It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

The generations of men run on in the tide of time, but leave their destined lineaments permanent for ever and ever.

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.

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

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.

The longer I live the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us.

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.

Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence; but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity.

We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.

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.