Our Elders Quotes

#1. What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.

Umberto Eco

#2. Our elders say that an elephant does not find its own trunk heavy.

Zakes Mda

#3. If we drive our fellow species to extinction, we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world we inherited from our elders.

James Hansen

#4. There is a simple but powerful African prayer that can be recited to remind you of this: Let us take care of our children, for they have a long way to go. Let us take care of our elders, for they have come a long way. Let us take care of those

Yana Cortlund

#5. In war, our elders may give the orders ... but it is the young who have to fight.

T.H. White

#6. We young Filipinos are trying to make over a nation and must not halt in our march, but from time to time turn our gaze upon our elders. We shall wish to read in their countenances approval of our actions.

Jose Rizal

#7. Wafa Wanaka, our elders say. Not only does this mean that death is the ultimate peace, it also means that we are not to speak ill of the dead. Once a person has crossed over to the real of the spirits, he takes his transgressions with him, and we speak only of the good. - 'Something Nice from London

Petina Gappah

#8. What did it mean to, as our elders told us, "grow up and be somebody"? And what precisely did this have to do with an education rendered as rote discipline?

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#9. There are constant cycles in history. There is loss, but it is always followed by regeneration. The tales of our elders who remember such cycles are very important to us now.

Carmen Agra Deedy

#10. Education is the constraining and directing of youth towards that right reason, which the law affirms, and which the experience of the best of our elders has agreed to be truly right.

Plato

#11. Idling of our elders is called business; the idling of boys, though quite like it, is punished by those same elders, and no one pities either the boys or the men.

Augustine Of Hippo

#12. Maurice Kenny stands at the forefront of his generation. Few writers of any ethnicity are destined to be remembered in the mainstream of literary history; I believe that Kenny's contributions as a poet are among those few. He writes from the center, as our Elders would say.

Wendy Rose

#13. I lose my patience, and I own it too,
When works are censur'd, not as bad but new;
While if our Elders break all reason's laws,
These fools demand not pardon but Applause.

Alexander Pope

#14. It takes a strong effort on the part of each American Indian not to become Europeanized. The strength for this effort can only come from the traditional ways, the traditional values that our elders retain.

Russell Means

#15. We always reference kids but very rarely ask their opinion. Our inexperience might be what gives us the ability to teach our elders something, due to the fact that we are not jaded or cynical.

Adora Svitak

#16. When my brother and me got into performing in the late '40s and early '50s, it was a sensational opportunity to learn from our elders. Every show we played had a dancer, a comic, a juggler, a singer, an acrobat. I came to appreciate virtuosity in all forms of the business.

Gregory Hines

#17. In Western Civilization, our elders are books.

Gary Snyder

#18. The playthings of our elders are called business.

Saint Augustine

#19. There has been enough suffering in our country, there has been enough of children whose dreams die before they have a chance to grow and there has been enough of our elders who, having served their nation, are forced into indignity in their old age.

John Agyekum Kufuor

#20. From the mouths of our elders comes a fountain of wisdom.

Ransom Riggs

#21. Kids learn from EMULATING their elders, not by being told..
We ought to teach our children to get EXCITED about life..
And not PAINT their minds with OUR potrayal of the World..
This asks us to LIVE that excitement,if we already don't..
We will be doing them a HUGE FAVOR!

Abha Maryada Banerjee

#22. What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?

Socrates

#23. I see a couple of things missing. Any society, any community, even in the family, when the elders don't do their jobs, the youth suffer. We have no done our job. I'm saying anybody 55 and up. We didn't teach people the basic things.

Iyanla Vanzant

#24. Integrity is the glue that holds our way of life together. What our young people want to see in their elders is integrity, honesty, truthfulness, and faith. What they hate most of all is hypocrisy and phoniness ... Let them see us doing what we would like them to do.

Billy Graham

#25. If we want to be respected and honored when we're older, then we must lay the groundwork by respecting and honoring the elders we meet in our lives today. How we treat them today is the way we'll be treated later.

Louise Hay

#26. The young generation can influence their elders and can make them understand the environmental problems that are faced by us today. The youth can make them see that our environment is deteriorating day by day.

Oren Lyons

#27. I certainly don't think we [The Elders organization] are oracles but I would hope that over our lifetimes we have accumulated some useful experience and perhaps even a modicum of wisdom! We don't have all the answers.

Desmond Tutu

#28. Personally, I am more than ever inclined to believe that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion are genuine. Without them I do not see how one could explain things that are happening today. More than ever, I think the Jews are at the bottom of all our troubles.

Nesta Helen Webster

#29. Guns are far too accessible and too readily available. There are over 200 million guns in our society - and that's just the legal ones, the ones we know about. Every ten seconds, another gun is produced. And every fourteen minutes, some person in America dies from gun-inflicted action.

Joycelyn Elders

#30. Let believers on earth imitate the saints in heaven in their nearness to Christ. Let us on earth be as the elders are in heaven, sitting around the throne. May Christ be the object of our thoughts, the centre of our lives.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#31. I believe that a hundred years from now, when people look back at the 20th century, they will look at Miles, Bird, Clifford Brown, Ella and Dizzy, among elders as our Mozarts, our Chopins, our Bachs and Beethovens.

Quincy Jones

#32. Parents have railed against shelters near schools, but no one has made any connection between the crazed consumerism of our kids and their elders' cold unconcern toward others. Maybe the homeless are not the only ones who need to spend time in these places to thaw out.

Anna Quindlen

#33. It is often easier for our children to obtain a gun than it is to find a good school.

Joycelyn Elders

#34. Masturbation never got anybody pregnant, does not make anybody go crazy, and what we're about is preventing HIV in our bright young people.

Joycelyn Elders

#35. I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint.

Hesiod

#36. Schooling should not be left to the whim or wealth of village elders. I believe that we should fund all schools in the U.S. with our national resources. All these kids are being educated to be Americans, not citizens of Minneapolis or San Francisco.

Jonathan Kozol

#37. Children know how to be cruel, and the cruelty of their elders is the surest residue of the malaise the young feel toward things strange, things other, things that reveal our own ignorance or insufficiency

Carlos Fuentes

#38. I've noticed that the children of other nations always seem precocious. That's because the strange manners of their elders have caught our attention most and the children echo those manners enough to seem like their parents.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#39. Trees are, after all, our largest and oldest living things. They are Australia's natural, national treasures - the true Elders of our vast continent.

Richard Allen

#40. To find meaning in our lives we need consistent exposure to kids, elders and animals ... cuz kids and animals aren't looking for it, and elders are the closest to finding it.

Gregor Collins

#41. We have come to this earth upon a mission ... that we may have power to go forth and warn the nations of the earth ... As elders of Israel, very few of us fully comprehend our position, our calling, our relationship to God, our responsibility, or work the Lord requires at our hands

G. Homer Durham

#42. our sole delight was play; and for this we were punished by those who yet themselves were doing the like. But elder folks' idleness is called "business"; that of boys, being really the same, is punished by those elders;

Anonymous