Quotes About Generation

Today's children are living a childhood of firsts. They are the first daycare generation; the first truly multicultural generation; the first generation to grow up in the electronic bubble, the environment defined by computers and new forms of television; the first post-sexual revolution generation; the first generation for which nature is more abstraction than reality; the first generation to grow up in new kinds of dispersed, deconcentrated cities, not quite urban, rural, or suburban.

If any generation of men ever possessed the right of dictating the mode by which the world should be governed for ever, it was the first generation that existed; and if that generation did it not, no succeeding generation can show any authority for doing it, nor can set any up.

Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right.

The preoccupations of young women-their looks, their clothes, their social life-don't seem to change much from generation to generation. But in every generation there are a few that make others choices.

When secularization has had its full sway, it will leave a generation devoid of shame. And if you show me a generation that lacks shame, I will show you a generation that is monstrous in its appetite... never satisfied.

I’m too young and ridiculous a person to speak for my generation, but I’d be happy to talk about my own experiences as a generation Y writer. I was raised by a generation of hippies. Throughout my childhood, teachers urged me to fight the establishment. My English teacher assigned Ginsberg and Kerouac and declared Bob Dylan “a genius.” My science teacher told me that television was “the new opiate of the masses” and bragged about never having owned one. My drama teacher made us perform Beckett.

He made the earth first and peopled it with dumb creatures, and then He created man to be His overseer on the earth and to hold suzerainty over the earth and the animals on it in His name, not to hold for himself and his descendants inviolable title forever, generation after generation, to the oblongs and squares of the earth, but to hold the earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood, and all the fee He asked was pity and humility and sufferance and endurance and the sweat of has face for bread.

With the Holocaust - I wonder if a lot of Jewish writers of my generation have felt this way - it feels really intimidating to approach it. I feel like so many writers who have either lived through it firsthand or were part of that generation where they were closer to the people who were in it have written so beautifully about it, so there's no lack of great books about it

The information that is passed from person to person and from generation to generation is the primary factor that gives humans a competitive advantage over other animals.

I think as time goes on that generation of rappers who's making it now is gonna face the same thing that my generation was facing, which is the decrease of sales. The decrease of hard-copies.

That the mechanisms of mass-production, which feed the demand for endlessly growing consumption in one generation can radically effect the possible futures for subsequent generations. Furthermore, to undo the effects of one generation's actions is not temporally relative. What is done, cannot be undone in the same timeframe. Like the factories themselves, the effects linger, they haunt us long after their final breath.

Unity will not make us rich, but it can make it difficult for Africa and the African peoples to be disregarded and humiliated. And it will, therefore, increase the effectiveness of the decisions we make and try to implement for our development. My generation led Africa to political freedom. The current generation of leaders and peoples of Africa must pick up the flickering torch of African freedom, refuel it with their enthusiasm and determination, and carry it forward.

We're all so clogged with dead ideas passed from generation to generation that even the best of us don't know the way out.

Our generation is wonderful generation, full of wonder. It's very hard to find an example of it in all our history. Composed of contradictions — light and darkness mixed.

Try to do for the next generation of church leaders what the previous generation of church leaders has not done for you.

For those that don't know much about 'American Idiot' or Green Day, just know that it's my generation's The Who's 'Tommy' or Pink Floyd's 'The Wall.' It was an album that really spoke to a generation. The theatrical show encapsulates that feeling and brings it to an even wider audience.

Every generation of humans believed it had all the answers it needed, except for a few mysteries they assumed would be solved at any moment. And they all believed their ancestors were simplistic and deluded. What are the odds that you are the first generation of humans who will understand reality ?

The most important business of one generation is the raising of the next generation. Nothing else you do in life will be as deeply satisfying.

We're not the Faster-than-the-Speed-of-Light Generation anymore. We're not even the Next-New-Thing Generation. We're the Soon-to-Be-Obsolete Kids, and we've crowded in here to hide from the future and the past. We know what's up - the future looms straight ahead like a black wrought-iron gate and the past is charging after us like a badass Doberman, only this one doesn't have any letup in him.

My great-grandmama told my grandmama the part she lived through that my grandmama didn't live through and my grandmama told my mama what they both lived through and my mama told me what they all lived through and we were suppose to pass it down like that from generation to generation so we'd never forget.

I was ruined before I got started. I say ruined, but I could say blessed; I was too far gone to believe in it. And I'm shocked how generation after generation repeats the behavior.

Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation in turn becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources - and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on in the future.

The language of freedom-fighting was so co-opted by the baby boomers in order to express their now-hopelessly compromised ideologies that no other generation could emulate it without a smirk. This has created an apathetic generation in the West, with young people no longer distinguishing between the old order and the new.

Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom. Of course the task will not be easy. But not to do this would be a crime against humanity, against which I ask all humanity now to rise up.

I have a real soft spot for flying saucer songs and Frenkenstein songs. When I was a kid the first record I ever really liked was called "The Mummy", and the flip-side was called "The Beat Generation" which Richard Hell later re-wrote as "The Blank Generation". I thought it was the greatest thing I had ever heard. I didn't like Elvis much then, but I was very young. When I was a kid I used to play that monster all the time!

One generation's idea of fast pace might be different from a later generation's.

I think my generation is a lost generation in a way.

A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.

I'm the granddaughter of a factory worker from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He went to work in the same lace mill every day for 50 years. He believed he passed it down to my dad, who passed it down to me, that if he did what he was supposed to do, he'd have a good life and his kids would have an even better life. That is the American dream. That is what we believe in, that's what we've got to keep going generation after generation.

In the U.S., I think there is an ideology of not telling kids what to do. Nobody to tell you who to marry, not tell you what job to pick. You're your own person. You have the freedom to choose, including the freedom to fail in magnificent ways. And I think that's the big difference. In other countries there is basically a social norm about saving that is passed from generation to generation. In the U.S. there isn't.

It's not fear that keeps me up. I mean, every generation has thought, this is the worst generation; the world's going to hell in a hand basket. The reality is, people are living longer, and they're living better.

There's a generation of people that do fetishize books and do fetishize catalogues and do look at them as something important. The same thing with magazine culture: because magazines don't make the amount of money that they used to, it's become important again to another generation of people to actually read them. And it's very, very pinpointed to the select people that actually fetishize and go in and look at them.

You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.

I've seen people talk about how they stopped polio, that was a generation that came together and said, "Let's do this." I think in the AIDS community we've become so complacent in that, it's like we just plateaued... We've completely neglected a whole young generation that is now highly infected.

We had the fun of being outlaws. But there's a whole generation now coming up with new gender identities. For this generation of kids who don't think that being gay is anything special, they might be more interesting than any of us.

Arab children, Corn ears of the future, You will break our chains, Kill the opium in our heads, Kill the illusions. Arab children, Don't read about our suffocated generation, We are a hopeless case. We are as worthless as a water-melon rind. Dont read about us, Dont ape us, Dont accept us, Dont accept our ideas, We are a nation of crooks and jugglers. Arab children, Spring rain, Corn ears of the future, You are the generation That will overcome defeat.

I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation. ...the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin. [p. 68]

Helping others isn't a chore, it is one of the greatest gifts there is. I want to challenge the next generation of women to find a way to give back that inspires and fulfills them and weave it into their daily lives. If the next generation can learn that early on, we have a real chance to change the world.

We need to awaken the next generation to understand that we are all change-makers. The nation is not as strong as its government but its next generation

I know of no system other than Hinduism under which a class has been set apart from generation to generation for the exclusive pursuit of divine knowledge and consigned to voluntary poverty.

Every generation proclaims that each must lead his own life, but seldom grants the subsequent generation the right to lead theirs.

A part of what makes myths live is their multiplicity, the way different voices retell them in every generation. Homer survives because his poetry was outstanding, yes, but also because he's been passed down by so many by luminaries like Vergil and Ovid, Shakespeare, James Joyce and Margaret Atwood, but also by countless others. I wanted to do my part for these tremendous stories.

I was so upset with what was going on in the world. I just couldn't stand the idea of being people tortured and that we even had such a thing as war. I hated the older generation, who had not done anything about it. Punk was a call-to-arms for me.

My generation is under-entertained.

I have no ambition for what society says is important as far as things like money, and all that kind of stuff. What I am ambitious about is I want to be the best wrestler that I can possibly be, and I think there's some sort of mistake in generations, as far as what he thinks as far as our generation lacking ambition.

With the young generation, there are even more women than men making movies right now.

Doubtless, we are as slow to conceive of Paradise as of Heaven, of a perfect natural as of a perfect spiritual world. We see how past ages have loitered and erred. "Is perhaps our generation free from irrationality and error? Have we perhaps reached now the summit of human wisdom, and need no more to look out for mental or physical improvement?" Undoubtedly, we are never so visionary as to be prepared for what the next hour may bring forth.

Babies are unreasonable; they expect far too much of existence. Each new generation that comes takes one look at the world, thinks wildly, "Is this all they've done to it?" and bursts into tears.