Aging Population Quotes

While eliminating smallpox and curtailing cholera added decades of life to vast populations, cures for the chronic diseases of old age cannot have the same effect on life expectancy. A cure for cancer would be miraculous and welcome, but it would lead to only a three-year increase in life expectancy at birth.

In 2003, at the time I made my "Old Europe" comment, the center of gravity in NATO and Europe had long since shifted to the East. With the former Warsaw Pact countries joining NATO, the alliance has a different mix today. Some people were sensitive about my comment because they thought it was a pejorative way of highlighting demographic realities. Apparently they felt it pointed a white light at a weakness in Europe - an aging population. Europe has come some distance since World War II in becoming Europe.

It's obvious that China faces a range of demographic and economic difficulties stemming from its own population growth, and that the global community has a vested interest in avoiding the worst impacts of that growth.

The economist John Maynard Keynes said that in the long run, we are all dead. If he were around today he might say that, in the long run, we are all on Social Security and Medicare.

The only reason there is a crisis about Social Security in the US and pensions in Europe and Japan is that you cannot maintain a "Ponzi" scheme indefinitely. We have collected from today's young to pay today's old and counted on tomorrow's young to keep doing so. That was a fine scheme as long as the number of young people was rising faster than old people. When that ratio comes to an end, such a system also has to end.

When I was a medical student in the 1950s, we practically never spoke about Alzheimer's disease. And why is that so? And that is because people didn't live long enough to have Alzheimer's disease.

I should be a representative for AARP!

Well, I do have some maiden aunts that are not quite like the aunts in the book, but I definitely do have a couple of them, and a couple of old aunties.

The increasing elderly population, rising expectations about what should be available, and costs of medical advancement—these are problems all countries face ...

I make no bones about the fact that I'm over 40.

The moral test of a society is how that society treats those who are in the dawn of life: the children; ... the elderly.

There won't be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days, because there won't be any more white folks around who actually remember them.

How good we all are, in theory, to the old; and how in fact we wish them to wander off like old dogs, die without bothering us, and bury themselves.

Slot machines are like crack for old people.

Let's protect our social security and Medicare.

Again and again, people get more conservative as they get older.

Growing old is not all sweetness and light. Old women especially are invisible.

It cuts one sadly to see the grief of old people; they've no way o' working it off; and the new spring brings no new shoots out on the withered tree.

My home State of North Carolina ranks 12th in the United States for increased aging population and, according to a national report, 41st in overall health. According to this same report, individuals aged 50+ are the least healthy.

People die at 100 years old now. When I was a kid, people died at 67.

One could look over the past century and ask oneself, has the increased longevity been good, bad or indifferent?

More women grow old nowadays through the faithfulness of their admirers than through anything else.

I think that when it comes to Social Security, all of us want to make sure that our senior citizens can retire with dignity and respect. And everybody has to be open-minded in thinking how do we firm up a system that, in fact, is going to be in difficulty in the coming years.

Sure, I'm for helping the elderly. I'm going to be old myself someday.

In a few decades, the U. S. economy will increasingly rest on the shoulders of a largely non-white, heavily Latino work force providing services and care to millions of white retirees.