Generation X Quotes

1. "There seemed never to be a moment when he was not haunted by the fear of being thought lacking by his British colleagues. And yet it seemed to be universally agreed that he was one of the most successful Indians of his generation, a model for his countrymen. Did this mean that one day all of India would become a shadow of what he had been? Millions of people trying to live their lives in conformity with incomprehensible rules? Better to be what Dolly had been: a woman who had no illusions about the nature of her condition; a prisoner who knew the exact dimensions of her cage and could look for contentment within those confines."
Author: Amitav Ghosh

2. "Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book."[Why Reading is Dangerous, Spirit Magazine (Southwest Airlines), February 2008]"
Author: Anthony Doerr

3. "So here, Floyd told himself, is the first generation of the Spaceborn; there would be more of them in the years to come. Though there was sadness in this thought, there was also a great hope. When Earth was tamed and tranquil, and perhaps a little tired, there would still be scope for those who loved freedom, for the tough pioneers, the restless adventurers. But their tools would not be ax and gun and canoe and wagon; they would be nuclear power plant and plasma drive and hydroponic farm. The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children."
Author: Arthur C. Clarke

4. "We hang on to our values, even if they seem at times tarnished and worn; even if, as a nation and in our own lives, we have betrayed them more often that we care to remember. What else is there to guide us? Those values are our inheritance, what makes us who we are as a people. And although we recognize that they are subject to challenge, can be poked and prodded and debunked and turned inside out bu intellectuals and cultural critics, they have proven to be both surprisingly durable and surprisingly constant across classes, and races, and faiths, and generations. We can make claims on their behalf, so long as we understand that our values must be tested against fact and experience, so long as we recall that they demand deeds and not just words."
Author: Barack Obama

5. "Under a system that sought to stamp out tainted blood for three generations, the punishment would extend to parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins. A lot of people felt if you had one life to give, you would give it to get rid of this terrible regime, but then you're not the only one getting punished. Your family would go through hell."
Author: Barbara Demick

6. "Exploration! Exploring the past! We students in the camps seminar considered ourselves radical explorers. We tore open the windows and let in the air, the wind that finally whirled away the dust that society had permitted to settle over the horrors of the past. We made sure people could see. And we placed no reliance on legal scholarship. It was evident to us that there had to be convictions. It was just as evident as conviction of this or that camp guard or police enforcer was only the prelude. The generation that had been served by the guards and enforcers, or had done nothing to stop them, or had not banished them from its midst as it could have done after 1945, was in the dock, and we explored it, subjected it to trial by daylight, and condemned it to shame."
Author: Bernhard Schlink

7. "I grew up with all these hippies. Ten of them and one of me. None of them wanted to work and spent all their time talking and dreaming and fooling around. 90% of that hippie stuff is just bullshit but the ideals of that generation were very beautiful and powerful and rebellious. I had to dress and feed myself from the time I was six, which meant I became a very organised person. But there came a point when I was about seven or eight, when I saw the absurdity of living in a commune and I said to them, "Why don't you just DO SOMETHING!?"
Author: Björk

8. "The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it. We do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off - we do not have to stand for this."
Author: Bono

9. "Since history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, the pattern that appears useful and agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next."
Author: Carl Lotus Becker

10. "Scratch any fortune and you'll find blood only a generation or two back...child labor in mines or mills...Slavery. Drugs. Stock swindles. Wasting nature with clear-cuts, pollution, harvesting to extinction. Monopolies. Disease. War. Every fortune comes out of something unpleasant."
Author: Chuck Palahniuk

11. "If more politicians in this country were thinking about the next generation instead of the next election, it might be better for the United States and the world."
Author: Claude Pepper

12. "Answering the question 'How would you like to smell?' by saying 'I'd rather I didn't' is also no longer acceptable. It's not playing the game. Men are expected to put some cash into the cosmetic pot too - it's seen as almost un-feminist not to. What a uniquely capitalist response to that gender inequality: women have been forced by convention for generations - millennia - to spend money on expensive clothes and agonising shoes, to daub themselves with reality-concealing slap, to smell expensively inhuman, to self-mutilate in pursuit of eternal youth; and this, quite rightly, has come to be deemed unfair. But how do we end this hell? We make men do it too. Well done everyone."
Author: David Mitchell

13. "But Dag, for all of his efforts, might as well have been talking to a cat. Our parents' generation seems neither able nor interested in understanding how marketers exploit them. They take shopping at face value."
Author: Douglas Coupland

14. "?"All that history, the love & laughter, is designed for youth. It is what keeps the story of who we are alive from one generation to the next. It ensures our indelible mark in the souls of generations we will never have the pleasure of holding in a warm embrace. Life is short people. Before you know it, another decade will pass, people you love will be lost to this world, and all that will be left of them is what we carry in our hearts." Elsie Love 2011"
Author: Elsie Love

15. "My generation grew up with an imposed myth: the myth of happily ever after -- (and makes you do the same). Whether we wrote this myth or its opposite -- there is no prince, and ever if there is, he never comes, and even if he comes, he never makes you come -- we were still seeing our lives in terms of this myth. Pro-prince or anti-prince, the terms of the debate were defined -- and not by us. We tried to write other myths -- some day my princess will come or I am my own princess so there --but they were all derivative. The armature of plot was the same. We were reacting, not creating. We had not expanded the terms in which we saw our lives."
Author: Erica Jong

16. "You're talking about a younger generation, Generation Y, whose interpersonal communication skills are different from Generation X. The younger generation is more comfortable saying something through a digital mechanism than even face to face."
Author: Erik Qualman

17. "Thought like that showed me the needless ambiguity of words like space-time. The average person heard a word like that and figured he'd never understand it. But it was so simple. Every place you ever saw was linked to a specific time ... the school you visited twenty years after you graduated, the football field you played on, the track you ran -- none of them was the same. If they were, you would collide with the generations that had run on them before and after you. The lover you kissed was not the same person he or she was sixty seconds before. In that minute, a million skin cells had died and been replaced by new ones. The smallest slices of space-time separated thought from action Life from death."
Author: Greg Iles

18. "Evolution is all about passing on the genome to the next generation, adapting and surviving through generation after generation. From an evolutionary point of view, you and I are like the booster rockets designed to send the genetic payload into the next level of orbit and then drop off into the sea."
Author: Harvey V. Fineberg

19. "There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die."
Author: Hunter S. Thompson

20. "If we hold true to our ideals and our commitment to freedom, this generation of servicemen and women will have extended liberty to the Iraqi people, just as previous generations of Americans have all across the globe."
Author: Jim Talent

21. "Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars. With the Model T, part of the concept of private property disappeared. Pliers ceased to be privately owned and a tire pump belonged to the last man who had picked it up. Most of the babies of the period were conceived in Model T Fords and not a few were born in them. The theory of the Anglo Saxon home became so warped that it never quite recovered."
Author: John Steinbeck

22. "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."
Author: Judy Blume

23. "I know if I were in your generation I would be really tired of seeing Sophia Loren as a sex object."
Author: Katherine Dunn

24. "Attention deficit is no longer the supposed domain of Generation Y's who were brought up on a diet of social media and new technology. A recent study revealed 65 percent of 55-64 year olds surf, text and watch television simultaneously."
Author: Kevin Kelly

25. "This way of leaving your family for work had condemned them over several generations to have their hearts always in other places, their minds thinking about people elsewhere; they could never be in a single existence at one time. How wonderful it was going to be to have things otherwise."
Author: Kiran Desai

26. "Two or three million years ago, the Earth was a ball of fire, revolving arround it's own axis. It took millions of years to cool under the constant downpour of rain. The Process was slow, imperceptible, but the gradual change - transition - came to pass. Same for generation after generation of evolution on Earth.Nature never jumps. She works in a leisurely manner, experimenting continuously. The same natural transition can be seen in man. This gradual change, transition, works every where, silently building storms and destroying soloar systems."
Author: Lajos Egri

27. "Whoever is planted in the Taowill not be rooted up.Whoever embraces the Taowill not slip away.Her name will be held in honorfrom generation to generation.Let the Tao be present in your lifeand you will become genuine.Let it be Present in your familyand your family will flourish.Let it be present in your countryand your country will be an example to all countries in the world.Let it be present in the universeand the universe will sing.How do I know this is true?by looking inside myself."
Author: Lao Tzu

28. "Now we lie here, a decapitated generation, our child-like names vanishing on tombstones, can't you see? Once there was Rock 'n' Roll, freedom of speech, baroque picnics on miraculous boats, there was resurrection on romantic lakes, there were melting kisses under golden trees, there was ticking laughter, clicking metaphors, there were wine and poetic sex, beauty..."
Author: Laura Gentile

29. "It became obvious to me that the generation who changed the world were my parents' generation, and not only in terms of the Second World War, but if you look at all the social legislation of the '60s - abortion, homosexual law reform, equal pay - it wasn't done by my generation; it was done by people who were adults."
Author: Linda Grant

30. "Like the Founders, the Conservative also recognizes in society a harmony of interests, as Adam Smith put it, and rules of cooperation that have developed through generations of human experience and collective reasoning that promote the betterment of the individual and society. This is characterized as ordered liberty, the social contract, or the civil society."
Author: Mark R. Levin

31. "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."
Author: Maya Angelou

32. "They convinced our mothers that if a food item came in a bottle -- or a can or a box or a cellophane bag -- then it was somehow better for you than when it came to you free of charge via Mother Nature....An entire generation of us were introduced in our very first week to the concept that phony was better than real, that something manufactured was better than something that was right there in the room. (Later in life, this explained the popularity of the fast food breakfast burrito, neocons, Kardashians, and why we think reading this book on a tiny screen with only three minutes of battery life left is enjoyable."
Author: Michael Moore

33. "On Christmas. "Santa Claus represents God on assistance," said Clyde."Santa Claus is a negative-idealed god, the pagan god of material worship," Leon stated. "Christmas means the rebirth, regeneration. Some people have Christmas every day. The Christmas tree stands up and either the wife trims it or they trim it together with righteous-idealed sexual intercourse. Or the husband prays to God through his Christmas tree and trims his bodily Christmas tree. Christ-mast; the mast of Christ, the upstanding penis—that's what it means to me.""Santa Claus is a good symbolization for Christmas," said Joseph. "Department stores, shopping, the coming of the New Year. Christmas means better business in the stores."
Author: Milton Rokeach

34. "The speaker was good, I liked what he had to say. I had expected a dry recitation on how women should change their gender if they expected to advance in a man's world, since I wasn't about to grow a cock and balls this man gave me hope and inspiration. Women dominated the audience, not surprising since the average African man wouldn't support a speaker preaching gender equality. Africa was a continent with generational precedent for the alpha male, it was part of their culture, learned at an early age. This led to abuse on many levels. Women were expected to do the physical work, produce male babies and satisfy the sexual urgings of men. Urgings that in other societies would be called rape but in Africa were accepted as common practice. I understood this better than most. Pictures of the Kony boy-soldiers and their adult commander were burned into my memory."
Author: Nick Hahn

35. "Marginal tax rates are the lowest they've been in generations, and all we can talk about is tax cuts."
Author: Patrick McHenry

36. "We have a new generation of very rich people who want to do more with their money than buy a lot of expensive toys. They want to live meaningful lives."
Author: Peter Singer

37. "It is always self-defeating to pretend to a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history."
Author: Renata Adler

38. "The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion mixes explosively with (and gives strong sanction to) both. Only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today. Without a doubt it is the prime aggravator of the Middle East. Those of us who have for years politely concealed our contempt for the dangerous collective delusion of religion need to stand up and speak out. Things are different now. ‘All is changed, changed utterly."
Author: Richard Dawkins

39. "Perhaps you and I have lived with this miracle too long to be properly appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again."
Author: Ronald Reagan

40. "What I'm seeing is a generation that says consistently, 'I would rather text than make a telephone call.' Why? It's less risky. I can just get the information out there. I don't have to get all involved; it's more efficient. I would rather text than see somebody face to face."
Author: Sherry Turkle

41. "..the family motto, after all, is 'To Have and To Hold'. We were always a warrior breed, but we don't fight solely for lands and material wealth. There's an understanding, drummed into all of us from our earliest years, that success-true success-means capturing and holding , something more. That something more is the future-to excel is very well, but one needs to excel and survive. To seize lands is well and good, but we want to hold them for all time. Which means creating and building a family-defending the family that is, and creating the next generation. Because it's the next generation that's our future. Without securing that future, material success is no real success at all."
Author: Stephanie Laurens

42. "Pops gave him a cool stare that settled Tom down - a thing not always easy to do. "Son, do you know what history is?""Uh...stuff that happened in the past?""Nope," he said, trying on his canvas change-belt. "History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever growing pile of crap. Right now, we're standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we'll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come. That's why your folks' clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example. And, as someone who's destined to buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a leetle more forgiving."
Author: Stephen King

43. "The claim at the heart of this book has been carefully researched by several generations of scholars and is orthodox in academic circles, if not beyond. Christians under the Roman Empire were neither constantly persecuted nor martyred in huge numbers for their faith. They were prosecuted from time to time for alleged sedition, holding illegal meetings or refusing to sacrifice to the emperor. They were, like other convicts, sometimes tortured and executed in horrible ways. They seem to have been regarded by many Romans with distaste as a particularly silly superstition. But Christian stories of thousands of individual and mass martyrdoms over centuries have at best a limited basis in historical fact, and in many cases are sheer fiction."
Author: Teresa Morgan

44. "In many ways, the young are more religiously minded than the older generations. I think it's the flip side of an age of individualism. Youngsters are not afraid to tell you what they think, to express their faith and be quite exuberant about it."
Author: Vincent Nichols

45. "If I spoke to Rodman in those terms, saying that my grandparents' lives seem to me organic and ours what? hydroponic? he would ask in derision what I meant. Define my terms. How do you measure the organic residue of a man or a generation? This is all metaphor. If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist."
Author: Wallace Stegner

46. "So the Negro race has continued, and today is the day of the Negro as far as the world is concerned. They have influenced the generations of time; they have mixed their blood with many peoples, until there are many peoples not able to hold the priesthood."
Author: Warren Jeffs

47. "Born of a virgin, apart from human generation, because He existed before His mother. He was not just born in this world; He came down from heaven into the world (John 3:13; 6:33, 38, 41–42, 50–51, 58). Jesus was sent by the Father and therefore came into the world having a human mother but not a human father (4:34; 5:23–24, 30; 9:4)."
Author: Warren W. Wiersbe

48. "If the generations of mankind suffered and laid down their lives; if martyrs sang in the fire... for no other end than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should succeed, and protract... their contented and inoffensive lives, why, at such a rate... better ring down the curtain before the last act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be saved from so singularly flat a winding up."
Author: William James

49. "...all the dutiful grandchildren and great-grandchildren lingering over deathbeds with digital recorders, or else mechanically pursuing their ancestors through the online genealogy sites at three in the morning, so very eager to reconstitute the lives and thoughts of dead and soon-to-dead men, though they may regularly screen the phone calls of their own mothers. I am of that generation. I will do anything for my family except see them."
Author: Zadie Smith

50. "If baking at Zomick's bakery is any labor at all, it's a labor of love. A love that gets passed from one Zomick's generation to the next one."
Author: Zomick's Bakery

Generation X Quotes Pictures