Ruth Rendell Quotes

The problems of aging present an opportunity to rethink our social and personal lives in order to ensure the dignity and welfare of each individual.

I do not believe that older Americans should be forced to live out their lives in poverty, their tiny savings destroyed by illness. Dependent upon their relatives. Feeling unwanted by their country.

I think we ought to provide much more dignity and respect to individuals who need some care and assistance, whether they are chronically ill or disabled or seniors, it's the right thing for this country to do.

In my opinion we don't take care of our disabled people well enough. We don't take care of our elderly well enough. We should honor them more than we do.

A woman in the audience asked [Barack] Obama about her mother. Her mother was 101 years old and was in need of a certain kind of procedure. Her doctor didn't want to do it because of her age. However, another doctor did and told this woman there is a joy of life in this person. The woman asked President Obama how he would deal with this sort of thing, and Obama said we cannot consider the joy of life in this situation. He said I would advise her to take a pain killer. That is the essence of the President of the United States.

Life in New York can be so, I don't know, chaotic, overwhelming, busy, frantic, and often, seniors can easily get overlooked.

We treat old people so badly. There is nothing easy about 80.

Anything that we can do to improve the lives of elderly people is welcome so far as I am concerned.

I'm too young for Medicare and too old for broads to care.

Few promises are more sacred than the ones we make to older Americans.

I want our party to step up its efforts to reflect and champion the concerns of everybody who has reached the second half of their lives.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

I am proud that we worked so hard to improve seniors' lives.

There's no such thing as ageing gracefully. I don't meet people who want to get Alzheimer's disease, or who want to get cancer or arthritis or any of the other things that afflict the elderly. Ageing is bad for you, and we better just actually accept that.

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness. A policy to reduce the loneliness of the elderly would certainly reduce suffering.

I don't think that care homes are all rotten old places that ought to be shut down.

My first job was in a nursing home - a terrible place in retrospect. It was in an old house, and the residents were so lonely. People rarely visited them. I only stayed there a couple of months, but it made a strong impression on me.

As far as I'm concerned, ageing is humanity's worst problem, by some serious distance.

My life came down to being a granny and watching a lot of television.

The elderly are all someone's flesh and blood and we cannot just shut them in a cupboard and hand over the responsibility for taking care of them to the state.

We older women in Europe are lucky not to be shoved away in a drawer.

I'd rather rot on my own floor than be found by a bunch of bingo players in a nursing home.

As pressure grows to ease the financial burden on social security, pressure will also grow to eliminate the elderly and infirm to 'free up' more money for the 'fit' and those who contribute more than they take from society.

In every decision we make and in every policy we develop, we are committed to protecting those who cannot protect themselves... the very young and the very old.

As life expectancy extends beyond 80 years in some parts of the world, more people are struggling with brain diseases. For older people, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other conditions become a major impediment to quality of life.