Generations Quotes

We gladly put antiquity above our age but not posterity. Only a father doesn't begrudge his son's talent.

When you build a memorial, you build it not because the person wanted it, but for the future -- for generations who didn't know the man and didn't know the era in which he lived.

By the eighties, a lot of radio stations had started playing "Sixties" music. They called it "Classic Rock," because they knew we'd be upset if they came right out and called it what it is, namely "middle-aged-person nostalgia music.

However much one generation learns from another, it can never learn from its predecessor the genuinely human factor. In this respect every generation begins afresh. Thus no generation has learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning.

I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.

We must strive to become good ancestors.

The present generation has the same right of self-government which the past one has exercised for itself.

(Five) thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than the present one, an audience of some 5 or 6 score people, if each person in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us away to the black unknown of the human species, to days without a document or monument to tell their tale.

A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.

Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself.

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

It is time for the next generations to continue our struggle against social injustice and for the rights of humanity. It is in your hands.

Society always consists, in greatest part, of young and foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of the courts and statesmen, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age.

It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.

If you're like most members of the Baby Boom generation, you decided somewhere along the line, probably after about four margaritas, to have children. This was inevitable. Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, has instilled within each of us a powerful biological instinct to reproduce; this is her way of assuring that the human race, come what may, will never have any disposable income.

Well, the task I've set forth will long outlive our own generation. But together, we too have come through the worst. Let us now begin a major effort to secure the best- a crusade for freedom that will engage the faith and fortitude of the next generation. For the sake of peace and justice, let us move toward a world in which all people are at last free to determine their own destiny.

While I do occasionally order items on the Internet, it's hard to teach an old shopper new tricks. I'm convinced that the catalogue will eventually disappear, but not until the last baby boomers have kicked off their smelly Nikes and been buried in mulch.

Every constitution..., and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years [a generation]. If it be enforced longer, it is anact of force, and not of right.

One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

When the boomers started to have kids reach adolescence, there was suddenly this feeling that they needed to protect their kids from all the same things they did when they were kids. Which I guess is a natural tendency, but it makes for a less fun society.

We will be soldiers, so our sons may be farmers, so their sons may be artists

Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, "that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living": that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

I have overlived the generation with which mutual labors & perils begat mutual confidence and influence.

Life is a test and this world a place of trial. Always the problems - or it may be the same problem - will be presented to every generation in different forms.

I have seen the rise and fall of Nazi tyranny, the subsequent cold war and the nuclear nightmare that for fifty years haunted the dreams of children everywhere. During that time my generation defeated totalitarianism. As a result, your world is poised for better tomorrows. What will you do on your journey?

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.

...the high roads of the future will be clear, not only for us but for all, not only for our time but for a century to come.

The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century... unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today.

I will spark a generation of thinkers who will question traditional thought until they find the absolute truth.

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

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms.

Every generation, no matter how paltry its character, thinks itself much wiser than the one immediately preceding it, let alone those that are more remote.

If you would be a leader of men, you must lead your own generation, not the next.

The future inhabitants of [both] the Atlantic and Mississippi states will be our sons. We think we see their happiness in their union, and we wish it. Events may prove otherwise; and if they see their interest in separating why should we take sides? God bless them both, and keep them in union if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better.

That which is truly human no generation learns from the one before it. No generation learns from another how to love. No generation has a shorter task assigned to it except insofar as the previous generation shirked its task and deluded itself.

The man who sees two or three generations is like one who sits in the conjuror's booth at a fair, and sees the same tricks two or three times. They are meant to be seen only once.

True success comes only when every generation continues to develop the next generation.

In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.

One woman and one man might have been OK in your grandmother's day, but who wants to marry your grandmother? Not even your grandfather!

I guess that's one of the things about growing up in the fifties - it never occurred to me that you wouldn't be at least as successful as your parents.

I think it will be found that he who speaks with most authority on a given subject is not ignorant of what has been said by his predecessors. He will take his place in a regular order, and substantially add his own knowledge to the knowledge of previous generations.

We shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves; and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life of the majority.

Each generation supposes that the world was simpler for the one before it.

I am my happiest self when generations in my family are getting together and I'm cooking.

The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grand-pères ont toujours tort.

A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.

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?

We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship; but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted...So any nation which in its youth lives only for the day, reaps without sowing, and consumes without husbanding, must expect the penalty of the prodigal whose labor could with difficulty find him the bare means of life.

Old women are the secret to the fluffiest cakes.

The earth belongs to the living. No man can, by natural right, oblige the lands he occupied or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the payment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the use of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living. No generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.

I wonder whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.

Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors.

Some people say it's a when you get older fans the kids don't like you. It's true.

As tough as things have been, I am convinced you are tougher. I've seen your passion and I've seen your service. I've seen you engage and I've seen you turn out in record numbers. I've heard your voices amplified by creativity and a digital fluency that those of us in older generations can barely comprehend. I've seen a generation eager, impatient even, to step into the rushing waters of history and change its course.

One generation cannot bind another.

They are exactly the persons who are to succeed to the government of our country and to rule its future enmities, its friendships and fortunes.