My Generation Quotes

I am sick of war. Every woman of my generation is sick of war. Fifty years of war. Wars rumored, wars beginning, wars fought, wars ending, wars paid for, wars endured. ~ Josephine Winslow Johnson

Now, I will be the first to admit that human life was not worth much to my generation in the Iron Age, but Flidais and her kind are forever rooted in Bronze Age morality, which goes something like this: If it pleases me, then it is good and I want more; If it displeases me, then it must be destroyed as soon as possible, but preferably in a way that enhances my reputation so that I can achieve immortality in the songs of bards. ~ Kevin Hearne

My generation remembered going to the movies as an event. We would see these things, we would bring them home, and we would think about them for years because it would take a long time before they would go on television where you could re-experience the fun that you had when you watched them. ~ Joe Dante

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I grew up believing my generation would be better. We would be kinder, we would be more level-headed. We would be more loving. And so many people are missing. ~ Jorja Fox

So many people of my generation all grew up with that shock theater package on television of 'Frankenstein,' 'Wolfman,' 'Dracula,' 'Mummy,' all the Universal stuff. ~ Rick Baker

I'm not gay, but I don't think you have to be gay to have a gay hero. Growing up, Alan Turing was certainly mine. I'm also not the greatest mathematician of my generation. We have lots of biographical differences, but nonetheless, I always identified with him so much. ~ Graham Moore

I had been sick of carrying around the self-indulgent negativity which was so much the malaise of my generation, my sex and my class. ~ Robyn Davidson

I feel like it's a real shame that my generation doesn't make an appearance at the opera. ~ James Gray

The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women - of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human. ~ Rebecca Solnit

It was in reading Tristam Shandy that I noticed how it is primarily men who gravitate towards the game-playing self-reflexive style. There is an alienation from emotion in it, a Nervous Nelly fear of letting go and being "exposed." As an attitude towards life, it betrays a perpetual adolescence. Those who hurled themselves after Derrida were not the most sophisticated but the most pretentious, and least creative members of my generation of academics. ~ Camille Paglia

My generation fought so hard to give all of you choices. We believe in choices. But choosing to leave the workforce was not the choice we thought so many of you would make."2 So ~ Sheryl Sandberg

People in the Middle East may consider the U.S. an evil hegemony that has tainted their culture, but when I look at the growth of racial and ethnic tolerance and understanding in my generation in the U.S., and see those sentiments make it around the world, it makes me feel proud. ~ Aloe Blacc

I am a member of the "career-less generation." Or the "screwed generation." Unlike previous generations, the members of my generation won't get jobs and respectable wages straight out of high school, let alone college. We don't have the means to buy homes and start families in our twenties. We're the first generation in a while who will be less well off and less secure than their parents'. Strangely, I seemed more okay with this than my parents. Not being able to afford an above-ground swimming pool and a kid wasn't some heartbreaking tragedy to me. ~ Ken Ilgunas

I was the Marlon Brando of my generation. ~ Bette Davis

My generation, we really have to step up to the plate and vote. Tweeting is great - people say, 'Oh, I don't want this or that' - but at the end of the day, tweeting isn't a ballot. Just saying that you don't like someone on Twitter is not going to turn a state blue or red. You have to vote. ~ Zendaya

People of my generation in Portugal fell into the magic potion of political ideas. What was very funny about this revolution was that it did not bring wealth to the Portuguese. But it brought language, ideas. You'd go to the fish market, and all the women who were selling fish would call each other fascist, communist. ~ Maria De Medeiros

South Central is just who I am. Even though I have a nice house, nice family, the rest of my generation is still in South Central L.A. My cousins, my brothers, my sisters, they don't wanna move out. ~ Ice Cube

I'm not the type to generalise about an entire generation. I think the most general thing I can say, is that things are way more dispersed, and way more de-centralised than they were twenty years ago. I don't really feel like people talk about my generation the way people would talk about Generation X in their early 90's when Nirvana blew up. I feel like there was an easier, more coherent narrative to find, than you can now. ~ Chris Baio

Anyone of my generation who tells you he hasn't 'done Brando' is lying. ~ James Caan

Like many other people of my generation, I don't think I ever really bothered to grow up. I wasn't ever really a proper teenager until I was about 19, and maybe I got a bit stuck there, because it seemed to go on and on. ~ Meg Rosoff

T.S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T.S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

My generation is under-entertained. ~ Dave Chappelle

When I was young, when the women of my generation were in their formative years, we were not taken seriously. Nor, just as damagingly, were our mothers, or our grandmothers. ~ Jane Caro

I know, for me, you know, my generation - I never would have known anything about Robert Preston's performance in 'The Music Man' if there hadn't been a film where he played the part. I just heard how great he was on Broadway way before my time. ~ John Lloyd Young

Men of my generation have had Spain in our hearts. It was there that they learned ... that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, and that there are times when courage is not rewarded. ~ Albert Camus

A lot of people in my generation don't seem to get that you have to work your way up. I don't care if filing invoices is beneath you. If you don't do it, who do you think is going to? Your boss? Nope. That's why she hired you. ~ Sophia Amoruso

Don't listen to the cynics. They were wrong about my generation and they were wrong about yours. ~ Joe Biden

Every generation builds on the work of the last, and pill or no pill, my generation could not have made the strides they have without all the work done by others. The same is true for future generations, although luckily for them the advancement of women is now snowballing. The legacy of the current crop of women over fifty - the accidental feminists - has given a leg up like no other to their daughter and granddaughters, not least through the #MeToo movement. ~ Jane Caro

I'm not too embarrassed to say I'm the definition of the target audience. This is my generation, the one of exalting music in album form. ~ Jonathan Lethem

To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth. ~ W. H. Auden

My generation has not seen one single day of peace, and my dream is for my children and the children of all Colombians to have the change to see it. I hope the guerrilla understands that the time has come to leave this 50-year confrontation behind; that the time has come to change from bullets to votes, from weapons to argumentations; that the time has come for them to continue their struggle, but within democracy. ~ Juan Manuel Santos

War is not the quintessential emergency in which man has to prove himself, as my generation learned at its school desks in the days of the Kaiser; rather, peace is the emergency in which we all have to prove ourselves. ~ Gustav Heinemann

For a man of my generation, our century has been a long intellectual and political struggle in favor of freedom. ~ Octavio Paz

My generation must have despair. - Leonard Bernstein Ch 40/Dog Water Free, A Memoir ~ Michael Jay

In our 20s, women in my generation, we all wanted to be Laurie Anderson. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

I've made a contribution to my time and my generation through being myself, not through what I shared with the Rolling Stones. It's very bad for me and very dangerous to see myself as someone who had an influence on this song or that song. It immediately puts me in the position where my worth is dependent on how much of my soul I shared with Mick Jagger, and it's just not valid. You can use the gossip you've heard. You're not getting it from me. ~ Marianne Faithfull

Science chases money
and money chases its tail
and the best minds of my generation can't make bail.
But the bacteria are coming
that's my prediction.
It's the answer to this culture
of the quick-fix prescription. ~ Ani DiFranco

There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda, but it doesn't work that way. ~ Ariel Levy

It was feminism that made it possible for women to go to the Ivy League and women to be astronauts and women to have their own TV shows. What happened, though, was that the generation after feminism, which is my generation, misunderstood what feminism was saying. ~ Debora Spar

The Pink Panther is legendary, but a lot of people my age haven't ever seen the original. So, I think it's great to bring it back for my generation, and to expose them to where that theme song which still sounds so modern and that legendary image of a pink cat came from. It's great to be a part of that, because it's history. ~ Beyonce Knowles

I think a lot of people of my generation are discomfited by the assertion of neutrality in the mainstream media, this idea that they're the voice of God. I think it's just honest to say, yes, you know where I'm coming from but you can fact-check anything I say. ~ Rachel Maddow

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. ~ Simon Rich

Our history, America's history, has been so heavily edited. In history classes, we don't really go into full discussions about the past. People, struggles, and triumphs have been erased. As a result, we now have a generation, my generation, of people who are intelligent but ignorant of and blind to the truth. ~ Janelle Gray

The Network Generation are secure in, and proud of, their Scottishness. Unlike my generation that grew up in the '80s, they don't see our sense of identity as under threat. ~ Douglas Alexander

My generation is the first to be in charge of their image. We call the shots and tell you how to feel about our lives. It doesn't matter if what we are projecting is phony. If someone believes it, that makes it true. ~ Ryan O'Connell

I am a college-educated American. In all my years of formal schooling, I never read Plato or Aristotle, Homer or Virgil. I knew nothing of Greek and Roman history and barely grasped the meaning of the Middle Ages. Dante was a stranger to me, and so was Shakespeare. The fifteen hundred years of Christianity from the end of the New Testament to the Reformation were a blank page, and I knew only the barest facts about Luther's revolution. I was ignorant of Descartes and Newton. My understanding of Western history began with the Enlightenment. Everything that came before it was lost behind a misty curtain of forgetting. Nobody did this on purpose. Nobody tried to deprive me of my civilizational patrimony. But nobody felt any obligation to present it to me and my generation in an orderly, coherent fashion. Ideas have consequences - and so does their lack. ~ Rod Dreher

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. ~ Steve Jobs

My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage ~ Peggy Noonan

My generation fought very hard for feminism, and we fought very hard to not be labeled as you had to have a husband or you had to be in a relationship, or you were somehow not a cool chick. ~ Stevie Nicks

I think my generation has had an unbelievably easy time profiting from the world that was made for us by our parents and grandparents. We are essentially a rather frivolous generation. The Blair government was my generation's shot at power. It had some good things, but it had some flaws. ~ Sebastian Faulks

My generation of director has no illusions that we are going to be fed and cared for by subsidized theater in America. ~ Diane Paulus

My generation is now the door to memory. That is why I am remembering. ~ Joy Harjo

I love dancing in general and making girls dance. My generation doesn't do it enough. ~ Jean Dujardin

Which women would no longer be the second-rate, unimportant creatures that they were now considered, but the equal and respected companions of men. Indeed, that school garden, now trimly beautiful in its twenty-year-old mellowness, but then recently hewn from the rough surface of the Downs and golden-hedged with tangled gorse and broom, has been for me somehow associated with every past phase of life. There, at the age of sixteen, I first began to dream how the men and women of my generation - with myself, of course, conspicuous among that galaxy of Leonardos - would inaugurate a new Renaissance on a colossal scale, and incidentally redeem all the foolish mistakes of our forefathers. ~ Vera Brittain

There is hardly an American male of my generation who has not at one time or another tried to master the victory cry of the great ape as it issued from the androgynous chest of Johnny Weissmuller, to the accompaniment of thousands of arms and legs snapping during attempts to swing from tree to tree in the backyards of the Republic. ~ Gore Vidal

I learned about the benefits and the vast limitations of such types of exploration, as did all my generation. ~ Frederick Lenz

In Obama's case, we've enabled affirmative action to find a home in the nation's highest office. There you have it. I said it and I stand by it. America fell for the gimmick candidate, disregarding every fact and warning sign in the rush to have 'the first African-American president.' ~ Allen West

Thanks to every generation of women from every culture on earth who ever lived, thanks to every woman who ever voiced a seditious thought or pursued her talents regardless of invisibility, my generation of women have been able to live a life different from that of every woman who came before us. ~ Jane Caro

Screw being a singer! I wanna be the voice of my generation with my talk show. ~ Tyra Banks

The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

People of my generation who became photographers in the late fifties, early sixties, there were no rewards in photography. There were no museum shows. Maybe MOMA would show something, or Chicago. There were no galleries. Nobody bought photographs. ~ Duane Michals

I've always found that fashion is, first of all, mainly for yourself. So my two icons are, on one side, Little Edie from 'Grey Gardens' and, of course, like all my generation, I'm influenced by Kate Moss. ~ Lou Doillon

I was scared to death because for the comics of my generation, HBO specials are like the pinnacle. I'm thinking of all these unbelievable comedians I've seen on HBO: Chris Rock, George Carlin, Damon Wayans, Richard Pryor and Billy Crystal. I started having a panic attack seeing my name in that list of people. It was pretty overwhelming. ~ Bill Burr

Oh you, my generation!- we were a lovely lot! Sharp minds- arguing all the time and brittle bodies and even more brittle laughter- and all the time knowing that we were growing up to die. ~ Joan Wehlen Morrison

I've been blessed. I grew up and played and worked and created with the Freddie Mercury, the Jimi Hendrix, the Keith Richards, the John Paul Jones of my generation. ~ Steven Adler

Everybody aspires to an affordable home, a secure job, better living standards, reliable healthcare and a decent pension. My generation took those things for granted, and so should future generations. ~ Jeremy Corbyn

Like many science fiction lovers of my generation, I discovered Andre Norton on the shelves at the junior high's library. ~ Sherwood Smith

In the words of Jeff Hammerbacher, a former manager at Facebook and the founder of Cloudera, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks. ~ Golden Krishna

I think I'm the most positive guy still going in my generation, and I'm out there to prove that. ~ Luther Allison

My generation never experienced (fortunately) that type of collective tragedy, where everybody goes totally crazy and turns the world into a gigantic nightmare. ~ Roselyne Bosch

It is my fault, and the fault of everyone of my generation. I wonder what the future generations will say about us. My grandparents suffered through the Depression, World War II, then came home to build the greatest middle class in human history. Lord knows they weren't perfect, but they sure came closest to the American dream. Then my parents' generation came along and f***ed it all up - the baby boomers, the "me" generation. And then you got us. Yeah, we stopped the Zombie menace, but we're the ones who let it become a menace in the first place. At least we're cleaning up our own mess, and maybe that's the best epitaph to hope for. 'Generation Z, they cleaned up their own mess. ~ Max Brooks

Religion knew the truth of metaphor and symbol for almost all of history until the past few hundred years, and especially until the wrongly named Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. Then we started confusing rational and provable with real. We actually regressed and went backward. In trying to defend its ground in the face of rationalism and scientism, religion tried to become "rational" itself and lost its alternative consciousness, which many of us call contemplation. It's as though we tried to deal with Mystery with the entirely wrong "software". We lost access to the higher levels of consciousness, the transrational, the transpersonal, the transcendent itself. Most tragic, we lost most inner experience of our own outer belief systems. That is the heart of religion's problem today, and it is indeed a deep and serious problem for upcoming generations. My generation took the symbols to literally, and now the following generation is just throwing them all out as useless. We are both losing. It might surprise you, but both religious fundamentalism and atheism are similar in that they are self-contained rational systems. Such a system works if you stay inside its chosen logic and territory. ~ Richard Rohr

My generation failed to change the world, but at least I did not let the world change me. ~ Chronis Missios

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads, ~ Ashlee Vance

So there really was a whole series of things that took the women of my generation a little bit of time to push forward. ~ Madeleine Albright

Every generation must loose its innocence, must see the brightly painted nursery wall smashed away by the wrecking ball of betrayal to reveal a blighted landscape. For our predecessors, it was the Somme, the Great Depression, the Holocaust or Vietnam; for my generation, it was The Phantom Menace ~ David Mitchell

My generation had Doris Day as a role model, then Gloria Steinem
then Princess Diana. We are the most confused generation. ~ Erica Jong

I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hitchens and Kipling as well as the pastel dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

It [Foucault's Pendulum] can be very comforting for people of my generation, who ate disappointment for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. ~ Umberto Eco

For my generation, the monetary union has always been about forging peace. ~ Jean-Claude Juncker

I think there are very few people, in my generation at least, that are that passionate about what they do. ~ Sasha Grey

The difference between me and other people in my generation is instead of saying the Internet's killing the record business, I say, 'Who cares about the record business, the Internet is enhancing music.' ~ Daryl Hall

I didn't have a philosophical understanding of music until I came to New York. I didn't understand how it applied to my kind and my generation. I thought it was just old people talking. ~ Wynton Marsalis

I did go to Vietnam in 2000 as a kind of pilgrimage and to feel my generation was very much a part of this. I felt responsible but also connected and empathetic. It was a very complicated relationship we had, whichever side you were on. The shock of being there was very few people my own age - I was primarily in the North in the streets of Hanoi. A whole generation was essentially decimated. ~ Anne Waldman

Well, for the My Generation album, there was nothing to be nervous about in them days. We used to take every day as it came. Every day was just a gig and I think we did the recording between gigs literally. ~ Roger Daltrey

People are dying and my generation just does not care. Including me. But I want to care. I really want to. I want to care so bad. ~ Charles Yu

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' But I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain. ~ Bertrand Russell

When the target audience is American teenage kids, you can have problems. My generation prized really fine acting and writing. Sometimes you have to go back to the basic principles which underpin great visual comedy. ~ John Cleese

I like to do theater and hopefully be effective. Most actors, at least contemporary actors of my generation, can't do it. They don't have the chops. ~ Jeffrey Wright

Like every thoughtful parent in every age of history, Neil consoled himself, My generation failed, but this new one is going to change the entire world, and go piously to the polls even on rainy election-days, and never drink more than one cocktail, and end all war. ~ Sinclair Lewis

I kind of dislike 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' but most of Hemingway in general, mainly because his stylistic shenanigans ruined so many young writers of my generation who tried to imitate him. I think, for his time, he moved fiction to a different level stylistically, or at least added to the dialogue, but in our time, he's annoying. ~ Christopher Moore

If my sons are to become the kind of men our daughters would be pleased to live among, attention to domestic details is critical.The hostilities that arise over housework ... are crushing the daughters of my generation ... Change takes time, but men's continued obliviousness to home responsibilities is causing women everywhere to expire of trivialities. ~ Mary Blakely

Artists of my generation were not educated. We were not given the equipment because it was generally believed to be irrelevant. ~ Eric Fischl

Spurred on by both the science and science fiction of our time, my generation of researchers and engineers grew up to ask what if? and what's next? We went on to pursue new disciplines like computer vision, artificial intelligence, real-time speech translation, machine learning, and quantum computing. ~ Elizabeth Bear

In Finland, we learned quite a lot from our own civil war. The wounds were visible when I was a boy, but my generation went into the Second World War and it united the Finnish nation, so I do not see any more wounds. ~ Harri Holkeri

My love of classical hit pretty early. I was 13 when it occurred, and that was really the only music I listened to for many, many years. I went to a conservatory, but I always knew I would be in the pop world, because A) it was more fun and B) you didn't have to practice as much and you could go out more. But I immediately saw this opportunity to inject my material with these sounds that most members of my generation really didn't know about, so it was a great way to differentiate myself from the pack. ~ Rufus Wainwright

I am not a lady
I live in an elevator
in a big department store America.
"Your floor, lady?"
"I don't have a floor,
I live in the elevator."
"You can't just live in an elevator."
They all say that
except for the man from Time magazine
who acted very cool.
We stop and let people into
dresses, better dresses, beauty,
and on the top floor,
home furnishings and then
the credit office, suddenly stark
and no nonsense this is it.
At each floor I look out
at the ladies quietly becoming
ladies and I say "huh"
reflectively.
My hair is long and wild
full of little twigs and cockleburrs.
I visit the floors only for water.
I make my own food
from the berries and frightened rabbits -
I pray forgive me brother as I eat -
that grow wild in the elevator.
Once every three months,
solstice and equinox,
a cop comes and clubs me a little.
The man from Time says
I articulate my generation something
wobble squeegy squiggle pop pop
Yesterday pausing at childrens
I saw another lady
take off all her clothes
and go to live in #7.
We are waiting to fill
all thirteen. ~ Jean Tepperman

When my generation grew up, our only sources of knowledge were books, teachers, parents and friends. The encyclopedia was an item of luxury. We faced big limits in what we could learn, where we could be and who we could reach. ~ Vivek Wadhwa

My generation have had it good, and I am really troubled by what we have done with it. ~ Jeremy Paxton