Quotes About Youth

The world is imperfect, and young people are always trying to perfect it and they always fail - which is a good thing. Who'd want to live in a perfect world?

I went to Princeton High School, when I was very serious about being an artist. I was in a theatre family but I didn't want to become an actor.

The kids out there want something they can relate to, something that's real; most of that whiny stuff isn't real. The cheesy pop songs just bore me to death.

I'm just a young person trying to fulfil his potential and be the best he can be at what he wants to do... I guess that's why people connect with the music.

I'm not very funny in real life. I used to want to be a comedian when I was 13, 14, 15, till I saw "Death Of A Salesman" with Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock.

When you play spin the bottle, if they don't want to kiss you they have to give you a quarter. Well, hell, by the time I was twelve years old I owned my own home.

I didn't have any friends at school, didn't want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench and watched the others play and they looked foolish to me.

When Hitler declared war on the United States, he was betting that German soldiers, raised up in the Hitler Youth, would always out fight American soldiers, brought up in the Boy Scouts. He lost that bet. The Boy Scouts had been taught how to figure their way out of their own problems.

Even though I'm retired for some years now I still have something positive to say to kids. And they still listen.

We seem to be young, in a very old Galaxy. We're like kids tiptoeing through a ruined mansion.

Artists are born under Saturn and heroes must die young

When you were nineteen, you couldn't give a monkey's

Well, I think that part of being young is not exactly knowing why you do some of the things that you do. And it's by exploring your life or experimenting or making mistakes and learning from them hopefully that you start to forge an identity.

When you think back to your first kiss, your hair is perfect and she was wearing a cool outfit. We remember it with restraint and we remember it with style. We remember it as idealistically as you can think.

I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.

Back when I was a callow youth, if I had known how miserable the hours would be working for the CIA, I would have just told that recruiter to send me in prison instead.

Then a stranger—a Dutchman who has just arrived—catches my vision, jumps into my circle, and we dance a dance as fierce as I have ever danced before. If my back breaks, if I drop dead, it doesn't matter. I am twenty-four. I am healthy. I am whole.

Rock was different from rock and roll. Rock was virtuosic and adult, as opposed to popsy and teenaged. Rock and roll was apolitical and fun, while rock was "heavy" and often political, creating vistas of psychic energy that carried beyond the music itself and into radical politics and art.

Adolescence is a dreadful period. We tend to notice those youngsters who misbehave and call attention to themselves, but there are others, equally miserable, who receive no help simply because they are silent. (41)

I don't want to just be in the normal kind of teen movie.

No war can be won without young men dying. Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.

You'd be amazed how much fun you can have if you get out of your own head. The problem is that now people are only interested in themselves. What we have is a non-voting generation. That's what they should call you guys, the non-voting generation. You think you can't fix anything until you fix yourselves. Well, let me be the first to tell you, you will never fix yourselves. p.32

No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.

Hell, I am young. I am free. My teeth are clean. The sun shines. To hell with everything else