Generation Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old generation quotes, generation sayings, and generation proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

Every generation rediscovers and re-evaluates the meaning of infancy and childhood. Arnold Gesell
Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers. Lewis Mumford
Each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most. Gilbert K. Chesterton
Each generation has something different at which they are all looking. Gertrude Stein
Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives. Chuck Palahniuk
Each generation has to reinvent spirituality. Susan Sontag
Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late. Thomas Sowell
Every generation and every group brings the door into other things. Iman Abdulmajid
Every generation is convinced there has been a deplorable breakdown of manners. Byron Dobell
This generation has given up on growth. They're just hoping for survival. Penelope Spheeris
Every generation is obsessed with the decade before they were born. Fiona Shaw
Every generation must re-win its own freedoms. Gatewood Galbraith
Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way. Robin G. Collingwood
All of the generations go to what is chic for them, and theater seems to be an older generation's art form. Estelle Parsons
A generation of people are being radicalised by the criminalisation of information sharing. Heather Brooke
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. Henry David Thoreau
Every generation blames the generation before them. Mutabaruka
The destiny of future generations depends on our action today Sunday Adelaja
A generation is not defined by the options it has but by the choices it makes. Sharanya Haridas
We are the generation that came of age in an ageless society. Lois Wyse
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. George Orwell
A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses. George Orwell
Every generation has a plague, so to speak, and that kind of prejudice and discrimination could so easily happen again if we're not mindful and careful. Ryan Murphy
We are the new generation that will be raised up and will remain on high Sunday Adelaja
Each generation has a backlash against the generation before. Jo Brand
The young generation has a different curiosity that is more visual. Jurgen Klinsmann
Each generation should be made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expense of other generations. James Madison
Every generation is more influenced by technology, which is always changing faster. Chuck Klosterman
The generations of men run on in the tide of time, but leave their destined lineaments permanent for ever and ever. William Blake
The knowledge of one generation is the ignorance of the next. Frances Wright
Each generation takes the earth as trustees. We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed. Julius Sterling Morton
Generational oppression begins when what is meant to be transferred to one offspring has been taken over by reason of oppression. Sunday Adelaja
Each generation has been an education for us in different ways. The first child with bloody nose was rushed to the emergency room. The fifth child with bloody nose was told to go to the yard immediately and stop bleeding on the carpet. Art Linkletter
Each generation must recreate liberty for its own times. Florence Ellinwood Allen
We can help the next generation, with the stories we write today. Lailah Gifty Akita
Every generation of converts threshes over the same old straw. Susan B. Anthony
Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity. Frantz Fanon
Every generation tailors history to its taste. Ada Louise Huxtable
Hopefully, generations after us will continue to protect, preserve, and look after this wonderful land. Wilford Brimley
Each generation supposes that the world was simpler for the one before it. Eleanor Roosevelt
Every generation is gonna keep changing, and you just have to embrace the change. Wyclef Jean
Ignorance is pass from one generation to other. Deyth Banger
Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors. Jim Morrison
Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers. Logan P. Smith
The younger generation can smell fakes authenticity trumps cool. Craig Groeschel
Every generation needs regeneration. Charles Spurgeon
Each generation seems to invent its own reasons for war. Walter Dean Myers
We are the first generation of human beings to have substantial insights into the origin of our cosmos and of human life in it. Arthur Peacocke
What one generation sees as a luxury, the next sees as a necessity. Anthony Crosland
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
Our generation must be inspired to search for that maturity which will manifest itself in the qualities of tenacity, dependability, co-operativeness and the inner drive to work and sacrifice for a nobler future of mankind. Joshua L. Liebman
We are raising a generation that has a woefully small stock of ideas and interests and emotions. It must be amused at all costs but it has little skill in amusing itself. It pays some of its members to do what the majority can no longer do for themselves. It is this inner poverty that makes for the worst kind of boredom. Robert J. McCracken
The next generation of businessmen will be articulate, knowing what they believe and entering joyously into the battle of ideas, or there will be no business as we have known it heretofore. Clarence B. Randall
The character of a generation is moulded by personal character. Brooke Foss Westcott
Each generation must win democracy for itself. Many young persons wish they might have lived in the historic and courageous time of George Washington, for example, when there were victories to be made and real history written. On the contrary, there are just as big problems today, and every opportunity for development. Frank Thayer
Occasionally we all inherit, or are given, or get something or some things that are too good to use for a variety of seemingly sound but really quite silly reasons—they’re heirlooms or too rare or too expensive or too fragile or too pretty. The result is heirloom linen handed down from generation to generation that falls apart when some benighted heiress decides to air it. While I'm glad that past generations saved some things we now enjoy, we are enjoying them by using them instead of carefully storing them for our kids—in turn to store. Unused beautiful things are a waste. Malcolm Forbes
I have to study politics and war so that my sons can study mathematics, commerce and agriculture, so their sons can study poetry, painting and music. John Quincy Adams
Tradition means handing on all that is of value to the next generation. Henry Lewis Bullen
Generations are as the days of toilsome mankind.... What the father has made, the son can make and enjoy but has also work of his own appointed him. Thus all things wax and roll onwards; arts, establishments, opinions; nothing is ever completed, but ever completing. Thomas Carlyle
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. The Holy Bible (Ecclesiastes 1:4)
Most oldsters are fascinated by the Future, while the young love to look back to earlier days, especially their own. Malcolm Forbes
To young people everything looks permanent, established—and in their eyes everything should be, needs to be changed. To older people everything seems to change, and in their view almost nothing should. Malcolm Forbes
Older generations are living proof that younger generations can survive their lunacy. Cullen Hightower
We may consider each generation as a separate nation, with a right, by the will of the majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country. Thomas Jefferson
We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority. D.H. Lawrence
Few can be induced to labor exclusively for posterity. Posterity has done nothing for us. Abraham Lincoln
Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Thomas Paine
Every generation, no matter how paltry its character, thinks itself much wiser than the one immediately preceding it, let alone those that are more remote. Arthur Schopenhauer
The man who sees two or three generations is like one who sits in the conjurer’s booth at a fair, and sees the same tricks two or three times. They are meant to be seen only once. Arthur Schopenhauer
Tradition is not a fetish to he prayed to— but a useful record of experiences. Time should bring improvement—but not all old things are worthless. We are served by both the moderns and the ancients. The balanced man is he who clings to the best in the old—and appropriates the desirable in the new. Richard Steele
I have had enough experience in all my years, and have read enough of the past, to know that advice to grandchildren is usually wasted. If the second and third generations could profit by the experience of the first generation, we would not be having some of the troubles we have today. Harry S. Truman
Every one expects to go further than his father went; every one expects to be better than he was born and every generation has one big impulse in its heart—to exceed all the other generations of the past in all the things that make life worth living. William Allen White
A generation which ignores history has no past—and no future. Robert A. Heinlein
A generation of men is like a generation of leaves: the wind scatters some leaves upon the ground, while others the burgeoning wood brings forth — and the season of spring comes on. So of men one generation springs forth and another ceases. Homer
The great cycle of the ages is renewed. Now Justice returns, returns the Golden Age; a new generation now descends from on high. Virgil
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
Would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm blooded animals have arisen from one living filament which the Great First Cause endued with animality. . . and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end! Erasmus Darwin
The whining and sniveling that wiser generations ridiculed with satire is given best-seller status among us. Eugene Peterson
People will not look forward to postertity, who will never look backward to their ancestors. Edmund Burke
We are always doing,' says he, 'something for Posterity, but I would fain see Posterity do something for us.' Joseph Addison
The fiery trials through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the last generation. Abraham Lincoln
Intimacy does not exist between generations — only trust. Carl Zucker
No generation can bequeath to its successor what it has not got. C.S. Lewis
Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. C.S. Lewis
Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. C.S. Lewis
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. G. K. Chesterton
Parents often talk about the younger generation as if they didn’t have anything to do with it. Dr. Haim Ginott
He plants trees to benefit another generation. Caecilius Statius
The earth belongs always to the living generation. Thomas Jefferson
When old age shall this generation waste, / Thou shah remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, / “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"" — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. John Keats
Not to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself with a moral — the truth, namely, that the wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones. Nathaniel Hawthorne
The younger generation will come knocking at my door. Henrik Ibsen
We're a beat generation. Jack Kerouac
Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are. Flannery O'Connor
Every tradition grows ever more venerable — the more remote its origin, the more confused that origin is. The reverence due to it increases from generation to generation. The tradition finally becomes holy and inspires awe. Friedrich Nietzsche
Let us have madness openly, / O men Of my generation. / Let us follow / The footsteps of this slaughtered age. Kenneth Patchen
You know how it always is, every new idea, it takes a generation or two until it becomes obvious that there's no real problem. Richard P. Feynman
One generation opens the road upon which another generation travels. Chinese Proverb
One generation plants the trees under whose shade another takes its ease. Chinese Proverb
Trouble is, kids feel they have to shock their elders and each generation grows up into something harder to shock. Ben Lindsey
The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young. Willa Cather
Come mothers and fathers, / Throughout the land / And don't criticize / What you can't understand…/ For the times they are a-changin'! Bob Dylan
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened. Saki
Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing. George Bernard Shaw
The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything. Oscar Wilde
It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date. George Bernard Shaw
You are all a lost generation. Gertrude Stein
Generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks. Sir Thomas Browne
The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. Karl Marx
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; / And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell. Gerard Manley Hopkins
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King Jr.
The Youth of a Nation are the trustees of Posterity. Benjamin Disraeli
I saw the finest minds of my generation consumed by madness. I also the feeblest minds of my generation cosumed by madness. There's nothing to howl about really. Rural Crazy
You're an impatient generation. Gen. Yevgraf Zhivago
If you wan't to survive, you have to depend on the new generation. Little Mohammed
Each generation is called upon to follow its own quest. Etienne Navarre
My Generation gets Traumatised for Breakfast. Summer
For half of us are dead, / And half have lost their youth, / And our hearts are scarred by many griefs, / That only age should know. J.C. Squire
Was it always as now? This race I truly can't fathom. / Nothing is young but old age; youth, alas! only is old. Friedrich Schiller
Too soon, life has swept each one away; / I now feel what my parents must have felt. / Old age for me midlife for them. / Then our next generation comes. W.T. Jackson
There's nothing new beneath the sun, I say. / Ye pigmies of a later race, who come / And play out your brief generation's play / Below me, know, I too spent my life's sum, / And revelled through my short tumultuous day. Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
I don't feel at home in this generation / The ones without a need they ain't got a reason / I've been feeling alone in this generation Nicholas Jago; Peter Hayes; Robert Turner
We want to know the face of freedom / We want to make a place where we can learn to love / Build a world that we can be proud of / This is my generation Emerson Hart; Nicole Hart
Pardon me for living, but this is my world too / I can't help if what's cool to us might be strange to you / Pardon me for breathing, borrow some of your air / The trouble with your generation is you don't take time to care Prince Rogers Nelson
Bold generation, we wanna change the world / The only thing that's in our way is you / Your old-fashioned music, your old ideas / We're sick and tired of you telling us what to do Prince Rogers Nelson