Ageism Quotes

Success is not about age, it's about action.

~ Richie Norton

Some people say they have 20 years experience, when in reality, they have 1 year's experience repeated 20 times. (Stephen M R Covey to Richie Norton when Norton asked if he was too young to train older executives for Covey.)

~ Richie Norton

THE BEST people are the good old wrinkled people with a sparkle in their eye, a wink when you walk by or a toothless smile saying you are doing just fine ...

~ Robert Wesley Miller

Women not only bear the brunt of the equation of beauty with youth, we perpetuate it—every time we dye our hair to cover the gray or lie about our age, not to mention have plastic surgery to cover the signs of aging.

~ Ashton Applewhite

The story of humanity can be written as the struggle to acknowledge all human beings as human beings.

~ J.s.b. Morse

We'd incorporated Asia into our bones - its colours and laughter, its smells, its rhythms, its tolerance and patience, its compassion, its lack of ageism.

~ Jane Wilson-Howarth

Do not dismiss the words of the old; they possess wisdom, which comes only with age, and often speak of things that the young are too immature to understand.

~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

I’m really happy when I’m with you. I get the feeling you feel the same way. And if that’s true, I don’t think you should give a fuck about what people may or may not think of our age difference. Furthermore, if our ages were reversed, no one would bat an eyelash. Am I right? So now it’s just some sexist, patriarchal crap, and you don’t strike me as the kind of woman who’s going to let that dictate her happiness. All right? Next issue…

~ Robinne Lee

So where does that leave me? I like hosting the show....It’s become my identity. If that’s gone, where am I?

~ Barbara Delinsky

It’s not loving a man that makes life harder for gay guys, it’s homophobia. It’s not the color of their skin that makes life harder for people of color; it’s racism. It’s not having vaginas that makes life harder for women, it’s sexism. And it’s ageism, far more than the passage of time, that makes growing older harder for all of us.

~ Ashton Applewhite

The good thing about being old is not being young.

~ Stephen Richards

When we age we shed many skins: ego, arrognace, dominance, self-opionated, unreliable, pessimism, rudeness, selfish, uncaring ... Wow, it's good to be old!

~ Stephen Richards

Never judge a woman by her age.

~ A.j. Darkholme

We don’t ask when people age out of singing, or eating ice cream; why would we stop making love?

~ Ashton Applewhite

Nowhere is ageism more sexist, and vicious, than in the domain of sexuality.

~ Ashton Applewhite

America isn't breaking apart at the seams. The American dream isn't dying. Our new racial and ethnic complexion hasn't triggered massive outbreaks of intolerance. Our generations aren't at each other's throats. They're living more interdependently than at any time in recent memory, because that turns out to be a good coping strategy in hard times. Our nation faces huge challenges, no doubt. So do the rest of the world's aging economic powers. If you had to pick a nation with the right stuff to ride out the coming demographic storm, you'd be crazy not to choose America, warts and all.

~ Pew Research Center

If we are to welcome the elderly into our communities and support them to stay there for as long as possible, if we are to attend to the social needs of our elderly citizens both inside and out of institutions, then we need both government intervention and funding, along with the community's engagement and help.

~ Karen Hitchcock

When I spoke to a colleague about Joe's report, her face registered surprise. She said, Is it possible for a death in a nursing home to be premature? Joe told me, If it were happening in any other kind of institution, to any other part of the population - workers, say, or children - there'd be an outcry, media, inquiries, swift intervention. The truth is we do not value the last months or years of a person's life. The remaining life of someone old. Particularly if they are in residential care. If we are all just economic units who lift or lean, then very little is lost when a nursing home resident or anyone getting on in their years dies prematurely. In fact money might be saved - one less nursing-home bed to fund, and the kids can finally get their hands on the house.

~ Karen Hitchcock

Medicine and society have entered into a folie a deaux regarding medicine's importance in gigantic population ills. We believe that genetics and pills and enzymes bring us health. We wait for the dementia cure (the obesity cure, the diabetes cure) rather than changing our society to decrease incidence and severity. We slash social welfare programs and access to GPs and ignore the downstream effect this will have on future generations. To reduce non-communicable disease, the actions we need to take are societal: make it easier for people to move and eat well, strengthen education, promote community participation and meaningful work. Our collective delusion is that we can have all the benefits such a society would bring without the structural supports necessary to bring it into being, that we can attain health by inventing and buying drugs. It is hard to know which is the more utopian vision: magic pills or a society serious about prevention.

~ Karen Hitchcock

As she drove the familiar route to the school, she considered her magnificent new age. Forty. She could still feel forty the way it felt when she was fifteen. Such a colorless age. Marooned in the middle of your life. Nothing would matter all that much when you were forty. You wouldn't have real feelings when you were forty, because you'd be safely cushioned by your frumpy forty

~ Liane Moriarty

The important part of growing older was the growing part. Resisting change meant forever standing still, which was a sad way to live.

~ Barbara Delinsky

This combination of ageism and sexism was also blatant in the Boston Herald's treatment of sixty-three-year-old Elizabeth Warren, whose 2012 Senate bid it sought to undermine by repeatedly dubbing her Granny in its pages, as if to imply that an older woman could not possibly be trusted with political responsibility.

~ Laura Bates

Discrimination on the basis of age is as unacceptable as discrimination on the basis of any other aspect of ourselves that we cannot change.

~ Ashton Applewhite