Many an article that I myself penned twenty years ago impresses me now as something quite foreign to myself.
Twenty years ago, I wrote a book called ‘It Takes a Village.’ And a lot of people looked at the title and asked, ‘What the heck do you mean by that?’ This is what I mean. None of us can raise a family, build a business, heal a community or lift a country totally alone.
A hundred years ago, if you had a child out of marriage, you’d be a social disgrace. Today women feel comfortable enough economically and culturally to bring up a child without a recognized commitment from a man.
It’s hard to watch something you’ve done many years ago.
Just a few years ago, at the age of 22, I learned I had an aggressive form of leukemia. I needed intensive chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant to save my life. Back then, my doctors told me that I had a 35 percent chance of surviving my transplant.
If I had some idea of a finish line, don’t you think I would have crossed it years ago?
It shocks me, the rumors people start: that I have the title because of my boyfriend. If that was the case, I would have gotten the title when I came back years ago and still had the title. He has nothing to do with it.
One of the saddest realities is that we never know when our lives are at their peak. Only after it is over and we have some kind of perspective do we realize how good we had it a day, a month, five years ago.
I made my first Australian senior team when I was 16, first Olympics when I was 19, and I retired. I’m 32, I retired four years ago, so a good third of my life or nearly a third of my life has been all about running.
The ordinary American – as far as I can tell – knows so much less than he did fifty years ago and has such poor work habits compared with fifty years ago that the average multiplicand of knowledge/capabilities is a much smaller number than it was in 1961.
Fifty years ago wealth was stored and transmitted physically through gold bars, stock certificates, bank notes, and coins.
Three or four years ago, I got really caught up in the movies people were making, the opportunities they were getting, and I was looking at them with bitterness.
Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who’s connected with it, the studio’s gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that’s left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.
I quit smoking well over twenty years ago.
The last thing I stole was a box of Coca Cola from a parked truck in Adelaide. I was nice and drunk. It was New Year’s Eve. And that was about 28 years ago.
American audiences tend to underappreciate the British, but 240 years ago they were us: They were the most powerful nation on Earth. Their mercantile empire spanned the planet. They had the most potent and experienced army and navy the world had ever seen.
Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.
Two years ago, I shot ‘Pillars of the Earth’ in Budapest – it was a big part, but I had a lot of time to sit around and visit cafes.
I got my black belt First Dan at the age of 12 and I was the youngest in my training centre. I practised karate till a few years ago and it has helped enhance my flexibility, stamina and mental toughness.
Every person has only so much attention to give, and politics and government takes up only a fraction of what it did 25 years ago.
Yeah I do and I don’t mind, in fact that is one of the real encouraging things about this whole career of mine is that there are tunes I wrote almost thirty years ago that I will still play in front of an audience and I still like the old tunes.
Just because someone’s dead doesn’t mean it’s over. My grandfather died more than 25 years ago, but I still think of him a lot and smell his smell.
I can remember crying on the set of Beverly Hills 90210 after being released from the show a few years ago.
I get people to this day – I won my title 25 years ago – saying how wonderful a time they had during that dark period in our history when they came to watch me fight.
Someone I met years ago explained to me the difference between a personality and an actor, a personality being Eddie Murphy or Roseanne Barr, and an actor being Morgan Freeman and Alfre Woodard or Marlon Brando.
Years ago, I tore out a Nike ad featuring Allyson Felix and Maria Sharapova looking super fierce and tough. I always told my family that I wanted to be like them someday, so to come home to my apartment and see boxes of Nike gear stacked higher than my doorknob is pretty much a dream come true.
I’ve done that I was touring a couple of years ago with R. Kelly and the Lillith Fair, I would do the late night underground gigs as well because it’s always around those times that there was a hot song, either on the radio or in the clubs, it would just be simultaneous.
I will always be the way I was a couple years ago before anything happened. And that’s to my parents’ credit, my amazing parents who have been around me my whole life and raised me right. I’m very happy with what has happened so far.
It used to be that you had to make female TV characters perfect so no one would be offended by your ‘portrayal’ of women. Even when I started out on ‘The Office’ eight years ago, we could write our male characters funny and flawed, but not the women. And now, thankfully, it’s completely different.
Forty years ago the chances of journalists reporting – or the authorities even prosecuting – a pro athlete were practically nil.
If there is no fundamental science then there is no basis for applied science. We have to strike a balance. 23 years ago the World Wide Web was born here. It has changed the world dramatically.
Twenty years ago, I was living in a lovely cottage on the edge of Dartmoor but I couldn’t afford to run a car.
When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.
What we have now is doctors who are actually better technically at what they’re doing in their specialty than 30 or 40 years ago, but we lost the relationship, when the doctor would look people in the eye and say, ‘I care about you. We can do this together.’
Five or ten years ago, when it was clear the Internet was becoming a mainstream phenomenon, it was equally clear that a lot of people were being left out and could be left behind.
We’re in a golden age for television. TV 25 years ago was slow, plodding , boring. The production values were not great. Today it’s so much better. People get really invested it.
I did a picture 40 years ago with Carroll O’Connor and Telly Savalas, God rest their souls, and Clint Eastwood, called ‘Kelly’s Heroes,’ which we filmed in Yugoslavia for six months.
I spent years studying the teachings of Patanjali, and he reminded us several thousand years ago that when we are steadfast – which means that we never slip in our abstention of thoughts of harm directed toward others – then all living creatures cease to feel enmity in our presence.
I met the Coens here a few years ago and they said they liked my work.
So in my personal opinion, I definitely feel like I’m a legendary emcee, and I also feel like we’re a legendary brand, which is why I started rebranding ourselves years ago by saying ‘The Legendary Roots Crew,’ which is how we’re introduced on ‘The Tonight Show.’
I think we were colonized by aliens 250,000 years ago, and they genetically altered our DNA to be primates into homo erectus and humans. I’m very interested in how we evolved so suddenly, which obviously ties in with the alien thing.
It was only a few years ago that I couldn’t get hired to save my life.
Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.
My presence in the social media and on the Internet is much bigger than many of the other candidates, including Mitt Romney. So, when you take the social media and you take the Tea Party citizens movement, you have a combination there that, quite frankly, 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have had a chance.
The March on Washington affirmed our values as a people: equality and opportunity for all. Forty-one years ago, during a time of segregation, these were an ideal.
Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science.
They called me the sexiest economist in America, and that was years ago, when I had hair and body mass and my teeth were shiny.
Nearly 60 years ago, the international community made a commitment to put an end to the crime of genocide by ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
It’s not just the players, it’s the culture. Sometimes it’s the people around them; the people who are looking after them – the money they’re given. Some of the families give up their jobs and live off their sons. That would never have happened 10 years ago.
The Beatles were something everyone had in common; this was thirty years ago, there was Dr. Who and everybody knew who the Daleks were and there was The Beatles and everybody knew who George Harrison was.
Broadcast TV is like the landline of 20 years ago.
