"Mad" magazine is like one of my few formative experiences, absolutely. "Mad" magazine teaches a whole generation of people to be irreverent toward power.
Sometimes a simple, almost insignificant gesture on the part of a teacher can have a profound formative effect on the life of a student.
It's not a deliberate thing. It's not like I was rejecting the UK, which is what the papers said. It's just that when you spend a lot of time in your formative years around an accent, you're going to pick it up. I had been living in LA for a bit and that's what happened.
In terms of what happened over that hiatus that I took, I just rested. I spent that time with my family, during their really formative years, and enjoyed that, and I messed with pills and new medications that help me to deal with dyskinesia and some other things I was struggling with, that I don't have as much now because of medication to counter the side effects. So, it just seemed like the right time to do it.
In the formative days of the Republic, the directing influence the Bible exercised upon the fathers of the Nation is conspicuously evident.
Never can a reforming sect survive if it is only reforming; the formative elements alone - the real impulse, that is, the principles - live on and on.
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.
Maybe deep down inside we were all still in our formative years. Maybe it was never too late for any of us to change.
A humankind abandoned in its earlier formative stage becomes its own greatest threat to survival.
I was not sure I wanted to issue orders to life; I rather liked the Greek notion of allowing Chance to take a formative hand in my affairs.
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.
The first decade of your life is really important; it's formative.
One of my favorite pieces of advice about being a writer came from a very formative teacher I had as an undergraduate, named John Hersey. On our last day of class together, which was also John Hersey last day before retirement, he said, "Remember, the world doesn't need any new writers. " Which at first didn't seem like great advice, but when you unpacked it, it was really that it's not enough to be confident in what you do; be conscious of bringing something to the world of readers and writers that it hasn't seen before. Something idiosyncratic.
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.
I say this as a young dad seeing children going into primary school: I don't think we should underestimate the formative effect on a child of those first years in primary school.
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.
My mother was a politician in my formative years.
I was 7 years old when the '80s began and 17 years old when they ended, so it was an incredibly formative decade for me.
The one and only formative power given to man is thought. By his thinking he not only makes character, but body and affairs, for "as he thinketh within himself, so is he. "
My mom is American, so I was raised in her household in my formative years. But as I got older, my pops tried to keep me involved with the culture by telling me the stories of the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, how he came to America, and about our family back home, because all that side of my family, my aunties, grandparents, is in Africa.