Two Decades Quotes & Sayings

39 After almost two decades of productive revisionism, it is surely time to return our focus squarely to the consequences of America's flawed hegemony in the 1920s, as classically outlined by C. P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929-1939 (Berkeley, 1986) and elaborated by Link, Stabilisierungspolitik, and Costigliola, Awkward Dominion. — Anonymous

Congress needs to send a strong signal that direct communication with the leader of the free world is a privilege, particularly for a regime that has been as hostile as Iran has been towards America for more than three decades. President Rouhani needs to take these two simple steps to demonstrate good faith before any further discussions. — Ted Cruz

As a Whig, Lincoln had seen the slavery question as a threat to party unity and economic policy as a source of party strength. Now, he realized, the situation was reversed. He worked to ensure that the new party with its heterogeneous membership ignored divisive issues like the Whig economic agenda, which he had strenuously advocated for two decades but which would alienate former Democrats. — Eric Foner

Two decades after communism and the alleged end of the Cold War, Russia is still a cash economy. The preferred currency is dollars, though euros are also acceptable. — Luke Harding

But looking under the covers of Indian democracy one sees a more complex and troubling reality. In recent decades, India has become something quite different from the picture in the hearts of its admirers. Not that it is less democratic: in important ways it has become more democratic. But it has become less tolerant, less secular, less law-abiding, less liberal. And these two trends - democratization and illiberalism - are directly related. — Fareed Zakaria

BUT WILL IT WORK FOR ME? After decades of tireless research, we have now identified about two-dozen accountability skills that, when used at the right time and delivered in the right fashion, separated positive deviants from everyone else. The questions remaining were (1) when taught, would people actually use the skills, and (2) if they did, would doing so yield better results? — Kerry Patterson

The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time. — Harold Acton

Just because your electronics are better than ours, you aren't necessarily superior in any way. Look, imagine that you humans are a man in LA with a brand-new Trujillo and we are a nuhp in New York with a beat-up old Ford. The two fellows start driving toward St. Louis. Now, the guy in the Trujillo is doing 120 on the interstates, and the guy in the Ford is putting along at 55; but the human in the Trujillo stops in Vegas and puts all of his gas money down the hole of a blackjack table, and the determined little nuhp cruises along for days until at last he reaches his goal. It's all a matter of superior intellect and the will to succeed.
Your people talk a lot about going to the stars, but you just keep putting your money into other projects, like war and popular music and international athletic events and resurrecting the fashions of previous decades. If you wanted to go into space, you would have. — George Alec Effinger

Of course, all people have their own reasons for believing what they do about gender. In my case, in over two decades of collaborating with men and women in music - conductors or otherwise - I have seen no distinction. — Michael Hersch

In spite of these disasters, some of the tribesmen continued to fight for their territory, but they were quickly overwhelmed and taken into captivity, placed aboard ships and sold as slaves in the West Indies. At the same time the whites were bringing to America their own slaves whose skins were black. The first shipments of these unfortunates were brought to Jamestown for sale by the Dutch in 1619. Within two decades the British realized what a lucrative trade slavery was, so they ousted the Dutch slave traders and, in 1639, established their own Royal African Company to make massive raids on the native villages of the Dark Continent and bring the chained captives to America to satisfy the ever-growing demand for slave labor.6 In all such matters, the human cruelty inflicted on people of either red skin or black was of precious little concern to the imperious British. — Allan W. Eckert

I will do my best to reduce the price of oil to expand the life span of oil at least for two decades or three decades. — Ahmed Zaki Yamani

His parenting never involved indulgence, just benign neglect. And having let me do as I wish for two decades, it seems a mean trick to impose discipline by marrying me off to some relic from another age."
"Perhaps."
"Who knows if the old baron is even up to the task of managing me! You say I'll give him fatal spasms." "Only if the drink doesn't kill him first," Clun quipped.
"He's a ... a tippler?" She asked.
"More than tipples, if memory serves. A bottomless cask. Mouth like a funnel on one end and a wee spigot at the other," he concluded with a wink. — Miranda Davis

As Walt Whitman says, "I am sufficient as I am." It is sufficient that I live - and am probably going to live for another few decades - and that human life exists. Viewed that way, the problem becomes amazingly simple and admits of no two answers. What can be the end of human life except the enjoyment of it? — Lin Yutang

I was just laying aside a Lausanne paper I'd bought in Zurich when my eye was caught by a report that said the remains of the Bernese alpine guide Johannes Naegeli, missing since summer 1914, had been released by the Oberaar glacier, seventy-two years later. And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots. — W.G. Sebald

For value investors, General Motors is a tempting target. The company's share of the North American auto market has steadily declined for two decades, and analysts say the company suffers from weak management and unexciting cars. — Alex Berenson

Strengthened by the experiences of almost two decades in the various capitals, the Nazis were confident that their best "propaganda" would be their racial policy itself, from which, despite many other compromises and broken promises, they had never swerved for expediency's sake. — Hannah Arendt

Pirate historians have now discovered social history, the branch of history which in the last two decades or so has been the most dynamic and inventive, in both senses of the word. — Peter Earle

I took the process of doing as much myself as I could like a duck to water. I set up my own label and publishing, etc, and it was a fun learning curve two decades ago. — David Knopfler

Since civilizing children takes the better part of two decades
some twenty years of nonstop thinking, nurturing, teaching, coaxing, rewarding, forgiving, warning, punishing, sympathizing, apologizing, reminding, and repeating, not to mention deciding what to do when
I now understand that one wrong move is invariably followed by hundreds of opportunities to be wrong again. — Mary Blakely

Anyone have some mints or some gum?" Bonnie asked. No one did, and she turned to Joe Hill Conley. She scrutinized him a moment, then, using her fingers, combed his part over to the left side. "That looks better," she said. Nearly two decades later, the little hair he has left remains parted by Bonnie's invisible hand. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Independent economists say immigration reform will grow our economy and shrink our deficits by almost $1 trillion in the next two decades. And for good reason: when people come here to fulfill their dreams - to study, invent, and contribute to our culture - they make our country a more attractive place for businesses to locate and create jobs for everyone. So let's get immigration reform done this year. — Barack Obama

After investigating the government for more than two decades and authoring books on its secret programs, it's been my experience that the government does whatever the hell it wants, whenever the hell it wants, and justifies it later. — Anonymous

Interesting, isn't it, that even though more than two and a half decades have passed since the sexual revolution brought women a new measure of sexual freedom, there's still no word in the language that doesn't reek with pejorative connotation to describe a woman who has sex freely. Since language frames thought and sets its limits, this is not a trivial matter. For without a word that describes without condemning, it's hard to think about it neutrally as well. When we say the words 'promiscuous woman,' therefore, it's a statement about her character, not just her sexual behavior. — Lillian B. Rubin

During the past two decades, inflation has fallen to a low level in major industrial countries. — Toshihiko Fukui

I spent nearly two decades as a social worker and an educator with kids. So, my whole life has been about helping middle-class families. So it's just kind of a hollow argument to say I'm not a family person. — Kyrsten Sinema

The wind industry has made major strides over the past two decades, and they have proven their industry to be efficient and self-sustainable. There is no need for the taxpayer to continue to subsidize a wind start-up tax credit. — James Lankford

Next came the drawing room and Abigail stared in surprise. It appeared as though the occupants had just been called away. A tea set sat on the round table, cups encrusted with dry tea. A book lay open over the arm of the sofa. A needlework project, nearly finished, lay trapped under an overturned chair. What had happened here? Why had the family left so abruptly, and why had the rooms been entombed for almost two decades? — Julie Klassen

In the last two or three decades, there's been a feminization of the man in popular media that I've never really understood. — Anson Mount

We, as a country, have not seen a significant change in immigration policy in nearly two decades, even though all Americans agree that current immigration policy is outdated and malfunctioning. — Raul Grijalva

Although I will deeply miss the talented team at SCEA and the passion demonstrated every day by our fans, I'm very excited about starting the next chapter of my career. I want to thank the employees, partners, and customers for their tireless commitment to the PlayStation brand and, of course, to our fans who have pushed us to new heights of innovation and entertainment over the past two decades. I leave PlayStation in a position of considerable strength and the future will only get brighter for PlayStation Nation. — Jack Tretton

While most of today's jobs do not require great intelligence, they do require greater frustration tolerance, personal discipline,organization, management, and interpersonal skills than were required two decades and more ago. These are precisely the skills that many of the young people who are staying in school today, as opposed to two decades ago, lack. — James P. Comer

There are two things that have been happening over the last few decades in my opinion. First, there have been unbelievable, remarkable, pioneering advances in technology and, second, an equal amount of evolution in creativity. These two shifts are meeting at an intersection. — Kevin Spacey

NAEP data show beyond question that test scores in reading and math have improved for almost every group of students over the past two decades; slowly and steadily in the case of reading, dramatically in the case of mathematics. Students know more and can do more in these two basic skills subjects now than they could twenty or forty years ago... So the next time you hear someone say that the system is "broken," that American students aren't as well educated as they used to be, that our schools are failing, tell that person the facts. — Diane Ravitch

Even though two decades and several years had gone by since [she] first decided to be a fairy, even though Lizabeth Kane now stood five feet six inches tall in her stocking feet, even though she was thirty two years old - she still had aspirations of growing up to be a fairy. — Janet Evanovich

Taken as a whole, Europe's share of world output is projected to fall by almost a third in the next two decades. This is the competitiveness challenge - and much of our weakness in meeting it is self-inflicted. Complex rules restricting our labour markets are not some naturally occurring phenomenon. — David Cameron

The Supreme Court told me that I should have filed a complaint within six months of the company's first decision to pay me less even though I didn't know about it for nearly two decades. — Lilly Ledbetter

By exiling human judgment in the last few decades, modern law changed role from useful tool to brainless tyrant. This legal regime will never be up to the job, any more than the Soviet system of central planning was, because ti can't think. The comedy of law's sterile logic
large POISON signs warning against common sand, spending twenty-two years on pesticide review and deciding next to nothing, allowing fifty-year-old white men to sue for discrimination
is all too reminiscent of the old jokes we used to hear about life in the Eastern bloc.
Judgement is to law as water is to crops. It should not be surprising that law has become brittle, and society along with it. — Philip K. Howard

Osama bin Laden did not attack on September 11 because there was a dearth of American diplomats willing to talk with him in the Hindu Kush. He did not think America denied its Muslim citizens the right to worship freely. He did not think his native Saudi Arabia was impoverished or short of lebensraum. Instead, he recognized that a series of Islamic terrorist assaults against U.S. interests over two decades had met with what he would judge as insignificant reprisals. And he therefore concluded, in rather explicit and public fashion, that the supposedly decadent Westerners would never fight, whatever the provocation - — Victor Davis Hanson

Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks' hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running. — Toni Morrison

C... wasn't actually sure how things went forward from here. Normally, if he had a fight with a girl, then the relationship was over and he moved on to the next girl. Of course, that usually happened after a week or two, not after months with a woman he'd known for years, and was pretty sure he'd be content to spend the next couple of decades getting to know better. — Amy Jo Cousins

For more than two decades, I repeatedly voiced the mantra that - situated as we are virtually on the coastline of the world's richest economy - Jamaica has no reason to be poor, — Edward Seaga

In the first two decades of this century, people and their political leaders, prodded by the quisling scientists, acted as though they could enjoy the benefits of modern science while rejecting any scientific findings that they found inconvenient to their ideology or their pocketbook. — James Lawrence Powell

Unrequited love is the best kind of all. But I can tell you with certainty, Robbie, that the other kind of love, the kind I received from your father for more than two decades, is far more necessary. — Jan Ellison

He nursed one beer each night. Sometimes two. He poured the beer into a glass, and I could smell the hops dancing in the air as I passed. Few scents crackle my nerve endings like beer. As gorgeous as campfire, as unmistakable as gasoline. I sidled up to him. Can I have a sip? Just one. I placed my nose in the glass, and I could feel stardust on my face. I don't know if parents still let their kids taste beer, but it wasn't uncommon at the time. The bitterness was supposed to turn us off the stuff, but that one sip lit a fuse in me that burned for decades. — Sarah Hepola

Dellosso's cleverly plotted second Jed Patrick novel (after 2015's Centralia) finds the Afghan war vet hiding with his wife, Karen, and their eight-year-old daughter, Lilly, in a cabin in the Idaho wilderness. Two months earlier, two CIA agents gave him a thumb drive containing "every damaging piece of information about the Centralia Project," the exposure of which threatens to cause a "scandal that would be talked and read about for decades to come." Then one day Jed returns to the cabin to find Karen in tears. She tells him that three armed men burst into the cabin asking for the thumb drive, but she didn't know where it was. The men took Lilly, and vowed they would return for Karen. More shocks follow. Meanwhile, CIA technician Tiffany Stockton discovers a plot to control Jed's mind in a sophisticated update of The Manchurian Candidate. Can she stop him from becomes an unwilling assassin? Dellosso expertly misdirects readers, but they should be prepared for only serviceable prose. — Publishers Weekly

The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats. Beyond the marsh flats and the natural canals lies the ocean and, a little farther down the coast, a derelict lighthouse. All of this part of the country had been abandoned for decades, for reasons that are not easy to relate. Our expedition was the first to enter Area X for more than two years, and much of our predecessors' equipment had rusted, their tents and sheds little more than husks. Looking out over that untroubled landscape, I do not believe any of us could yet see the threat. — Jeff VanderMeer

[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

I think it's really important to enlarge the issue behind abortion. I have been serving for over two decades and I have seen year in and year out largely the Republicans voting against women's contraception, family planning. — Barack Obama

In the two decades after I left, I waited for the end of Wall Street as I had known it. The outrageous bonuses, the endless parade of rogue traders, the scandal that sank Drexel Burnham, the scandal that destroyed John Gutfreund and finished off Salomon Brothers, the crisis following the collapse of my old boss John Meriwether's Long-Term Capital Management, the Internet bubble: Over and over again, the financial system was, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet the big Wall Street banks at the center of it just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to twenty-six-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents' world when you can buy it and sell off the pieces? — Michael Lewis

They will also tell you how far along we are along the depletion curve; the optimists among them will even claim that there is nothing to worry about, because we have two or three decades of production left at the current level. It is to be expected that we will run out of fossil fuels before we run out of optimists, who are, along with fools and madmen, a renewable resource. — Dmitry Orlov

Over the past two decades, we have clearly seen an erosion of ethical values. — Arthur Levitt

With modern technology it is the easiest of tasks for a media, guided by a narrow group of political manipulators, to speak constantly of democracy and freedom while urging regime changes everywhere on earth but at home. A curious condition of a republic based roughly on
the original Roman model is that it cannot allow true political parties to share in government. What then is a true political party: one that is based firmly in the interest of a class be it workers or fox hunters. Officially we have two parties which are in fact wings of a common
party of property with two right wings. Corporate wealth finances each. Since the property party controls every aspect of media they have had decades to create a false reality for a citizenry largely uneducated by public schools that teach conformity with an occasional advanced degree in consumerism. — Gore Vidal

Emotions don't know how to stitch back the way flesh could. How do you go to a person, your wife of two decades, and tell her you want to start over again? How do you say, "Forget everything we've got together. Forget the kids and the fights and all the good times, too. I take it all back." How do you do that? It ain't a lizard's tail, those years. It ain't something you walk away from and start over. — Hugh Howey

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

Some of you may know my story: How for nineteen years, I worked as a manager for a tire plant in Alabama. And some of you may have lived a similar story: After nearly two decades of hard, proud work, I found out that I was making significantly less money than the men who were doing the same work as me. — Lilly Ledbetter

You don't know me well enough to be confident that I wouldn't be able to live without you. I survived almost two decades of ignoring the fuck out of you, I can survive plenty more. — Christine Celis

I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book. — William Styron

Only the Indians respect the forest," Paolo said. "The white people cut it all down." Mato Grosso, he went on, was being transformed into domesticated farmland, much of it dedicated to soybeans. In Brazil alone, the Amazon has, over the last four decades, lost some two hundred and seventy thousand square miles of its original forest cover - an area bigger than France. Despite government efforts to reduce deforestation, in just five months in 2007 as much as two thousand seven hundred square miles were destroyed, a region larger than the state of Delaware. Countless — David Grann

For two decades the state has been taking liberties, and these liberties were once ours. — E.P. Thompson

I don't know how long we talked about that game the first time my dad showed me the ticket stub. He admitted he hadn't even been sure that he still had it, that he was surprised when he'd been able to find it. But we've spent hours and hours and hours talking about it since. And it's pretty amazing, because that ticket stub sat in a box for two decades - once it let my dad into a stadium to see a baseball game, and then later, it let me into my dad's world, into his past, to learn about the man who taught me to love a game so passionately that it shaped nearly every aspect of my life. — Tucker Elliot

Democrat flaks jump on this like ducks on a June-bug, and in the process themselves reproduce the sick militarism of this culture that automatically valorizes anyone who wears a uniform. How dare you insult a soldier! Like its some sacred calling instead of an imperial employment program steeped in the culture of machismo and misogyny.(And you can gasp as theatrically as you want I spent more than two decades wearing a uniform that is exactly what it is.) — Stan Goff

As the tide of feminism that crested two decades ago recedes and the old advance-and-retreat games of courtship return, "Pride & Prejudice" speaks wistfully to the moment. Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy are tantalizing early prototypes for a Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy ideal of lovers as brainy, passionate sparring partners. That the world teems with fantasies of Mr. Darcy and his ilk there is no doubt. How many of his type are to be found outside the pages of a novel, however, is another matter. — Stephen Holden

As a founder of two organizations that recruit top college graduates to expand educational opportunity, I've spent a lot of time examining what's at work in successful classrooms and schools over the past two decades. — Wendy Kopp

One especially prominent time loop lashes together two of the city's most celebrated high-rises -- the Park Hotel and the Jin Mao Tower -- binding the Puxi of Old Shanghai with the Pudong New Area. Each was the tallest Shanghai building of its age (judged by highest occupied floor), the Park Hotel for five decades, the Jin Mao Tower for just nine years. This discrepancy masks a deeper time-symmetry in the completion dates of the two buildings: the Park Hotel seven years prior to the closing of the city (with the Japanese occupation of the International Settlement in 1941), the Jin Mao Tower seven years after the city's formal re-opening (as the culmination of Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour, in 1992). — Nick Land

For more than two decades, Barry Diller has been among the most respected - and feared - figures in the entertainment industry. — Alex Berenson

There's no doubt that in the last two to three decades, American democracy has been hacked. It was based on the regular harvesting of the wisdom of crowds, but now big sources of special interest money are able to prevent the passage of almost any meaningful reform that's aimed at the public interest. — Al Gore

He spent two decades wandering the wilderness, overmedicated, set upon by the tax man, divorce lawyers, everything but a rain of toads. There were more fights and pills and liquor and car crashes and women and discharge of firearms - accidental and on purpose - than a mortal man could be expected to survive, but he played. — Rick Bragg

The American university inherits the missions of two very different institutions: the English college and the German research university. The first pattern prevailed before the Civil War. Curricula centered on the classics, and the purpose of education was understood to be the formation of character. With the emergence of a modern industrial society in the last decades of the nineteenth century, that kind of pedagogy was felt to be increasingly obsolete. Johns Hopkins was founded in 1876 as the first American university on the German model: a factory of knowledge that would focus in particular on the natural and social sciences, the disciplines essential to the new economy and the world to which it was giving rise. — William Deresiewicz

I didn't believe for a minute that this liquid colossus, which had brought about the death of hundreds of humans within itself, with which my entire race had for decades been trying in vain to establish at least a thread of communication - that this ocean, lifting me up unwittingly like a speck of dust, could be moved by the tragedy of two human beings. But — Stanislaw Lem

As a result of the World War and of a peace whose imperfections and risks are no longer denied by anyone, are we not even further away from the great aspirations and hopes for peace and fraternity than we were one or two decades ago? — Hjalmar Branting

You know, the sad thing of post-9/11, which was of course horrific, was that the city in which I felt completely at home for two decades, suddenly people like us - brown people - were looked at as the 'Others.' — Mira Nair

Pop is everything art hasn't been for the last two decades ... It springs newborn out of a boredom with the finality and over-saturation of Abstract-Expressionism, which, by its own esthetic logic, is the END of art, the glorious pinnacle of the long pyramidal creative process. Stifled by this rarefied atmosphere, some young painters turn back to some less exalted things like Coca-Cola, ice-cream sodas, big hamburgers, super-markets and 'EAT' signs. They are eye-hungry; they pop ... — Robert Indiana

We all run on two clocks. One is the outside clock, which ticks away our decades and brings us ceaselessly to the dry season. The other is the inside clock, where you are your own timekeeper and determine your own chronology, your own internal weather and your own rate of living. Sometimes the inner clock runs itself out long before the outer one, and you see a dead man going through the motions of living. — Max Lerner

As noted, there's nothing wrong with the DTP vaccine per se. However, studies that have been going on for more than two decades show that, when it is administered after other vaccines, such as BCG or measles vaccine, the combination can be deadly. But only if you're a girl. — Michael Brooks

Like the two trees in our garden that had grown side by side, their trunks intertwining over the decades to accommodate and support one another. — John O'Farrell

It's no accident that most ads are pitched to people in their 20s and 30s. Not only are they so much cuter than their elders...but they are less likely to have gone through the transformative process of cleaning out their deceased parents' stuff. Once you go through that, you can never look at *your* stuff in the same way. You start to look at your stuff a little postmortemistically. If you've lived more than two decades as an adult consumer, you probably have quite the accumulation, even if you're not a hoarder...I'm not saying I never buy stuff, because I absolutely do. Maybe I'm less naive about the joys of accumulation. — Roz Chast

For the first few hundred years of American history, food preparation was generally approached in a no-nonsense manner. Even as late as twenty-five years ago, the general attitude was that "feeding your face" was all right, but to make too much fuss about it was somehow decadent. In the past two decades, of course, the trend has reversed itself so sharply that earlier misgivings about gastronomic excesses seem almost to have been justified. Now we have "foodies" and wine freaks who take the pleasures of the palate as seriously as if they were rites in a brand-new religion. Gourmet — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I eat tons, three full meals a day, and I never go to the gym. When I was a child, my geography teacher said, 'You may be slim now but if you carry on eating like that, you'll end up being really fat.' Fortunately, I really don't think I've changed much in the past two decades, so that teacher was an idiot. — Gina Bellman

I am a futurist, projecting trends in science into the next decades and century, but ironically my two daughters - one is a neuroscientist and the other is a pastry chef - tell me that my taste in music is positively prehistoric. — Michio Kaku

Your daughter would like to know if you are still going insane, dear." Paw considered this. "I've been married to your mother for over two decades. You might allow me certain dispensation for eccentricity. — Gail Carriger

How lucky have we been that the face of baseball for the past two decades, through ups and downs, has been Derek Jeter. — Bud Selig

Tell that to the BTK killer," I said. "He was a churchgoer, raised two kids, married, and resisted the urge to kill for decades. He was a person, but he was a monster, too — Laurell K. Hamilton

More than two decades later, it is hard to imagine the Revolutionary War coming out any other way. — George W. Bush

For twenty-one years, I have been paralyzed by the fear of what this society will do with me if they ever were to know of the thoughts that I continually push away. For more than two decades, I have made a choice to be straight. After all, it's as easy as making a choice, isn't it? This culture has made sure that I know that. Anyone who is anything other than straight was just someone deceived by the devil. He is unnatural. He is confused. He is mistaken. He is weak. He can control it if he desires to control it. Such a compelling and ongoing argument has been made that I have always trusted it.
I believed that if I hid it long enough, and ran from it long enough, and refused to acknowledge it for long enough, I could indeed succeed at living up to their decrees. I believed that I could force myself to never be anything else. — Dan Pearce

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

All I'm saying is that your happiness is in your hands and those of your nearest and dearest. And if you think I'm going to show up two decades or so down the line to collect your soul in my moldy old pocketbook, you'd better think again. The souls of humans have become poor and transparent things. — Stephen King

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

Sachin Tendulkar is a guy you don't want to chat to period, because he will knuckle down- Brett Lee tells you why one must never sledge Sachin Tendulkar It is an amazing achievement to play for the country for over two decades and still continue to be the team's anchor. Sachin makes all of us so very proud — Manmohan Singh

I have a theory about marriage, Monsieur Boustouler. And it's that nearly always you will know within two weeks if it's going to work. It's astonishing how many people remain shackled for years, decades even, in a protracted and mutual state of self-delusion and false hope when in fact they had their answer in those first two weeks. — Khaled Hosseini

For more than three decades, coffee has captured my imagination because it is a beverage about individuals as well as community. A Rwandan farmer. Eighty roast masters at six Starbucks plants on two continents. Thousands of baristas in 54 countries. Like a symphony, coffee's power rests in the hands of a few individuals who orchestrate its appeal. So much can go wrong during the journey from soil to cup that when everything goes right, it is nothing short of brilliant! After all, coffee doesn't lie. It can't. Every sip is proof of the artistry
technical as well as human
that went into its creation. — Howard Schultz

Future historians trying to determine what it was like to be alive in fin de millennium America should read the last two decades of O. Henry and Best American short-story collections. — Gary Krist

So how, one wonders, does Lean,[i] the hot business methodology of the past two decades, continue to thrive when companies that sign up for it have been dropping out at a rate of more than 90%? — Employee X

Robbers' Hill and its surrounding area were extremely safe for women.
In the last two decades, there had been no incident of molestation or rape in and around the village. People in the region both feared and respected Bhagatji.
There lived two eunuchs in the village. There was a fable in the village that years ago these eunuchs were men who had sexually assaulted a local woman. Bhagatji punished them. Since then they had been like this. — Ravi Ranjan Goswami

Against The Stream is more than just another book about meditation. It is a manifesto and field guide for the front lines of the revolution. It is the culmination of almost two decades of meditative dissonance from the next generation of Buddhists in the West, It is a call to awakening for the sleeping masses. — Noah Levine

After more than two decades here, I know that kindness is not a value that's encouraged. It's often seen as a weakness. Instead, the culture encourages keeping your head down, minding your own business, and never letting yourself be vulnerable. — Dan Gediman

This story of benign judicial neglect of Nazis and collaborators forms a striking contrast with the systematic repression of the Greek Left, which lasted for over two decades. — Mark Mazower

When historians get to write the truth about this completely unnecessary referendum [Brexit] they won't say it was a vote demanded by the British people to decide their national destiny. They will say it was the final battle in a decades-long Tory Civil War, at the heart of which was a fight to the death between two Old Etonians, David Cameron and Boris Johnson, for the hollow crown. A sort of Eton Wall Game. Where the poorest are put up against the wall and shot. — Brian Reade

Our alliance with AARP provides valuable insights into the critical 50- plus consumer segment. For more than two decades, The Home Depot has delivered home improvement know-how to customers of all ages. With the help of AARP, our newest workshops will address the specific interests of customers 50 and over. — Robert Nardelli

Many nights, Ai-ming said, ignoring my question, her father's music pulled her from sleep. Sparrow, she slowly pieced together, had been one of Shanghai's most renowned composers. But after the Conservatory was shut down in 1966 and all five hundred of its pianos destroyed, Sparrow worked in a factory making wooden crates, then wire, and then radios, for two decades. Ai-ming heard him humming fragments of music when he thought no one was listening. Eventually she came to understand that these fragments were all that remained of his own symphonies, quartets and other musical works. The written copies had been destroyed. — Madeleine Thien

And astronomy stagnated for decades because Nicolaus Copernicus refused to publish his original discovery that the earth revolves around the sun. Fearing rejection and ridicule, he stayed silent for twenty-two years, circulating his findings only to his friends. Eventually, — Adam M. Grant