Quotations about Generations

There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age - I missed it coming and going. ~J.B. Priestly


It's one of nature's way that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us. ~Igor Stravinsky


People who don't cherish their elderly have forgotten whence they came and whither they go. ~Ramsey Clark


As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.
The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber
Burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.
So one generation of men will grow while another dies.
~Homer, Iliad


Generation Gap: A chasm, amorphously situated in time and space, that separates those who have grown up absurd from those who will, with luck, grow up absurd. ~Bernard Rosenberg, Dictionary for the Disenchanged, 1972


They say genes skip generations. Maybe that's why grandparents find their grandchildren so likeable. ~Joan McIntosh


We're the middle children of history.... no purpose or place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. ~From the movie Fight Club, about Generation X


The older generation thought nothing of getting up at five every morning - and the younger generation doesn't think much of it either. ~John J. Welsh


That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another. ~Adlai Stevenson


First we are children to our parents, then parents to our children, then parents to our parents, then children to our children. ~Milton Greenblatt


A father lives after death in his son. ~Sanskrit


When women feel they have learned to forgive their mothers - and men, their fathers - all it usually means is that they've decided to allow themselves the same kind of behavior. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head. ~Benjamin Disraeli


Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers. ~Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades


The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children. ~Clarence Darrow


Parents often talk about the younger generation as if they didn't have anything to do with it. ~Haim Ginott


Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents' pots and pans, the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum. ~Susan Sontag


It's hard for me to get used to these changing times. I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty. ~George Burns


Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves. ~D.H. Lawrence, Classical American Literature, 1922


In my day, we didn't have self-esteem, we had self-respect, and no more of it than we had earned. ~Jane Haddam


Some men so dislike the dust kicked up by the generation they belong to, that, being unable to pass, they lag behind it. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


There is nothing wrong with today's teenager that twenty years won't cure. ~Author Unknown