Older Generation Quotes

Didn't anyone stop to reflect that the so-called old people of today used to smoke pot, for heaven's sake, and wear bandannas tied around their heads and picket the White House? When Amanda chided her for saying that something was "cool" ("I hate it when the older generation tries to copy the younger," she had said), did she not realize that "cool" had been used in Abby's time, too, not to mention long before? ~ Anne Tyler

The young now approached love in the way they approached success and consumption and the future itself: with an underlying assumption of abundance. They expected more out of love than earlier generations did and were willing to fight to secure it, but when it failed they were equally at ease in walking away. It was one strike and you're out. They rejected the moral vocabulary of an older generation: patience, tolerance, adjustment. ~ Anand Giridharadas

What I tell these young people is, the world is not as dangerous as the older generation would like you to believe. Anyone I know who has ever taken a risk and lost a job has ended up getting a better one two years later. ~ Jonathan Kozol

The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters ~ William Maxwell

Older generations can sometimes look down on today's hip hop but I refuse that mindset. I remember how hurt I was when older people told me that Run-D.M.C. was jungle music or that it was not music at all. Or that LL Cool J was not art. ~ Erik Parker

For an older generation of employees, social media often remains misunderstood and underutilized. ~ Ryan Holmes

The air of the English is down-to-earth. They care about details; there's a tradition, but there's also a counter-culture: the younger generation versus the older generation and so on. But then that's well blended into a happy balance and crystallised into common sense. ~ Tadashi Yanai

We're accustomed to the older generation looking down on the younger and telling them that they know nothing of the world. But things are rather out of kilter now, aren't they? It is your generation who understands the inhumanity of man, not ours. It's boys like you who have to live with what you have seen and what you have done. You've become the generation of response. While your elders can only look in your direction and wonder. ~ John Boyne

All of the generations go to what is chic for them, and theater seems to be an older generation's art form. ~ Estelle Parsons

On my US tour maybe three out of 30 shows there was an Elvis impersonator in the crowd but that's it. I usually get younger fans, and those that come that are of an older generation end up walking out because it's too loud. ~ Lisa Marie Presley

Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth. ~ Maya Angelou

You have the older generation like Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson who are not as old as Graham Greene, but still are coming on. I dare say anyone who knew the scene better than I know it could fill it in with a very satisfactory supply of novels. ~ William Golding

Again, it's about patterns––you see the pattern, for example, that a young person has moral outrage and is finding effective ways to express it. It's very important that the older generation sees this, feels it, and tastes it. Otherwise they become cynical old goats, and they die with regret. But if you can see that younger people are also tapping into visions analogous to those that you had in your twenties, that's very heartening. If you have something to teach them––which you probably do, especially if you carry some wounds yourself––then there's a mutual learning that goes on. It's not one-way by any stretch of the imagination. It's a beautiful thing. ~ Adam Bucko

There is a widening gap between the middle-aged-to-older generation, who still read newspapers and watch CCTV news, and the Internet generation. ~ Rebecca MacKinnon

What has been forgotten is that there were major intellectual breakthroughs in the 1960s, thanks to North American writers of an older generation. There was a rupture in continuity, since most young people influenced by those breakthroughs did not enter the professions. ~ Camille Paglia

The older generation may not understand all the new scientific terms of the young generation, but they know the principles of life which never change. And it is a wise youngster who will not discard the inheritance of wisdom and experience from those who have gone before. ~ Isobel Kuhn

I do think it's fascinating to see a play where everybody's sort of, in various ways, uprooted, and you see the older generation, the parents, whose faith has been something concrete that has guided them through a specific set of hurdles and circumstances. ~ Stephen Karam

I'm not good at texting because I'm an older generation, old school. And nobody ever listens to the answering machine anymore. It's terrible. ~ Igor Levit

We are your shadow uncles, your angel godfathers, your mother's or your grandmother's best friend from college, the author of that book you found in the gay section of the library. We are characters in a Tony Kushner play, or names on a quilt that rarely gets taken out anymore. We are the ghosts of the remaining older generation. You know some of our songs. We do not want to haunt you too somberly. We don't want our legacy to be gravitas. You wouldn't want to live your life like that, and you won't want to be remembered like that, either. Your mistake would be to find our commonality in our dying. The living part mattered more. We taught you how to dance. ~ David Levithan

older generation accounts for only 19 percent of the national church, they give 46 percent of the donations. ~ Mark Driscoll

It was not only for Americans that he was concerned, or primarily the older generation of any land. The thought that disturbed him the most, and that made the prospect of war much more fearful than it would otherwise have been, was the specter of the death of the children of this country and all the world - the young people who had no role, who had no say, who knew nothing even of the confrontation, but whose lives would be snuffed out like everyone else's. They would never have a chance to make a decision, to vote in an election, to run for office, to lead a revolution, to determine their own destinies. Our generation had. But the great tragedy was that, if we erred, we erred not only for ourselves, our futures, our hopes, and our country, but for the lives, futures, hopes, and countries of those who had never been given an opportunity to play a role, to vote aye or nay, to make themselves felt. ~ Robert F. Kennedy

It's the same thing now. When I go onstage the young people scream and holler as much as the older generation. ~ Etta James

Older generations are living proof that younger generations can survive their lunacy. ~ Cullen Hightower

I wouldn't say they're neglected, but everybody is going to grow old and we should be looking after the older generation more than we do at the moment. ~ Alan Hansen

Sometimes I want to yell on this track; I want to yell the whole song, and I don't think nothing's wrong with that, but the older generation feel like you can't. ~ Slim Jimmy

With an older generation, there's some weight carried with the Beatles. There's almost like an untouchable, god-like force field around them. ~ Brendon Urie

I think this is the danger we face whenever time passes and those who have suffered recover from what flattened them. The generation coming up behind might underestimate or miss completely all that the older generation survived. Q. ~ Susan Meissner

The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it. ~ Simon Wiesenthal

I'm an older generation. ~ Martin Scorsese

There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters.' (from "The Man in the Moon") ~ William Maxwell

Consistency, constancy, and undeviating diligence to maintain Christian character are a must if the older generation is to command respect, or even a hearing, from the young. ~ Billy Graham

Today's comedian has a cross to bear that he built himself. A comedian of the older generation did an act and he told the audience, This is my act. Today's comic is not doing an act. The audience assumes he's telling the truth. What is truth today may be a damn lie next week. ~ Lenny Bruce

The ukulele has always appealed to the older generation. ~ Jake Shimabukuro

It's rare enough as an older generation player that you're 100% fit - there's always something niggling. ~ Brian O'Driscoll

Our chaotic economic situation has convinced so many of our young people that there is no room for them. They become uncertain andrestless and morbid; they grab at false promises, embrace false gods and judge things by treacherous values. Their insecurity makes them believe that tomorrow doesn't matter and the ineffectualness of their lives makes them deny the ideals which we of an older generation acknowledged. ~ Hortense Odlum

The young are the silent carriers of COVID-19 and the older generation are the victims. ~ Steven Magee

The older generation sat looking at the younger, and Kat wondered exactly when and how the baton had been passed. She wanted to know if it was too late to give it back. ~ Ally Carter

Magoo's appeal lies in our hostility toward an older generation. But he's not only nearsighted physically. His mind is selective of what it sees, too. That is where the humor, the satire lies, in the difference between what he thinks he sees and reality as we see it. ~ Jim Backus

The older generations have eaten the future of the younger ones. ~ Giuliano Amato

I no longer wished to have a diluted life, made faint by living according to the norms and values of an older generation who'd forgotten what it felt like to have the impassioned representatives of soul and spirit lobby their vessel with an unrelenting persistence to take them on an adventure. ~ Ken Ilgunas

People fall out of love, or get married for the wrong reasons. People change. The older generation - they got married and had a kid when they were 20. How do you know who you are when you're 20? ~ Kellan Lutz

Once your children are grown up and have children of their own, the problems are theirs and the less the older generation interferes the better. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Episode 5: Meanwhile, they'd all lost touch, because they didn't have Facebook and phones were expensive or whatever. (You do have to feel sorry for the older generation. I mean, all this "pay phones" and "telegrams" and "airmail." How did they cope?) ~ Sophie Kinsella

My grandmother raised me for a good portion of my life. She moved to Los Angeles with me to be an actor, so I've always had a connection with an older generation. ~ Britt Robertson

We all respected him because, in a way, we felt as though the president was one of the guys, albeit of a salty older generation. When he issued orders for a national fight, he understood the consequences of sending people into harm's way. ~ Gary J. Byrne

At heart, this perfect storm involves the collision of an older generation of American engineers and scientists who are retiring at the same time that a younger generation is not stepping into their shoes in sufficient numbers - and at the same time that the foreigners who used to make up the difference are either staying home or being kept out of America for security reasons. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

The classical music scene was completely unfamiliar to me. It was something that I didn't have the most fun associations around. A lot of people don't - they think of older generations and stuffiness. But it's not. You listen to the Overture of 1812, and you can hear a rock n' roll catharsis. ~ Lola Kirke

Middle age is when you stop criticizing the older generation and start criticizing the younger one. ~ Laurence J. Peter

An older generation of free market economists used to point out that what is wrong with socialist planning is that it requires the sort of perfect knowledge (of present and future alike) that is never vouchsafed to ordinary mortals. They were right. But it transpires that the same is true for market theorists: ~ Tony Judt

The older generation had greater respect for land than science. But we live in an age when science, more than soil, has become the provider of growth and abundance. Living just on the land creates loneliness in an age of globality. ~ Shimon Peres

A lot of youth today have become very narrow and conservative in a way, whereas we in the older generation are kind of living it. ~ Marc Almond

I still get angry when older people assume that everyone in my generation, screws around. They're probably the same ones who think all kids use dope. It's true that we are more open than our parents but that just means we accept sex and talk about it. It doesn't mean we are all jumping into bed together. ~ Judy Blume

An older generation, chastened by one depression, is afraid to be optimistic; and a younger generation, accustomed to security, is inexperienced at being pessimistic. ~ Warren W. Wiersbe

I am somebody who focuses on a dialogue between generations - that's the drive of my work. I believe the young generation take the power; they'll take over at one point, but the older generation, they'll push it away only because of the fear. I'm the opposite; I'm curious. ~ Raf Simons

While the older generation is content to sit around and critique culture, that culture is moving beyond them. At some point the traditional church and all of the expressions of that church will become essentially irrelevant. ~ Ted Dekker

Being a digital photographer I'm in awe of the older generation of photographers who created all those iconic cinematic style images on film, such as Man Ray's portrait of the photographer Lee Miller. ~ Paul Walker

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. ~ Vivienne Westwood

Whatever happens, happens for the best.' That's how any domestic counselling starts in a Marathi family. Everyone in every family has an inner psychiatrist who rises to the occasion with some home-made mottos, a few lines from Jagjit Singh ghazal. An older generation may quote Tukaram but underlying all this is the bedrock phase: Whatever happens, happens for the best. ~ Sachin Kundalkar

I'm one of a generation brought up on television whose acting is more 'naturalistic', whereas with some of the older generation it's more heightened. But I think there's room for both styles. ~ David Oyelowo

No matter your situation, you can make family history a part of your life right now. Primary children can draw a family tree. Youth can participate in proxy baptisms. They can also help the older generation work with computers. Parents can relate stories of their lives to their posterity. Worthy adult members can hold a temple recommend and perform temple ordinances for their own kin. ~ Russell M. Nelson

The faces of these young people, especially those who were military men, bore that expression of condescending respect for their elders which seems to say to the older generation, "We are prepared to respect and honor you, but all the same remember that the future belongs to us. ~ Leo Tolstoy

If readers, young and old, would take even a moment to reflect on our rapidly shifting culture and ideology, I would be happy. Many leaders of the older generation dismiss emerging culture. Those leaders are at risk of becoming a feeble voice-piece without followers. Most of the younger generation is going deaf to the truth. ~ Ted Dekker

It is not new for the older generation to bewail the indolence of the young, and there is a tendency for the latter to maintain much of the older ethic screened by a new semantics and an altered ideology. ~ David Riesman

In San Francisco, most of the older activists, especially at Berkeley, were very hostile towards punks. The music, certainly, wasn't nice and mellow for them, and neither was our look or our attitude. While in Vancouver, the two most important early punk bands, D.O.A. and the Subhumans, were both managed by former yippie activists, who saw this as a logical extension of what they were already doing. ~ Jello Biafra

The Constitution needs allegiance and loyalty and renewal and understanding with each generation, or else it's not going to last. ~ Anthony Kennedy

But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny--helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.'
'Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.'
'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals--mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.'
'Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing. ~ George Orwell

I think the consensus among our generation and people younger than us is that we do have a defining challenge in the moment, so I do like being involved in something bigger than the finger-doodling I do in art. It stimulates your brain in certain ways. ~ Edward Norton

And as I grew older, I then auditioned for the Royal Academy of Music in London, and they said, well, no, we won't accept you, because we haven't a clue - you know - of the future of a so-called 'deaf' musician. And I just couldn't quite accept that. ~ Evelyn Glennie

Sacrifices. They married in record numbers and gave birth to another distinctive generation, the Baby Boomers. They stayed true to their values of personal responsibility, duty, honor, and faith. ~ Tom Brokaw

When you're younger, your inspiration is there. As you get older, it tends to waver. Once you find it - I found it again - that's where you can draw from. That's where you draw your strength from. ~ Elvis Stojko

This is a very connected, tolerant, creative generation, but a lot of them feel really constrained because they've got this big debt. ~ Hillary Clinton

The response to 'The Greatest Generation' and the books that followed has been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life. ~ Tom Brokaw

Most nations, as well as people are impossible only in their youth; they become incorrigible as they grow older. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Every generation", Aby Warburg mused long ago, "gets the Renaissance of Antiquity that it deserves. ~ Anonymous

Unalert yet sometimes suffused through and through by an inward light, is characteristic of the primitive and of the child (and also of those moments of religious and artistic inspiration that occur ever less and less often as a Culture grows older) right ~ Oswald Spengler

If you're not going to get any wiser, what's the point of getting older? ~ Elizabeth Lowell

This myth he'd made out of intricate movements and imagination, out of moonlight and love, out of prayers older than Adam, and gray cliffs and crimson shadows, laments and rivers of martyrs - what had it come to at last? When the waves receded, the shores of Time would spread out there clean, empty, shining with infinite grains of memory and little else. ~ Frank Herbert

There we were all in one place, a generation lost in space. ~ Don McLean

To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date. ~ Marcel Proust

The notion that as a man grows older his illusions leave him is not quite true. What is true is that his early illusions are supplanted by new, and to him, equally convincing illusions. ~ George Jean Nathan

Your legacy will be the world's inheritance, and the laughter you left us with will be the birthright of a new generation.
from a letter to Robin Williams ~ Michelle Franklin

When I was younger, I was just always looking for this hot, so hot, like super-hot girl. And then, as I've gotten older, different things are really important to me, like just honesty. Being able to sit down and have a conversation. ~ Blake Griffin

Albert [Brooks] was rare in that he could make adults laugh. He was a prodigy. At age 15 and 16, he could make my dad laugh uncontrollably. And whenever we had parties, some of the funniest people of my generation - whether it was Billy Crystal or Robin Williams or John Belushi - would be doing shtick. ~ Rob Reiner

I had been overexposed in a particular way because my marriage to an extremely successful older man meant I was involved in his public life as well as my own. ~ Sarah Brightman

All things take time. A lot of my films still run on cable and are in video stores, and there's a whole generation that doesn't know who I am. So, it's a dichotomy. In some people's minds I may never grow up. ~ Robby Benson

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, and in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man's distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: 'This tower is most interesting.' But they also said (after pushing it over): 'What a muddle it is in!' And even the man's own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: 'He is such an odd fellow! Imagine using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? he had no sense of proportion.' But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Absolutely the United States should lead in space, for the survival of the United States. It's inspiring for the next generation. If we lose leadership, then we'll be using Chinese capability to inspire Americans. ~ Buzz Aldrin

(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. ~ William James

This time is very important in your life because God wants to lift this generation from failures, poverty, and unbelief ~ Sunday Adelaja

I've spent my creative life so far first in the theatre, then on the page, then on the screen, examining what is turning out as I grow older to look like one enormous landscape.

What I originally thought were different worlds turn out to be one interconnected place. And like a bedspread viewed by a sick child from his pillow, I am very aware that there are colours in various corners which I know very well, but I haven't yet found the ways to get from the blue to the green and from the green to the red.

I've just begun, and I suppose that's become my preoccupation – the idea that at one point I will see it clearly. ~ Clive Barker

We are a generation told to consume and consume, with no thought of where it all comes from and where it all goes. ~ Essena O'Neill

I think you have to make concessions in life. One of the most frustrating things about getting older is [you realize] the reason you have a plan is so you can see everything that it isn't. The plan never works. Something happens and you adjust to it and you adapt to it and you accept it and you keep going, but that's not the plan. ~ Torquil Campbell

Let us educate the younger generation to be shy in and out of season: to edge behind the furniture: to say spasmodic and ill-digested things: to twist their feet round the protective feet of sofas and armchairs: to feel that their hands belong to someone else
that they are objects, which they long to put down on some table away from themselves.
For shyness is the protective fluid within which our personalities are able to develop into natural shapes. Without this fluid the character becomes merely standardized or imitative: it is within the tender velvet sheath of shyness that the full flower of idiosyncrasy is nurtured: it is from this sheath alone that it can eventually unfold itself, coloured and undamaged. Let the shy understand, therefore, that their disability is not only an inconvenience, but also a privilege. Let them regard their shyness as a gift rather than as an affliction. Let them consider how intolerable are those of their contemporaries who are not also shy. ~ Harold Nicolson

We don't change as we get older - we just get to be more of what we've always been. ~ Joan D. Chittister

Say to the next generation again and again: God is truthful; God keeps his word; God does not lie; God can be trusted! That's one blessing of Advent. Receive it as a wonderful Christmas gift, and give it to as many people as you can. ~ John Piper

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to
mankind, which are delivered down from generation to
generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn ~ Joseph Addison

He wondered vaguely how many others like here there might be in the younger generation, people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog. ~ George Orwell

I don't have a sense of time. Time is timeless to me, and I'm not in a hurry to get older. I mean, if I were worried about time, all the time, it would be terrible. ~ Nico

Hey presto: time travel. You don't need a time machine, it turns out, you just need a friend to laugh like a teenager. Chronology shivers. ~ Michael Marshall Smith

I think women should start to embrace their age. What's the alternative to getting older? You die. I can't change the day I was born. But I can take care of my skin, my body, my mind, and try to live my life and be happy. ~ Olivia Munn