Formative Years Quotes

• My mother was a politician in my formative years.

  Antonia Fraser

  Mother, Years, Politician

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• Maybe deep down inside we were all still in our formative years. Maybe it was never too late for any of us to change.

  Claire Cook

  Years, Too Late, Stills

  Claire Cook (2014). “Must Love Dogs: New Leash on Life”, p.76, Marshbury Beach Books

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• Childhood is what you spend the rest of your life trying to overcome.

  Sandra Bullock

  Childhood, Trying, Overcoming

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• It is mother's influence during the crucial formative years that forms a child's basic character. Home is the place where a child learns faith, feels love, and thereby learns from mother's loving example to choose righteousness.

  Ezra Taft Benson

  Mother, Children, Home

  Ezra Taft Benson (1988). “The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson”, Bookcraft Pubs

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• Now, today, some children are enrolled in excellent programs. Some children are enrolled in mediocre programs. And some are wasting away their most formative years in bad programs....That's why I'm issuing a challenge to our states: Develop a cutting-edge plan to raise the quality of your early learning programs; show us how you'll work to ensure that children are better prepared for success by the time they enter kindergarten. If you do, we will support you with an Early Learning Challenge Grant that I call on Congress to enact.

  Barack Obama

  Children, Cutting, Years

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• I would have been about seven years old when the formative years of my competitive football education began. I was playing in the local leagues around Manchester, playing against lads from tough areas who had been taught they had to fight for everything.

  Gary Neville

  Football, Fighting, Years

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• You're always looking at last year, or 10 years ago, or your school days, or your teenage years, your formative years. Because that's exactly what they are, they're your formative years.

  Paul McCartney

  Teenage, School, Years

  "Sir Paul McCartney". Interview with Chris Dahlen, pitchfork.com. May 21, 2007.

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• I have great parents, and they both taught me great things, but my formative years were boundaryless.

  Roseanne Barr

  Years, Parent, Taught

  Source: www.elle.com

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• The general disinclination of Spain to accept slaves from Islamicized regions of Africa during the formative years of Hispano-American society had enormous consequences for the development of music in the New World.

  Ned Sublette

  Years, Spain, Development

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• The funniest thing is not who influenced me positively, but who influenced me negatively. I had such an aversion to what Busby Berkeley did; in my early formative years, I thought it was terrible. Now, I think it's wonderful. But then, I wanted to do anything but what Busby Berkeley did.

  Stanley Donen

  Thinking, Years, Aversion

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• I don't mind being classified as a jazz artist, but I do mind being restricted to being a jazz artist. My foundation has been in jazz, though I didn't really start out that way. I started in classical music, but my formative years were in jazz, and it makes a great foundation.

  Herbie Hancock

  Artist, Years, Mind

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• Even now, after whatever gains feminism has made in involving fathers in the rearing of their children, I still think virtually all of us spend the most formative years of our lives very much in the presence of women

  Reynolds Price

  Children, Father, Thinking

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• To deny that human beings are filled with anti-social passions betrays a denial of reality and a lack of self-awareness. One has to be taught nonsense for a great many formative years to believe it.

  Dennis Prager

  Believe, Passion, Reality

  Dennis Prager (2016). “A Dark Time in America”, p.8, Creators Publishing

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• My formative years, until I was 12, was all shaped by Jamaican culture, by that economy, by the people in my family, who are agriculturalists, who were plantation workers, who harvested those crops and took them down to the boats run by the United Food Company, to load those ships at night, hence all the songs that I sing that come from that environment.

  Harry Belafonte

  Running, Song, Night

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• My first memoir, 'Home,' was about my childhood, early training and formative years in the Theater, i am so pleased that my good friends at the Hachette Book Group have encouraged me to share the next phase of my life, beginning with my arrival in Hollywood and the wonderful movies and television programs I was asked to be a part of.

  Julie Andrews

  Life, Book, Home

  "Julie Andrews Announces New Memoir". www.cbsnews.com. March 23, 2015.

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• I think what frustrated me more than anything else in my formative years was that I just had to work. I had to have a job. Like twenty to thirty hours a week, a lot of times in high school and college. And that was hard.

  Jon Gordon

  Jobs, School, College

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• High school and college were my punk, formative years. I was playing hardcore, learning to be a musician. In bands, you tour, but you're paid nothing; you're playing to 50 people in a basement, sleeping in a van, and you love it.

  Steve Aoki

  School, Sleep, College

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• When I was growing up, everybody in charge, my parents and teachers, had all survived the war, and they talked about the war like it was the Kraken - you know, this huge beast that roamed the earth during their formative years.

  Tom Hanks

  Teacher, Growing Up, War

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• My formative years were all about 'Star Wars' - the first three, not the last crap, obviously. I understood 'Star Trek' but it was too caricatured for me.

  Nick Frost

  Stars, War, Years

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• I suppose, if someone was into baseball for an extended period of time during their formative years, they're always going to be interested in it.

  James Mercer

  Baseball, Years, Periods

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I spent my youth and my most formative years in Africa. I left Africa when I was about 20, 21, and when Mo says a great African, I was really moulded by my African experience, although I had the good fortune that by the time I was 24 I had studied and worked on three continents - Africa, the US, and Europe.

  Kofi Annan

  Years, Europe, Three

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• In my formative years the people who influenced me most were the Christian existentialists, I mean men like Munier and Kierkegaard and perhaps most of all Nicholas Berdyaev and in my travels I looked for one thing more than anything. I rarely discussed, probably mainly because of language difficulties, metaphysics with the various religious people of other groups I'd meet with. But I'd very much try to see how they were incarnated, how their particular soul was incarnated or took roots into reality.

  Pierre Trudeau

  Christian, Religious, Mean

  Source: presbyterianrecord.ca

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• I do think a lot of sexual violence stems from experiences in childhood or at puberty. Some people become sadistic after suffering early abuse at the hands of parents, relatives or friends. But for others, the seed is planted in the formative years by the conflation of images of violence with those of sexual arousal. Magazines, TV shows and, especially, slasher movies are masters at doing this.

  Park Dietz

  Thinking, Years, Tv Shows

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• I was fortunate to work with Corigliano for a few years in the mid nineties. Meeting and working with him during those formative years was an important experience.

  Michael Hersch

  Years, Important, Meetings

  Interview with Elijah Ho, www.thecounterpoints.com. April 14, 2014.

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• I think it was interesting that when you're in those formative years you respond to things that interest you and don't always know where they lead. But they accumulate and add up to something that enriches your later life or leads you to some new experience.

  Paul Smith

  Thinking, New Experiences, Years

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