Generation Gap Quotes

Sorry to tell you, but that's a very old chestnut. My mother used to say when God slams a door on you, he opens a window.'

Tig gave this two seconds of respectful consideration before rejecting it. 'No, that's not the same. I'm saying when God slams a door on you it's probably a shitstorm. You're going to end up in rubble. But it's okay because without all that crap overhead, you're standing in the daylight.'

'Without a roof over your head, it kind of feels like you might die.'

'Yeah, but you might not. For sure you won't find your way out of the mess if you keep picking up bricks and stuffing them in your pockets. What you have to do is look for blue sky. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I think there's a gigantic generation gap in terms of how people understand the Internet and how much they think technology is an important factor in social change. ~ Alex Steffen

In the 1950s kids lost their innocence.
They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term ---the generation gap.

In the 1960s, kids lost their authority.
It was a decade of protest---church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it.

In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of me-ism dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self.
Self-image, Self-esteem, Self-assertion....It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference.

In the 1980s, kids lost their hope.
Stripped of innocence, authority and love and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future.

In the 1990s kids lost their power to reason. Less and less were they taught the very basics of language, truth, and logic and they grew up with the irrationality of a postmodern world.

In the new millennium, kids woke up and found out that somewhere in the midst of all this change, they had lost their imagination. Violence and perversion entertained them till none could talk of killing innocents since none was innocent anymore. ~ Ravi Zacharias

In searching for ways to bridge the generation gap, there is no doubt that we, as parents, will have to practice what we preach, by striving more to bring our conduct into line with our code of beliefs. ~ Billy Graham

I wanted to ask which war
the Boer or the Crimean? It was amazing how old people could talk about The War, as though that meant something. ~ John Christopher

There remains a natural career progression even though the tougher job climate seeks to delay it. ~ Miles Anthony Smith

We don't deserve our job. Period. ~ Miles Anthony Smith

Think not forever of yourselves, O Chiefs, nor of your own generation. Think of continuing generations of our families, think of our grandchildren and of those yet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneath the ground. ~ T. S. Eliot

Every generation needs a new revolution. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Truly the worst generation. Stupid children nowadays are nothing like my time. We were far more independent. We weren't so weak that we needed to lean on others to make it in this world. Either you were the best or you were trash. That was the bottom line. You can't even fight a rebellion with your own strength. ~ Charles Lee

Adaptability is the name of the game; if you understand that you must now be adaptable and flexible, you will find a way to succeed in your career. If not, you will succumb to job market pressures. ~ Miles Anthony Smith

We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [ ... ]
My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings. ~ Wallace Stegner

Whereas previous generations had to face some unpredictability, current generations are facing unprecedented levels of instability. ~ Miles Anthony Smith

It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations. ~ Kahlil Gibran

A father must lead his children; but first he must learn to follow. He must laugh with them but remember the ache of childhood tears. He must hold the past with one hand and reach to the future with the other so there can be no generation gap in family love. ~ June Masters Bacher

A conversation between a person of my age and one of hers is like a map of a maze: There are things that each of us knows, and that each of us knows the other knows, that can be talked about. But there are things that each of us knows that the other doesn't know we know, which must not be spoken of, no matter what. Because of our ages, and for reasons of decency, there are what Daffy would refer to as taboos: forbidden topics which we may stroll among like islands of horse dung in the road that, although perfectly evident to both of us, must not be mentioned or kicked at any cost.
It's a strange world when you come right down to it. ~ Alan Bradley

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is pleasure beyond compare. ~ Yoshida Kenko

What someone may lack in talent can be more than made up for in self-motivation, self-direction, and follow-through. ~ Miles Anthony Smith

In the name of all that is holy, please consider the wages of a particular profession before you select that degree plan. ~ Miles Anthony Smith

All I'm saying is that there is a generation gap, and I think it revolves around this public/private thing. Our generation -- we subscribe to the old liberal doctrine of the inviolate self. I'ts the great tradition of realistic fiction, it's what novels are all about. the private life in the foreground, history a distant rumble of gunfire, somewhere offstage. In Jane Austen not even a rumble. Well, the novel is dying, and us with it. No wonder I could never get anything out of my novel-writing class at Euphoric State. It's an unnatural medium for their experience. Those kids...are living a film, not a novel. ~ David Lodge

This is because only two things can fulfill millennials: First is to be completely understood, accepted and respected by a loyal companion whom they respect themselves - a lifelong seduction with someone they can call their own. This level of understanding and intimacy is the only way they can heal the wounds of their treacherous childhood. The second thing is having enough money to live a lifelong vacation and help people along the way - as they are an emotional generation, they are actually compassionate about their fellowmen though they may not seem like it. Nothing dissatisfies this cohort more than the need to fend for basic necessities, as it goes against their lifelong quest to find fulfillment and reduces them to their base human urges they consider beneath them, like fighting for resources and food - an anathema to this generation who puts a premium on self-actualization. ~ Cate East

You waste everything because you've always had everything. ~ Balli Kaur Jaswal

We didn't have a generation gap, we had a generation Grand Canyon. ~ Mary Brave Bird

Finding a job that is a good fit is as much about you selecting the right company as it is about them selecting the right candidate. ~ Miles Anthony Smith

Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music. ~ Allan Bloom

Everywhere Frances looked there were children: children sitting gravely behind news desks, controlling traffic, running writers' festivals, taking her blood pressure, managing her taxes, and fitting her bras. ~ Liane Moriarty

The cigar has been smoked out, and we are the ashes. ~ Anthony Trollope

Old people. They don't know shit. This generation is moving faster. ~ Karina Halle

Due to their tendency to micromanage, they left little for their millennial and Gen Z children to work on themselves, resulting in the current problem of "adulting" - more so felt by the millennials, often being their eldest children. ~ Cate East

The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated in a contemporary antagonism known as the generation gap. ~ Spiro T. Agnew

Don't let the little fuckers generation gap you. ~ William Gibson

Didn't young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years? ~ Sara Sheridan

The surest way to ensure career extinction is to resist change and adaptation. ~ Miles Anthony Smith

Wart meets Merlin for the first time – only for Merlin, who lives backwards, it's the last time. The old wizard weeps and the boy can't understand why. It's a powerful expression of the gulf between the ancient and the young. ~ Philip Womack

This war has already stretched the generation gap so wide that it threatens to pull the country apart. ~ Frank Church

repeat after me:
1. our immigrant families are not just 'homophobic' they are also 'colonized.'
2. our parents have histories, genders, and sexualities, too.
3. they are just as broken as we are (but we have the words - i mean the english - to say it)
4. the diaspora responds to racism with heteronormativity
5. trauma seeps through generations ~ Darkmatter

Everyone is dispensable but some are more dispensable than others. ~ Miles Anthony Smith

27. So often, we go through our battles in private. As it was with me and with many of the women in my generation. We were taught and reared and molded to keep that stiff upper lip and to never explain in public how deeply some people have hurt us. I cannot get away from that mold. I am comfortable in it. I derive my sanity from it. ~ Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

When presented with an open door in your job, drive a Mack truck through it. ~ Miles Anthony Smith

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement. ~ George Eliot

I really have a generation gap about modern clothes. ~ Julie Harris

I think there is a generation gap. I personally look forward to, as our generation becomes the leaders, you are gonna see a change, and I think hopefully gay marriage will be a part of that country. ~ Vanessa Kerry

John considered a young master as the natural enemy of an old servant, and young people in general as a poor contrivance for carrying on the world. ~ George Eliot

Palo's three older brothers had died in the Paraguayan War, conscripted by the Argentinian government, taken off by force along with all the black men of their generation, because, Palo told young Santiago, they needed a way to not only win their war but also rid this country of us in the process, two birds with one stone. Buenos Aires was too black for them, one third of the population, that's enough blackness to swallow you up! to get strong on you! and so they sent our fathers off to war and opened floodgates to European steamships so that white men would pour into the city to replace us, and their plan worked, the bastarda, look at our city now. ~ Carolina De Robertis

I think my whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche. ~ Beck

First, make sure you get into a relationship for the right reasons. (I'm using the word "right" here as a relative term. I mean "right" relative to the larger purpose you hold in your life.) As I have indicated before, most people still enter relationships for the "wrong" reasons - to end loneliness, fill a gap, bring themselves love, or someone to love - and those are some of the better reasons. Others do so to salve their ego, end their depressions, improve their sex life, recover from a previous relationship, or, believe it or not, to relieve boredom. None of these reasons will work, and unless something dramatic changes along the way, neither will the relationship. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

Anton Brookes: I think I was within my right to accuse him of selling out a little bit, if you think about what Nirvana was supposed to be about and what they stood for; they did antirape benefits for Bosnia and stuff like that. Nirvana were supposedly right-on, weren't they? They were the voice of a generation, the conscience of a generation. And for all intents and purposes, Kurt mutated into everything he was against. He became your attitudinal rock star, with the tantrums and the plush hotels and everything. And then, for all intents and purposes, Kurt was sucking corporation cock. ~ Mark Yarm

It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road. ~ Donald Hall

Lesson for young men: if you want your eventual wife to be excited about sucking your dick for forty years, don't create a generation of women who think enthusiasm about sex is a bad thing. ~ Anna Kendrick

Where there is an absence of international political leadership, civil society should step in to fill the gap, providing the energy and vision needed to move the world in a new and better direction. ~ Daisaku Ikeda

From 1945 to 1991, China was engaged in a series of wars that nearly broke them. This generation has been through hell: the Great Leap Forward, hunger, starvation, near collision with the Russians - the Cultural Revolution gone mad. I have no doubt that this generation wants a peaceful rise. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

To build the next generation of companies, we must abandon the dogmas created after the crash. ~ Peter Thiel

My special cause, the one that alerts my interest and quickens the pace of my life, is to preserve the wildflowers and native plants that define the regions of our land-to encourage and promote their use in appropriate areas, and thus help pass on to generation in waiting the quiet jobs and satisfactions I have known since my childhood. ~ Lady Bird Johnson

In my grandparents' time, it was believed that spirits existed everywhere - in trees, rivers, insects, wells, anything. My generation does not believe this, but I like the idea that we should all treasure everything because spirits might exist there, and we should treasure everything because there is a kind of life to everything. ~ Hayao Miyazaki

The dream of true economic, gender and racial equality in a free society, which was cherished (if not achieved) by Leftists of the post-war generation, died under New Labour; but the egalitarianism at its heart was resurrected by a merciless minority as the brain-sucking zombie of Political Correctness. ~ Mark Crutchfield

All ages serve and worship the same God, gather under the same gospel and add to the collective song that praises the faithfulness of God as each generation shares in his promises to us. ~ Keith Getty

Breaking away from old psychological memes requires a Herculean effort in many cases. In essence, we are outgrowing a worldview while maintaining a relation-ship of sorts. Transcending an ideology can feel like going through a divorce and having to stay friends because of the kids. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

Cognitive psychology considers successive mediating events between the outer world of the organism (environmental input) and the behavior of the organism (response output). The gap between these two endpoints is reputed to be filled by various components (e.g., a complex memory system comprising several constituent parts, an information processing system also comprising several constituent parts, a "cognitive map," or a symbol manipulation machine. ~ Mecca Chiesa

A society which is clamouring for choice, which is filled with many articulate groups, each urging its own brand of salvation, its own variety of economic philosophy, will give each new generation no peace until all have chosen or gone under, unable to bear the conditions of choice. ~ Margaret Mead

Consider the death of Princess Diana. This accident involved an English citizen, with an Egyptian boyfriend, crashed in a French tunnel, driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian, who was drunk on Scotch whiskey, followed closely by Italian paparazzi, on Japanese motorcycles, and finally treated with Brazilian medicines by an American doctor. In this case, even leaving aside the fame of the victims, a mere neighborhood canvass would hardly have completed the forensic picture, as it might have a generation before. ~ Mark Riebling

1983:
To my generation has now come the challenge. In the days to come we will be tested on whether we have the moral courage, the realism, the idealism, the tenacity, and the ability to sacrifice some of the current comfort to invest in the future ... I believe that this generation will rise to the challenge ... The experts believe that, like the Democratic Party itself, the less than forty-year-old voters are prepared to sell their souls for some security, real or illusory. They have misjudged us. Just because our political heroes were murdered does not mean that the dream does not still live, buried deep in our broken hearts. ~ Joe Biden

The United States over the last thirty years has seen a growing gap - indeed, a deepening gulf - between rich and poor. The gap is significantly greater than in any other developed nation. Moreover, the growing gulf between rich and poor is the result of social and economic policy, not because some classes of people worked harder and others slacked off over the last thirty years (all of us, according to most studies, are working harder). The differences among countries generate the same conclusion: social policy, not simply individual effort, is responsible for the distribution of wealth. Our recent social policy may not have been intended to produce this result, but it has. The consequence is increased suffering and desperation among the poor and potentially grave consequences for the society as a whole.

Moreover, many people in the middle, who are most often struggling financially, support the individualistic ideology underlying our social policy - namely, the notions that we each have worked hard for what we have and ought to be able to keep all of it, that government is bad (or at least inefficient and wasteful - and hungry for our tax dollars), and that things will be better for all of us if we let the wealthiest people in our country make and keep as much money as possible. Many of us seem not to realize that the people who benefit the most from our politics and economics of individualism are the wealthiest 10 percent, especially the top 1 percent. People wil ~ Marcus J. Borg

Ambitious young women today are taught to ignore or suppress every natural instinct, if it conflicts with the feminist agenda posed on them. All literary and artistic works, no matter how great, that document the ambivalence of female sexuality they are trained to dismiss as "misogynous." In other words, their minds are being programmed to secede from their bodies ... there is a huge gap between feminist rhetoric and women's actual sex lives, where feminism is of little help except with a certain stratum of deferential, malleable, white middle-class men. ~ Camille Paglia

Government is about coercion. Limiting government is the single most important instrument for guaranteeing liberty. We're working on a third generation which has little in the way of education about what our Constitution means and why it was written. Thus, we've fallen easy prey to charlatens, quacks, and hustlers. ~ Walter E. Williams

Eye-popping tales of growing income inequality are hardly new. By now, nearly every American must be painfully aware of the widening pay gap between top executives and shop floor laborers; between 'Master of the Universe' financiers and pretty much everyone else. ~ Steven Rattner

I filled my sketchbook with drawings, very much as any educated girl of my generation might have kept a diary. ~ Gabriele Munter

I think in many ways what my films are about is that search for my grandpa's dentures: for that humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between "us" and "them" to arrive at a "we." ~ Brian Lindstrom

My father had a lifelong terror, phobia whatever, about hospitals. Makes a lot of sense in hindsight. He was so scared of doctors, he passed that on to me. That's what parents exist for: to pass their phobias on generation to generation. ~ Jackie Kay

Theodore Senior belonged to a class and a generation that considered politics to be a dirty business, best left, like street cleaning, to malodorous professionals. ~ Edmund Morris

Paul Ryan, who teamed up with Akin in the House to sponsor harsh anti-abortion bills, may look young and hip and new generation, with his iPod full of heavy metal jams and his cute kids. But he's just a fresh face on a Taliban creed - the evermore antediluvian, anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-gay conservative core. Amiable in khakis and polo shirts, Ryan is the perfect modern leader to rally medieval Republicans who believe that Adam and Eve cavorted with dinosaurs. ~ Maureen Dowd

Public schools are where the next generation of leaders are educated and where cultural exchange will take place. ~ Eugenie Scott

A small businesses ability to gain an edge for a profitable niche is not by just focusing on the dynamic market gap, but by identifying a market within the gap. ~ Wayne Chirisa

I'm operating in the gap between the trajectory of modernity and the trajectory of modernism. So what people think is design is not design, it's my attempt to engage with the trajectory of modernity. ~ Liam Gillick

...ignorance is a curse lying in wait for the younger generation, for those who forgot to ask. ~ Hannah Mary Rothschild

I came to see soldiers as men willing to lay down their lives for the sake of others. They fight for themselves and the generation under immediate attack, but certainly they fight for the futures of free peoples. Decades beyond World War II, I am one who benefited. That I can vote in presidential elections and not bend my knee to Hirohito's grandson is testament to the enduring work of the veterans of World War II. That I can write books for a living instead of sweating in a Third Reich factory is a product of Allied triumph. ~ Marcus Brotherton

Power," Nita heard her father say behind her. "Creation. Forces from before time. This is
this business is for saints, not children!"
Even saints have to start somewhere," Carl said softly. "And it's always been the children who have saved the universe from the previous generation and remade the universe in their own image. ~ Diane Duane

So is he a radical?" non-Muslims often asked when I told them about the Sheikh. "Not at all," I'd say, assuming we were all speaking in post-9/11 code. "Of course not."

And I'd meant it. He is not a radical. Or rather, not their kind of radical.

His radicalism is of entirely another caliber. He's an extremist quietist, calling on Muslims to turn away from politics and to leave behind the frameworks of thought popularised by Islamists in recent centuries. Akram's call for an apolitical Islam unpicked the conditioning of a generation of Muslims, raised on the works of Abu l'Ala Maududi and Sayyid Qutb and their nineteenth-century forerunners. These ideologues aimed to make Islam relevant to the sociopolitical struggles facings Muslims coping with modernity. Their works helped inspire revolutions, coups, and constitutions. But while these thinkers equated faith with political action, the Sheikh believed that politics was puny. He was powered by a certainty that we are just passing through this earth and that mundane quests for land or power miss Islam's point. Compared with the men fighting for worldly turf, Akram was far more uncompromising: turn away from quests for nation-states or parliamentary seats and toward God. "Allah doesn't want people to complain to other people," he said. "People must complain to Allah, not to anyone else."

All the time spent fulminating, organising, protesting? It could be saved for prayer. So unjust governments run ~ Carla Power

Deficit consumption is, in effect, drawing down on the capital entitlements of future generations ~ Jonathon Porritt

You were witnessing me become this crazy and cerebral girl, the kind of girl that you and your entire generation vilified. But doesn't witnessing contain complicity? "You think too much," is what they always said when their curiosity ran out. ~ Chris Kraus

Simon drove as if he knew something about physics that Einstein hadn't thought of and God never intended. If nature abhorred a vacuum, Simon positively loathed one, and rushed to fill in the tiniest gap in the heavy flow of speeding traffic. He passed on the right, left, center, and all variations in between, and the Keble responded as if involved in some kind of blood compact with its human master. ~ Don Winslow

If you don't want a generation of robots, fund the arts! ~ Cath Crowley

a generation:
the black night gave me black eyes
still I use them to seek the light ~ Gu Cheng

I created Punk for this day and age. Do you see Britney walking around wearing ties and singing punk? Hell no. That's what I do. I'm like a Sid Vicious for a new generation. ~ Avril Lavigne

I think if we could raise one generation of kids without violence and shaming, we don't know what might be possible. ~ Gloria Steinem

Contemporary American politics also revolve around this contradiction. Democrats want a more equitable society, even if it means raising taxes to fund programmes to help the poor, elderly and infirm. But that infringes on the freedom of individuals to spend their money as they wish. Why should the government force me to buy health insurance if I prefer using the money to put my kids through college? Republicans, on the other hand, want to maximise individual freedom, even if it means that the income gap between rich and poor will grow wider and that many Americans will not be able to afford health care. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

The key reason why we are richer than our ancestors is that these ancestors have bequeathed us buildings, factories and machines that have given us a high living standard to start with. Driven by irresponsible policy makers, America's present generation is consuming the nation's capital. ~ Kurt Richebacher