A man's liberal and conservative phases seem to follow each other in a succession of waves from the time he is born. Children are radicals. Youths are conservatives, with a dash of criminal negligence. Men in their prime are liberals (as long as their digestion keeps pace with their intellect). The middle aged run to shelter: they insure their life, draft a will, accumulate mementos and occasional tables, and hope for security. And then comes old age, which repeats childhood — a time full of humors and sadness, but often full of courage and even prophecy.
Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence; but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity.
From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.
I avoid talking before the youth of the age as I would dancing before them: for if one's tongue don't move in the steps of the day, and thinks to please by its old graces, it is only an object of ridicule.
I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.
It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.
It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.
Nothing so dates a man as to decry the younger generation.
Our tastes greatly alter. The lad does not care for the child's rattle, and the old man does not care for the young man's whore.
The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
The generations of men run on in the tide of time, but leave their destined lineaments permanent for ever and ever.
The longer I live the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us.
The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered.
Twenty can't be expected to tolerate sixty in all things, and sixty gets bored stiff with twenty's eternal love affairs.
We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.
We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country.
What one generation sees as a luxury, the next sees as a necessity.