Officially 40 Years Old Quotes

Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Gone With the Wind in 1937. She was 37 years old at the time. Margaret Chase Smith was elected to the Senate for the first time in 1948 at the age of 49. Ruth Gordon picked up her first Oscar in 1968 for Rosemary’s Baby. She was 72 years old. Billie Jean King took the battle of women’s worth to a tennis court in Houston’s Astrodome to outplay Bobby Riggs. She was 31 years of age. Grandma Moses began a painting career at the age of 76. Anne Morrow Lindbergh followed in the shadow of her husband until she began to question the meaning of existence for individual women. She published her thoughts in Gift from the Sea in 1955, at 49. Shirley Temple Black was Ambassador to Ghana at the age of 47. Golda Meir in 1969 was elected prime minister of Israel. She had just turned 71. This summer Barbara Jordan was given official duties as a speaker at the Democratic National Convention. She is 40 years old. You can tell yourself these people started out as exceptional. You can tell yourself they had influence before they started. You can tell yourself the conditions under which they achieved were different from yours. Or you can be like a woman I knew who sat at her kitchen window year after year and watched everyone else do it and then said to herself, “It’s my turn.” I was 37 years old at the time.

Maybe (Taoist story) A classic ancient story illustrates the importance of equanimity and emotional resilience beautifully. Once upon a time, there was a wise old farmer who had worked on the land for over 40 years. One morning, while walking to his stable, he noticed that his horse had run away. His neighbours came to visit and sympathetically said to the farmer, “Such bad luck”. “Maybe,” the farmer replied. The following morning, however, the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “Such good luck,” the neighbours exclaimed. “Maybe,” the farmer replied. The following afternoon, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses and was thrown off, causing him to break his leg. The neighbours came to visit and tried to show sympathy and said to the farmer, “how unfortunate”. “Maybe,” answered the farmer. The following morning military officials came to the farmer’s village to draft young men into the army to fight in a new war. Observing that the farmer’s son’s leg was broken, they did not draft him into the war. The neighbours congratulated him on his good luck and the farmer calmly replied, “Maybe”.

A special government commission consisting of Party officials and scientists were on their way to assess the situation, and would arrive over the following 24 hours. The commission’s leader was Boris Scherbina, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and a former Minister for Construction in the oil & gas industry. While not a low-level politician, Scherbina was not a member of the Politburo - the Soviet political elite - because nobody in the government realised how serious the accident was at this stage. The most prominent scientific member of the commission was 49-year-old Academician Valerii Legasov. Legasov held a Doctorate in Chemistry and was something of a prodigy, having enjoyed an unprecedented rise within Soviet scientific circles to become the First Deputy-Director of the prestigious I. V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. Even though he was not a specialist in nuclear reactors, he was a highly intelligent, experienced and influential figure, both within the Communist Party and the global scientific community.164