybe I had better get dressed. — Robert A. Heinlein

I don't think I'd have wanted to be around during a dark age. It's odd, though. They had interstellar flight. And data retrieval and everything." Gabe nodded. "None of it matters if you have an unstable society and tin-pot dictators. They had several hundred years of economic collapse. Widespread poverty. A few people at the top had all the money and influence. They had terrible overpopulation, struggles over water and resources. Civil wars. And widespread illiteracy." The thirty-second to the thirty-ninth century. "It's a wonder we survived. — Jack McDevitt

For the first time, she enjoyed the freedom of being a thirty-year-old spinster. This was a distinctly compromising situation that no schoolroom virgin would ever have been allowed to witness. However, she could do as she liked by sheer virtue of her age.
"I took care of my father during the last two years of his life," she said in response to Devlin's comment. "He was an invalid, and required assistance with his clothes. I served as valet, cook, and nurse for him, especially toward the end."
Devlin's face seemed to change, his annoyance vanishing. "What a capable woman you are," he said softly, with no trace of irony. — Lisa Kleypas

You don't stay married for thirty-nine years because of sex or even because of love, but because your partner is a real friend to you, because they respect and regard you. — Olympia Dukakis

Technology is the new religion of urban China, and no longer just in the coastal cities. Having wasted decades, centuries almost, overcoming traditional objections to progress, and then wasted thirty years convulsing to a Maoist revolutionary tune, the Chinese have finally gotten themselves into a position where they can develop technology and begin to take on the world. Everywhere you see signs that say REVIVE THE NATION THROUGH SCIENCE AND EDUCATION. — Rob Gifford

One hundred thirty years after Abe Lincoln, re Republicans have got the anti-black vote and it's bigger than any Democratic Presidential candidate can cope with. — John Updike

I may have been in stage four, but I wasn't completely crazy. At least eighty-six journalists had been killed in Iraq, more than in any other conflict since World War II, and another thirty-eight had been taken hostage. More would die in the years to come. I knew I had to limit my movements and take special care when I did go out. — Richard Engel

For example, knowing that it takes only about eleven and a half days for a million seconds to tick away, whereas almost thirty-two years are required for a billion seconds to pass, gives one a better grasp of the relative magnitudes of these two common numbers. — John Allen Paulos

I see so many fools in this world that sometimes I could just go home and cry about what people do to themselves Hey, wake up, wake up, look here! Think a minute, think a minute. This is your life! You got, what, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years here, and you gonna be gone.' — J. California Cooper

You look thirty. You act ... well, never mind. You're carrying on like you think you're seventy." Was I? I guess it was no secret I'd been unpleasantly startled to find myself suddenly hitting the big 4-0. You'd have thought the previous thirty-nine years were sufficient warning. I glanced at his profile. "Okay. Maybe I'm a little hung up on the age thing. You have to admit gay culture is youth-oriented. — Josh Lanyon

My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts; my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel. — Chinua Achebe

History flung the accents on our names into the water when it took us across the Gulf of Siam thirty years ago. — Kim Thuy

I just don't think of age and time in respect of years. I have too much experience of people in their seventies who are vigorous and useful and people who are thirty-five who are in lousy physical shape and can't think straight. I don't think age has that much to do with it. — Harrison Ford

FOAM OF THE DAZE is a novel like no other, a sexy, innocent, smart and sweet cartoon of a world which then begins, little by little, to bleed real blood until, in the end, the blood turns out to be our own. I read it nearly thirty years ago in its previous incarnation as Mood Indigo and I loved it then; it's still one of my favorite books in the whole world — Jim Krusoe

I have known nothing the last thirty years save the struggle for human rights on this continent. If it had been a class of men whowere disfranchised and denied their legal rights, I believe I should have devoted my life precisely as I have done in behalf of my own sex. — Susan B. Anthony

I hope progressive ways of thinking will permeate the "mainstream" more and more in the coming years. Goddess knows we have endured a very long spell (thirty plus years) of regressive thinking and hyper conservativism dominating our culture and national discourse. It necessitates risk taking and rule breaking by people in all walks of life to swing that pendulum back though. — Ani DiFranco

Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished. Which is why we find ourselves in the predicament we do: in need of a whole new way to think about eating. — Michael Pollan

No. I will remain because I have been accustomed for thirty years to go and take the orderly word of the King, and to have it said to me, 'Good evening, d'Artagnan,' with a smile I did not beg for! — Alexandre Dumas

I spent hours apart by myself, taking stock of where I stood, mentally, on this my thirtieth birthday. It came to me queerly how, four years ago, I had meant to be a general and knighted, when thirty. Such temporal dignities were now in my grasp, only that my sense of falsity of the Arab position had cured me of crude ambition: while it left me craving for good repute among men. This craving made me profoundly suspect my truthfulness to myself. Only too good an actor could so impress his favorable opinion. Here were the Arabs believing me, Allenby and Clayton trusting me, my bodyguard dying for me: and I began to wonder if all established reputations were founded, like mine, on fraud. — T.E. Lawrence

The leaky-replacement hypothesis - assuming for the moment that it's correct - provides the strongest possible evidence for the closeness of Neanderthals and modern humans. The two may or may not have fallen in love; still, they made love. Their hybrid children may or may not have been regarded as monsters; nevertheless someone - perhaps Neanderthals at first, perhaps humans - cared for them. Some of these hybrids survived to have kids of their own, who, in turn, had kids, and so on up to the present day. Even now, at least thirty thousand years after the fact, the signal is discernible: all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA. One — Elizabeth Kolbert

In the 1970s, 3 percent of retiring members became lobbyists. Thirty years later, that number has increased by an order of magnitude. Between 1998 and 2004, more than 50 percent of senators and 42 percent of House members made that career transition. — Lawrence Lessig

I'm surprised you haven't come to hate humans," Rose said with hesitation. "I mean, given all that happened to you here. I'm pretty sure assimilating wasn't easy either. You have a sort of foreign look for an American, and Americans are notorious for their xenophobia."

Zita laughed softly. "Me? Hate humans?" She darkly shook her head. "I fought in the Midnight War for thirty years, Rosie. I know what happens when people let hate make decisions for them. — Ash Gray

He was inspired, and yet he wants books!
He had been preaching for thirty years, and yet he wants books!
He had seen the Lord, and yet he wants books!
He had a wider experience than most men do, and yet he wants books!
He had been caught up into the third heaven, and had heard things that it was not lawful for a man to utter, and yet he wants books!
He had written a major part of the New Testament, and yet he wants books! — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

People who were born in '66 are nearly fifty? I know the show's fifty, but it seems like yesterday. Human years are different. I'd have guessed that Tim was twenty-five for thirty. — Nick Hornby

There seems to be a different Chicago around every street corner, behind every bar, and within every apartment, two-flat, cottage, or bungalow. City of immigrants or city of heartless plutocrats, say what you will, Chicago almost defies interpretation. In many ways Chicago is like a snake that sheds its skin every thirty years or so and puts on a new coat to conform to a new reality. — Dominic A. Pacyga

I want to make rockets 100 times, if not 1,000 times better. The ultimate objective is to make humanity a multiplanet species. Thirty years from now, there'll be a base on the moon and on Mars, and people will be going back and forth on SpaceX rockets. — Elon Musk

Even now, at least thirty thousand years after the fact, the signal is discernible: all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA. — Elizabeth Kolbert

Some people look at a picture for thirty seconds, some for years. It doesn't really matter because a picture is like life. You take out of life as much as you are able to take out of life, just as you take out of a picture as much as you can take out of a picture ... — Oliviero Toscani

This was 1941 and I'd been in prison eleven years. I was thirty-five. I'd spent the best years of my life either in a cell or in a black-hole. I'd only had seven months of total freedom with my Indian tribe. The children my Indian wives must have had by me would be eight years old now. How terrible! How quickly the time had flashed by! But a backward glance showed all these hours and minutes studding my calvary as terribly long, and each one of them hard to bear. — Henri Charriere

My interests are different now than they were thirty years ago. — Terry Brooks

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness. — Terry Pratchett

Return to Shaoshan I regret the passing, the dying, of the vague dream: my native orchards thirty-two years ago. Yet red banners roused the serfs, who seized three-pronged lances when the warlords raised whips in their black hands. We were brave and sacrifice was easy and we asked the sun, the moon, to alter the sky. Now I see a thousand waves of beans and rice and am happy. In the evening haze heroes are coming home. — Mao Zedong

There is a friend ever waiting to help us, if we will only unbosom to Him our sorrow, - a friend who pitied the poor, and sick, and sorrowful, when He was upon earth, - a friend who knows the heart of a man, for He lived thirty-three years as a man amongst us, - a friend who can weep with the weepers, for He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, - a friend who is able to help us, for there never was earthly pain He could not cure. That friend is Jesus Christ. The way to be happy is to be always opening our hearts to Him. — J.C. Ryle

I heard my old friend Clem's voice coming back to me through the dimness of thirty years: "I see you coming here trying to make sense where there is no sense. Try just living in it. Respond, alter, see what happens." I thought of the African way of perceiving life, as experience to be lived rather than as problem to be solved. — Audre Lorde

Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey. — Nick Hornby

Old Sobriety's son? How is the old devil?"
"Dunno, sir, what with him being dead."
"Oh dear. How long ago?"
"These past thirty years," said Shawn.
"But you don't look any older than twen-" Ponder began. Ridcully elbowed him sharply in the ribcage.
"This is the countryside," he hissed. "People do things differently here. And more often. — Terry Pratchett

Most people can stay excited for two or three months. A few people can stay excited for two or three years. But a winner will stay excited for twenty or thirty years ... or as long as it takes to win. — Arthur L. Williams Jr.

Thirty to 40 years ago, most financial decisions were fairly simple. — Scott Cook

My father, never chooses me for anything. Unless he needs a human shield. Thirty years and all I am to him is a hunk of meat to block buck shot. Told you dad needed me. Who's the best man now? — Christopher Titus

Could she really do it? Could she really go all that way by herself? Yes, she whispered, of course you can do it: you're thirty-eight years old and you're not going to the moon, just to Baghdad. The word sounded the way a shiver felt. At the dinner party in London it had been a shiver of excitement, but now it held a frisson of dread. She — Lindsay Jayne Ashford

The key question of time travel," my father says, "is this: How do we know what it means to perceive an event as presently occurring, rather than as a memory of a past event? How can we tell present from past? And how do we move the infinitesimal window of the present through the viewfinder at such a constant rate? Why can we see a faraway snow-tipped mountain range, or a jet taking off, or the moon, or the sun, or stars, and not an event that took place a moment ago, let alone a month ago, a year, thirty-three years ago? — Charles Yu

You cannot write to resonate twenty or thirty or forty years from now. You only can write for that very day, but whatever happens is all gravy. — John Guare

It is near thirty years since He made it sure; and since that time, though there has fallen out much sin, yet I was never out of an assurance of mine interest, nor long out of sight of His presence. — Donald Cargill

Remember that no piece of honestly conducted research is ever wasted, even if it seems so at the time. Put it away in a drawer, and ten, twenty or thirty years down the road, it will come back and help you in ways you never anticipated. — Anthony James Leggett

Mr. president, I've been a citizen of the United States of America for thirty three years and was never invited to the White House. It sure gives me pleasure to be invited to the Black House. — Muhammad Ali

Harris, as he occasionally explains to George and to myself, has daughters of his own, or, to speak more correctly, a daughter, who as the years progress will no doubt cease practising catherine wheels in the front garden , and will grow up into a beautiful and respectable young lady. This naturally gives Harris an interest in all beautiful girls up to the age of thirty-five or thereabouts; they remind him, so he says, of home. — Jerome K. Jerome

First, her father had a minor stroke, giving Claire a glimpse of his mortality and, by extension, her own. And then she had a vision of herself thirty years in the future: a spinster librarian in an apartment full of cats named after New Wave directors. (Godard, leave Rivette's chew toy alone - ) — Jess Walter

A beggar had been sitting by the side of a road for over thirty years. One day a stranger walked by. "Spare some change?" mumbled the beggar, mechanically holding out his old baseball cap. "I have nothing to give you," said the stranger. Then he asked: "What's that you are sitting on?" "Nothing," replied the beggar. "Just an old box. I have been sitting on it for as long as I can remember." "Ever looked inside?" asked the stranger. "No," said the beggar. "What's the point? There's nothing in there." "Have a look inside," insisted the stranger. The beggar managed to pry open the lid. With astonishment, disbelief, and elation, he saw that the box was filled with gold. I am that stranger who has nothing to give you and who is telling you to look inside. Not inside any box, as in the parable, but somewhere even closer: inside yourself. — Eckhart Tolle

Though no one had been buried here for almost thirty years, the grass was mown by yours truly. I felt a tidy graveyard made a happy graveyard. — Kim Harrison

I shall be thirty-one next birthday. My youth is gone like a dream; and very little use have I ever made of it. What have I done these last thirty years? Precious little. — Charlotte Bronte

By the age of twenty, you know you're not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you're not going to be a dentist or any kind of professional. And by thirty, darkness starts moving in- you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy and successful. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life, and you become resigned to your fate ...
... I mean, why do people live so long? What could be the difference between death at fifty-five and death at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five? Those extra years ... what benefit could they possibly have? Why do we go on living even though nothing new happens, nothing new is learned, and nothing new is transmitted? At fifty-five, your story's pretty much over. — Douglas Coupland

Used well beyond her thirty years, a powerful weariness gnawed at her face this day. The taste of the land hung in her mouth, and worry lines etched deep ravines near the corners of her lips and eyes. Tall and thin, she wore her markings with a quiet dignity in much the way a soldier displays his bars. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply.
Texas."
The Taken, November 2010 — Mike Kearby

Now, kids ... wine is alcohol. That's a drink for grown-ups.
Gee, Mr. Percy Jackson, you say, can't we have some wine?
No, no, kids. Wine is dangerous. I don't want any of you to drink alcohol until you're at least thirty-five years old. Even then, you should get a doctor's note and your parents' permission, drink responsibly (like one swig a month), and never operate heavy machinery while under the influence!
Okay ... I think that covers my legal bases. On with the story. — Rick Riordan

I think the internal combustion engine will disappear from the streets of our cities in the next thirty years because transportation will be mass transportation, or probably electrical power. — Gaylord Nelson

Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, 'Collecting material'. No one can object to that. — Stella Gibbons

Inside the music like this, she understood many things. She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at this age, to tell her he had pitied her for years. She understood that as he drove his car back down the coast toward Boston, toward his wife with whom he had raised three children, that something in him would be satisfied to have witnessed her the way he had tonight, and she understood that this form of comfort was true for many people, as it made Malcolm feel better to call Walter Dalton a pathetic fairy, but it was thin milk, this form of nourishment; it could not change that you had wanted to be a concert pianist and ended up a real estate lawyer, that you had married a woman and stayed married to her for thirty years, when she did not ever find you lovely in bed. — Elizabeth Strout

When you are spending time in front of the television, you are not doing other things. The young child of three or four years old is in the stage of the greatest emotional development that human beings undergo. And we only develop when we experience things, real-life things: a conversation with Mother, touching Father, going places, doing things, relating to others. This kind of experience is critical to a young child, and when the child spends thirty-five hours per week in front of the TV set, it is impossible to have the full range of real-life experience that a young child must have. — Jerry Mander

He was thinking about men like his Uncle Ted, a Cornishman to his bones, who lived and would die in St. Mawes, part of the fabric of the place, remembered as long as there were locals, beaming out of fading photographs of the Life Boat on pub walls. When Ted died - and Strike hoped it would be twenty, thirty years hence - they would mourn him as the unknown Barrovian Grammar boy was being mourned: with drink, with tears, but in celebration that he had been given to them. What had dark, hulking Brockbank, child rapist, and fox-haired Laing, wife-torturer, left behind in the towns of their birth? Shudders of relief that they had gone, fear that they had returned, a trail of broken people and bad memories. — Robert Galbraith

The dissolute and unlawful king came: Herod! I saw him with my own eyes when he called me to Jericho to heal him. I took along my secret herbs - I knew all about such lore - and went. I went, and from that day on, I have not been able to eat meat, for I saw his putrescent flesh; I have not been able to drink wine, for I saw his blood filled with worms. I have retained his stench in my nostrils for over thirty years. — Nikos Kazantzakis

I have a Web site that parents and girls can use to learn about Title IX and take action if they find their school is not in compliance. Thirty years after Title IX passed, 80 percent of schools are not in compliance. — Geena Davis

I know, it looks pure and beautiful to you now, at your great old age of twenty-two. But do you know what it means? Thirty years of a lost cause, that sounds beautiful, doesn't it? But do you know how many days there are in thirty years? Do you know what happens in those days? ... I want you to know what's in store for you. There will be days when you'll look at your hands and you'll want to take something and smash every bone in them, because they'll be taunting you with what they could do, if you found a chance for them to do it, and you can't find that chance, and you can't bear your living body because it has failed those hands somewhere. — Ayn Rand

He looked ninety years old for thirty years and then he got the notion that he would die, and did so. — Richard Brautigan

When I met couples whose marriages were thriving after thirty and forty years, none of them were riding an emotional roller coaster of passion and then resentment. Instead, they loved each other as an act of their conscious will. They were more in control of their love than their "love" was in control of them. — Donald Miller

It's always been Apple's goal to ship something we were proud of and something people would be proud to own, and I think that's still true from thirty years ago. — Michael Scott

Fair Fatality, you are the most unusual female I have encountered in all my thirty-eight years!" "You can't think how deeply flattered I am!" she assured him. "I daresay my head would be quite turned if I didn't suspect that amongst so many a dozen or so may have slipped from your memory. — Georgette Heyer

Ig had not been inside for years, but it was much as he remembered it. The foundry lay open to the sky, brick arches and pillars rising away into the slanting reddish light. Thirty years of overlapping graffiti covered the walls. The individual messages were mostly incoherent, but then perhaps the individual messages were of no importance. It seemed to Ig that all such messages were the same at heart: I Am; I Was; I Want To Be. — Joe Hill

No good play is a success; fine writing and high morals are useless on the stage. I have been scribbling twaddle for thirty-five years to suit the public taste, and I should know. — W.S. Gilbert

The typewriter is neat and compact and sturdy and blue, just the right machine to pound out a missive of love. When you strike the keys it's a sound that hasn't been heard in the qorld world for thirty years (we are so far away from a time when typewriters won world wars). When you strike the keys they make a sound like a pistol shot, a sound so definite and sure you feel like a genius, or an orayor orator, or a beat poet. When you strike the keys you just want to keep on fucking writing. You have to wrestle with the thing, like I am doing now, steer it like an old manual car, keep the words together and right and on the page, but the blood and muscle of a typewriter, it is a beautiful thing. — Yvette Walker

I teach child development and social policy as an undergraduate course, and I tell my students, "Look, on any of these issues, if you don't want to work on it for thirty years, don't start." — Edward Zigler

A wedding is allegedly one of the most wondrous experiences in a woman's life. All attending her presence are to make the occasion completely about her. Her beauty in that sliver of time is to be suspended in eternity so that ten years, thirty pounds and two kids later, she may sigh at the princess she once was. — Kenn Bivins

I will miss myself in relation to others. The rareness. The exceptional differences. I will miss the gift that comes with hardship and paying the price. I will miss the tragedy of my own life. As I once spoke...emphatically, but I now repeat here, quietly - the pain, the pain is what made it so God damn beautiful. I endured. You can wait a lifetime for thirty seconds, five minutes, or for an hour to come into your life - a brief interval that makes all the suffering purposeful. In such moments of splendor and rapture - even if the rapture be stilled, the private hours and years of reckoning are unloaded, a burden lifted and the spirit feels as it did on the happiest day of its life when it was young and untormented Or rather, unconscious of the torment waiting to be ignited. — Wheston Chancellor Grove

For me, I'm always looking for opportunities to work with people who are better than me, who are more experienced than me, people from whom I can learn. And who could I learn more from than someone with an unprecedented movie star career that has spanned over thirty years whose name is Tom Cruise? — David Oyelowo

You may have heard that America doesn't have enough scientists and is in danger of "falling behind" (whatever that means) because of it. Tell this to an academic scientist and watch her laugh. For the last thirty years, the amount of the U.S. annual budget that goes to non-defense related research has been frozen. From a purely budgetary perspective, we don't have too few scientists, we've got far too many, and we keep graduating more each year. America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it. Within environmental science in particular, we see the crippling effects that come from having been resource-hobbled for decades: degrading farmland, species extinction, progressive deforestation... The list goes on and on. — Hope Jahren

The first element in a symmetrical life is work. Three-fourths of our time is probably spent in work. Of course the meaning of it is that our work should be just as religious as our worship, and unless we can work for the glory of God three-fourths of life remains unsanctified. The proof that work is religious is that most of Christ's life was spent in work. During a large part of the first thirty years of His life He worked with the hammer and the plane, making ploughs and yokes and household furniture. Christ's public ministry occupied only about two and a half years of His earthly life; the great bulk of His time was simply spent in doing common everyday tasks, and ever since then work has had a new meaning. — Henry Drummond

While re-addiction is clearly a hazard for some, others achieve a realistic and lasting confidence that they've outgrown their addictions and it's time to move on. In fact, survey research published over the last thirty years indicates that most addicts eventually recover permanently.9 For them, the disease label may be an unnecessary, even harmful, burden. — Marc Lewis

I know at least what I am,' he simply went on; 'the other side of the medal's clear enough. I've not been edifying
I believe I'm thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I've followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods; it must have come to you again and again
in fact you've admitted to me as much
that I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous scandalous life. And you see what it has made of me. — Henry James

I was raised as a Catholic and received the body and blood of Jesus Christ every Sunday at communion until I was thirty years of age, when I became a vegetarian. — Joe Queenan

Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish. — Akhil Sharma

The length of the friendship never brought astonishment. After all, the
majority of Baby Boomers could likely claim a long-standing friendship in their lives. No, it was always the letters: the-pen-on-paper, inside a-stamped-envelope, mailed-in-a-mailbox letter that was awe inspiring.
"You've been writing a letter every week for almost thirty years?"
The question always evokes disbelief, particularly since the dawn of the
Internet and email. We quickly correct the misconception.
"Well, at least one letter, but usually more. We write each other three or four letters a week. And we never wait for a return letter before beginning another."
Conservatively speaking, at just three letters a week since 1987, that
would equal 4,368 letters each, but we'd both agree that estimate is much
too low. We have, on occasion, written each other two letters in a single
day. — Mary Potter Kenyon

The fact that you can take LEGO bricks from thirty years ago and they still snap together with the same new LEGO brick that comes out, I mean what type of product can span generations like that, there is something really special to it. — Nathan Sawaya

I was thirty-seven years old and wearing nothing but a butt plug. But there was a 1940's film-star Toby, looking about to spontaneously combust from sheer desire. It was probably hysterical postpubescent hormones, but still, it felt so good. So ridiculously good. — Alexis Hall

Photography as a subject is a good one. Its history is only about 150 years ... You only have to know about twenty-five or thirty names and that's it. All you need. In painting there are more than 1,000. — William Wegman

Once upon a time, USDA inspectors had to condemn any bird with such fecal contamination. But about thirty years ago, the poultry industry convinced the USDA to reclassify feces so that it could continue to use these automatic eviscerators. Once a dangerous contaminant, feces are now classified as a cosmetic blemish. — Jonathan Safran Foer

a 2010 University of Michigan study shows that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than they were thirty years ago, with much of the drop having occurred since 2000. (The study's authors speculate that the decline in empathy is related to the prevalence of social media, reality TV, and "hyper-competitiveness.") — Susan Cain

She had to do that
she had to become a widow, for life, before she was even married. That's why I never got married. I'm thirty-eight years old. I can read and write very well
my mother made sure I was educated
and I do the bookwork for all the shops and businesses in the slum. I do the taxes for every man who pays them. I make a good living here, and I have respect. I shouldn't been married fifteen or even twenty years ago. But she was a widow, all her life, for me. And I couldn't do it. I just couldn't allow myself to get married. I kept hoping I would see him, the sailor with the best moustache. My mother had one very old, faded photograph of the two of them, looking very serious and stern. That's why I lived in this area. I always hoped I would see him. And I never married. And she died last week, Lin. My mother died last week. — Gregory David Roberts

I located America thirty-one years ago in a Model T Ford and planted my flag. I've tried a couple of times since to find it again, riding in faster cars and on better roads, but America is the sort of place that is discovered only once by any one man. — E.B. White

Gay marriage is probably the biggest issue that will impact our state and our nation in the last, at least, thirty years. I AM NOT UNDERSTATING THAT. — Michele Bachmann

Somewhat leaky boat are on the lookout for a human companion. Not me. I have learned to love the inside of my own head. There isn't much I'd rather say than think. Of course for more than thirty years I've had Chuck. We've known each other so long that we don't have to talk, and when we do we don't have to say anything. When he asks me if I'd like to take a trip around the world I can say yes knowing I'll never have to go. — Abigail Thomas

Rhyme as an echo not a closing off of sound. Love it. I don't know where the rhymes came from. Or the puns like "no/know" and so on. Just a way my mind start moving toward what seemed urgent to it. I'd like to claim complete rational intent for it all, but it wasn't that way. if you asked me about rhyme thirty years ago, I'd have said: not me, never. And now I done it. — Gregory Orr

My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note! — May Sarton

The time's come: there's a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up ... It's going to blow away all this idleness and indifference, and prejudice against work ... I'm going to work, and in twenty-five or thirty years' time every man and woman will be working. — Anton Chekhov

My parents raised me that you never ask people about their reproductive plans. "You don't know their situation," my mom would say. I considered it such an impolite question that for years I didn't even ask myself. Thirty-five turned into forty faster than McDonald's food turns into cold nonfood. — Tina Fey

Thirty trillion dollars worth of services, scot-free to humanity, every year. — E. O. Wilson