17 Quotes About Generations

“In every generation there is a chosen one."

Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer


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“If we could raise one generation with unconditional love, there would be no Hitlers.

Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.”

William James

“You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.”

Brigham Young

“Every 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

“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.”

Allen Ginsberg, Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems

"The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you.”

Elie Wiesel

"Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. You can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom.”

Nelson Mandela

“The trouble with my generation is that we all think we're fucking geniuses."

Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

“We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.”

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.”

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.”

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.”

Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

“Justice is based on values. And those change every generation.”

Eiichiro Oda

"If only each generation would realise that the time for greatness is right now when they're alive ... the time to flower is now.”

Patti Smith

"There are no myths about Generation X. It's all true.”

Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

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