Ralph Nader Quotes

I'm not as hopeful as I was when I was young.

No generation has escaped it - one morning, your skill with the eight-track or the record player or the cotton gin suddenly ceases to impress. It's just one of those inevitable disappointments that come with growing up, like the realization that Santa doesn't exist or the way that music always takes a turn for the worse after you turn 30.

A man doesn't grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deserts his ideal. The years may wrinkle his skin, but deserting his ideal wrinkles his soul.

Every generous illusion of youth leaves a wrinkle as it departs. Experience is the successive disenchanting of the things of life; it is reason enriched with the heart's spoils.

The days of idealism had gone. Only life was left.

What I've lost in years I've gained in wisdom. Bullshit, I haven't learnt one thing in the last 15 years that hasn't just depressed me more.

When you're younger, love is this magic thing where the heavens open up. You live 40 years past that, you realize sometimes the heavens close down.

I've been around a long time. I've seen it all before.

As things mature - whether they be real estate, rock n' roll, politics, festivals, radio - there's an efficiency that develops, and with it, very often, comes some soul-crushing truths.

You're killing yourself with cynicism. Your idols got taken away from you one by one and now you have nothing to give your love to.

In youth we feel richer for every new illusion; in maturer years, for every one we lose.

I am older now, and sleep less, and have seen most of what there is to see and am not very much impressed any more, I suppose, by anything.

Once we reach a certain age, we tend to recalibrate our expectations. We expect less from the world once we've seen it up close.

What we gain by experience is not worth that we lose in illusion

Picture anybody growing up so stupid he didn't know that hope is just another phase you'll grow out of.

He wondered whether growing up was learning that most stories turned out to be lies.

When I was young, people used to say to me: Wait until you're fifty, you'll see. I am fifty. I haven't seen anything.

I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.

If age, which is certainly Just as wicked as youth, look any wiser, It is only that youth is still able to believe It will get away with anything, while age Knows only too well that it has got away with nothing.

My idealism has not abated, but I have witnessed it withering away nationwide, to the point where at least among the young, to have ideals is akin to being blinkered and oldfashioned.

The fonder you are of your ideals, the greater your heartbreaks.

Every year strips us of at least one vain expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead.

I know all about the facts of life, and I don't think much of them.

Whoever is not a misanthrope at forty can never have loved mankind.

The chorus of “Jack and Diane” is: Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone. Are you kidding me? The thrill of living was high school? Come on, Mr. Cougar Mellencamp. Get a life.