Selected generations quotes

1. Speeches easy to young speakers are generally very difficult to old listeners.

2. The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof.

3. I grew up with the concept of freedom of speech. So I'm too old, it's too late for me to adjust to the new world, the new world order.

4. It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.

5. Each generation's job is to question what parents accept on faith, to explore possibilities, and adapt the last generation's system of values for a new age.

6. Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations.

7. She [then nine-year-old daughter Emily] grew up with 'The Rhythm is Gonna Get You,' Well . . . It got her!

8. Posterity: you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.

9. For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.

10. Maybe our generation is more about sex, but it feels like romance is dying out.

11. Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

12. Age is deformed, youth unkind, We scorn their bodies, they our mind.

13. Posterity is the world to come; the world for whom we hold our ideals, from whom we have borrowed our planet, and to whom we bear sacred responsibility. We must do what America does best: offer more opportunity to all and demand responsibility from all.

14. One wonders whether a generation that demands instant satisfaction of all its needs and instant solution of the world's problems will produce anything of lasting value. Such a generation, even when equipped with the most modern technology, will be essentially primitive - it will stand in awe of nature, and submit to the tutelage of medicine men.

15. Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken. . . .

16. Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

17. What an elder sees sitting, the young can't see standing.

18. Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.

19. In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people's lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world.

20. Each generation makes its own accounting to its children.

21. The future is not a gift: it is an achievement. Every generation helps make its own future. This is the essential challenge of the present.

22. The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

23. I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false. But at least it represents a great adventure of the mind... No, everything is not summed up in negation and absurdity. We know this. But we must first posit negation and absurdity because they are what our generation has encountered and what we must take into account.

24. The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts. I think that a terrible bitterness and anger began there, which led to communism. And now it feeds terrorism. Anyway, that's my thesis. It's very oversimplified, as you can see.

25. The Constitution of the United States was made not merely for the generation that then existed, but for posterity-unlimited, undefined, endless, perpetual posterity.

26. He that planteth a tree is the servant of God, He provideth a kindness for many generations, And faces that he hath not seen shall bless him.

27. Ages are no more infallible than individuals; every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and it is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present. (p. 25)

28. The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists in the circulation of their blood.

29. You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.

30. The hour of emancipation is advancing. . . this enterprise is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to it's consummation. It shall have all my prayers, and these are the only weapons of an old man.

31. The system of banking we have both equally and ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our Constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption, and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens. Funding I consider as limited, rightfully, to a redemption of the debt within the lives of a majority of the generation contracting it; every generation coming equally, by the laws of the Creator of the world, to the free possession of the earth he made for their subsistence, unincumbered by their predecessors, who, like them, were but tenants for life.

32. No generation has a right to contract debts greater than can be paid off during the course of its own existence

33. Again, men in general desire the good, and not merely what their fathers had.

34. I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint.

35. There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix - a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get...

36. Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works. Not to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself with a moral, - the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief; and he would feel it a singular gratification if this romance might effectually convince mankind - or, indeed, any one man - of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms. In good faith, however, he is not sufficiently imaginative to flatter himself with the slightest hope of this kind. When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtile process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod, - or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly, - thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.

37. And they told me The times have changed Cause' our parents had Hendrix, Janis and Jim But what about River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain.

38. each generation wastes a little more of the future with greed and lust for riches

39. Crabbed age and youth cannot live together: Youth is full of pleasure, age is full of care

40. Then there are the 22 million Americans on food stamps. And of course there are the 39 million greedy geezers collecting Social Security. The greatest generation rewarded itself with a pretty big meal.

41. But you have one thing that may save you, and that is your youth. This is your great strength. It is also why I hate and fear you. Hear me out. It has been said that children are our future. But does that not also mean that we are their past? You are here to replace us. I don't understand why we're here helping and honoring them. You do not see union workers holding benefits for robots.

42. The argument of the 'long view' may be correct in some meaninglessly abstract sense, but it represents a fundamental mistake in categories and time scales. Our only legitimate long view extends to our children and our children's children's children-hundreds or a few thousands of years down the road. If we let the slaughter continue, they will share a bleak world with rats, dogs, cockroaches, pigeons, and mosquitoes. A potential recovery millions of years later has no meaning at our appropriate scale.

43. Ne ressemblons-nous pas presque tous a ce vieux general de quatre-vingt-dix ans, qui, ayant rencontre de jeunes officiers qui faisaient un peu de desordre avec des filles, leur dit tout en colere: 'Messieurs, est-ce la l'exemple que je vous donne?'

44. Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction.

45. 'I'm deep inside your children, who betray you in my name!'

46. And they told me The times have changed Cause' our parents had Hendrix, Janis and Jim But what about River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain.

47. O matre pulchra filia pulchrior

48. I'm sitting in the drive-through and I've got my three girls in the back and this station comes on and it's playing 'Jailhouse Rock,' the original version, and my girls are jumping up and down, going nuts. I'm looking around at them and they've heard Dad's music all the time and I don't see that out of them.

49. It's rare when an artist's talent can touch an entire generation of people. It's even rarer when that same influence affects several generations. Elvis made an imprint on the world of pop music unequaled by any other single performer.

50. There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

51. When I was young there was no respect for the young, and now that I am old there is no respect for the old. I missed out coming and going.

52. A vida...e uma enorme loteria; os premios sao poucos, os malogrados inumeros, e com os suspiros de uma geracao e que se amassam as esperancas de outra. Isto e a vida.

53. Each generation makes its own accounting to its children.

54. The future is not a gift: it is an achievement. Every generation helps make its own future. This is the essential challenge of the present.

55. Nothing so dates a man as to decry the younger generation.

56. Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.

57. Predominant opinions are generally the opinions of the generation that is vanishing.

58. I am my father's father, You are your children's guilt. In history's pity and terror The child is Aeneas again; Troy is in the nursery, The rocking horse is on fire. Child labor! The child must carry His fathers on his back.

59. 'Grandpa, like most of the fun-loving gang who built the Plants, just wanted to die or have his brain turn to oatmeal before it becomes too apparent exactly what a nightmare he and his buddies have saddled their descendants with.'

60. It is an old cliche to say that the future is in the hands of the young. This is no longer true. The quality of life to be enjoyed or the existence to be survived by our children and future generations is in our hands now.

61. Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?

62. Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.

63. You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grandchildren may be.

64. Kings live in Palaces, and Pigs in sties, And youth in Expectation. Youth is wise.

65. I'm aware that many of my friends will be saddened and shocked, or shock-saddened, over some of the chapters in The Catcher In the Rye. Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all my best friends are children. It's almost unbearable for me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach.

66. The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.

67. It scares the shit out of me because I see my nieces and nephews growing up and it's fucking hard. It was hard for me to grow up and it's even harder now with all the scary, spooky shit that's out there. (1995)

68. 'One can learn such a lot and enjoy such a lot in seventy years, and three generations is a long, long time to see human follies and acquire human wisdom. Anyone who is wise and has lived long enough to witness the changes of fashion and morals and politics through the rise and fall of three generations should be perfectly satisfied to rise from his seat and go away saying, 'It was a good show,' when the curtain falls.' (p. 23-24)

69. 'The modern young man,' said Aunt Dahlia, 'is a congenital idiot and wants a nurse to lead him by the hand and some strong attendant to kick him regularly at intervals of a quarter of an hour.'

70. Yet somehow our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members.

71. You talk a great deal about building a better world for your children, but when you are young you can no more envision a world inherited by your children than you can conceive of dying. The society you mold, you mold for yourself. It was this way with my generation. We were unhappy with what we inherited and we tried to reshape it in ways that would make it more tolerable to us. You were not uppermost in our thoughts. Now, in middle age, some of us are trying to rewrite history. Some of us tell you, 'We labored and dared and sacrificed - all for you - yet we hear no thanks.' You will not be unduly moved, I hope, by these laments. They are sentimental cries from persons so attached to the society they have rebuilt that they cannot bear the thought of seeing it overhauled by new proprietors.

72. He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on?

73. It may be that nothing in the world is so hard to comprehend as a terror whose time has come and gone - which may be why parents can scold their children for their fear of the boogeyman, when as children themselves they had to cope with exactly the same fears (and the same sympathetic but uncomprehending parents). That may be why one generation's nightmare becomes the next generation's sociology, and even those who have walked through the fire have trouble remembering exactly what those burning coals felt like.

74. We live, but a world has passed away With the years that perished to make us men.

75. We believe that peace is not just signed papers, but rather a contract between generations for the building of a more promising and less threatening future

76. The boys, who cannot grow up to adult human nature, are beating the prophets of the ancient race - Marx, Freud, Einstein - who have been tearing at our social, personal and intellectual roots, tearing with an objectivity which to the healthy animal seems morbid, depriving everything, as it seems, of the warmth of natural feeling. What traditional retort have the schoolboys but a kick in the pants? ... To our generation Einstein has been made to become a double symbol - a symbol of the mind travelling in the cold regions of space, and a symbol of the brave and generous outcast, pure in heart and cheerful of spirit. Himself a schoolboy, too, but the other kind - with ruffled hair, soft hands and a violin. See him as he squats on Cromer beach doing sums, Charlie Chaplin with the brow of Shakespeare... So it is not an accident that the Nazi lads vent a particular fury against him. He does truly stand for what they most dislike, the opposite of the blond beast - intellectualist, individualist, supernationalist, pacifist, inky, plump... How should they know the glory of the free-ranging intellect and soft objective sympathy to whom money and violence, drink and blood and pomp, mean absolutely nothing? Yet Albert and the blond beast make up the world between them. If either cast the other out, life is diminished in its force. When the barbarians destroy the ancient race as witches, when they refuse to scale heaven on broomsticks, they may be dooming themselves to sink back into the clods which bore them.