Top 82 Quotes About Past Generations
#1. The tradition of past generations weighs like the Alps on the brains of the living.
Karl Marx
#2. The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#3. One of the most useful tasks of apology is to bring home to us how keenly, honestly, and painfully past generations pursued aims that now seem to us wrong and disgraceful. It behooves us to consider if future geenrations will similarly regard the aims we most defend today.
John Kador
#4. In past generations, people would try to play younger than they really are. My trick is, I don't try to play younger than I really am.
Clint Eastwood
#5. Projects undreamed of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants, comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache and their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.
Winston S. Churchill
#6. The same sins that tempted past generations remain perennial temptations today.
Anonymous
#7. In times of war, it is often best to look to our history to see how past generations of Americans dealt with the loss of their countrymen in just causes.
Virginia Foxx
#8. Will this generation be able to turn things around and learn a valuable lesson from all of this? I hope so, but I have my doubts. The damage has been done. And as a lifelong student of history, it's quite evident that human beings don't learn from the mistakes of past generations.
Aaron B. Powell
#9. Where past generations had film cameras, scrapbooks, notebooks, and that part of the brain which stores memories, we now have a smartphone app for every conceivable recording need.
Graydon Carter
#10. One of history's most useful tasks is to bring home to us how keenly, honestly and painfully, past generations pursued aims that now seem to us wrong or disgraceful.
John Carey
#11. I really look to past generations. I think my grandparents, friends' grandparents, or even parents of my older friends grew up in a time when they used everything. There was a more mindful way of moving through life. You didn't waste.
Elizabeth Rogers
#12. we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time.
Steven Pinker
#13. A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave.
Henri Matisse
#14. Had the employers of past generations all of them dealt fairly with their men there would have been no unions.
Stanley Baldwin
#15. There is nothing in the world so dangerous, or so overwhelming as stupidity; perhaps there is no more of it now than there has been at any time, but I do not think the witless of past generations had so much power. The powers of darkness are the powers of misdirected knowledge.
Gwethalyn Graham
#16. Liberals tend to view traditions, policies, and morals of past generations as arbitrary designs put in place by less enlightened people. Because of this, liberals don't pay much attention to why traditions developed or wonder about possible ramifications of their social engineering.
John Hawkins
#17. There cannot be any better cross-section of America and I think the soldiers represent the best we have. Today's soldiers are brighter and smarter, perhaps in a different way, than past generations because they've been brought up in the computer and information age.
Gerald Griffin
#18. Elizabeth, this one last task you will enter in a moment, will determine your fate and who you are. You are eighteen now and with the blood of past generations running through your veins, this will destine who you really are and where you belong.
Elena Carpenter
#19. I don't know how to save the world. I don't have the answers or The Answer. I hold no secret knowledge as to how to fix the mistakes of generations past and present. I only know that without compassion and respect for all of Earth's inhabitants, none of us will survive - nor will we deserve to.
Leonard Peltier
#20. It is unfortunate that in most cases when the sins of the father fall on the son it is because unlike God, people refuse to forgive and forget and heap past wrongs upon innocent generations.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#21. Texas is my mind's country, that place I most want to understand and record and preserve. Four generations of my people sleep in its soil; I have children there, and a grandson; the dead past and the living future tie me to it.
Larry L. King
#22. Neither past nor future generations can serve God's purpose in this generation. Only we can.
Rick Warren
#23. The world is no longer closed to us in the way it was in the past - present generations have unparalleled access to pretty much all corners of the globe.
Edgar Guest
#24. Every generation has the right to build its own world out of the materials of the past, cemented by the hopes of the future.
Herbert Hoover
#25. I think whatever generation you're in has a nostalgia for the generations past and the generations you weren't in.
Meghan Daum
#26. Recent generations seem to consider 'old-fashioned' thinking as out-dated and without place in the modern world. I beg to differ. After all, who has greater faith? He who looks to and learns from the past, or the man who cares not for consequence?
Fennel Hudson
#27. An old farm is always more than the people under its roof. It is the past as well as the present, and vanished generations have built themselves into it as well as left their footsteps in the worn woodwork of the stair.
Henry Beston
#28. It's a wonderful feeling to be a bridge to the past and to unite generations. The sport of baseball does that, and I am just a part of it.
Vin Scully
#29. If we can ... get them to understand that saying 'no' to drugs is rebelling against their parents and the generations of the past, we'd make it an enormous success.
John Van De Kamp
#30. In Iroquois society, leaders are encouraged to remember seven generations in the past and consider seven generations in the future when making decisions that affect the people.
Wilma Mankiller
#31. If we are to achieve a world free from nuclear weapons, we need the involvement of young people. Youth have energy, enthusiasm and many good ideas to share. Most importantly, however, it is young people who will be inheriting the problems which have been left to them by the generations past.
Marc Kielburger
#32. Later that summer, as rain fell, such a moment shimmered and paused on the brink, and then began the ancient dance of numbers: two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and a new life took root and began to grow. And thus the generations past were joined to the unknowable future.
Mary Doria Russell
#33. You are young. No hungry generations tread you down. The past does not mock you with the ruins of a beauty the secret of whose creation you have lost
Oscar Wilde
#34. I wouldn't say that processed food, ready meals and even takeaways aren't relevant to modern life, it's just that over the past 40 years there are three generations of people who have come out of school and gone through their home life without ever being shown how to cook properly.
Jamie Oliver
#35. My work is as an ethnographic rescuer: a conduit between past and future generations. The urgency of this effort cannot be overstated.
Elizabeth Kapu'uwailani Lindsey
#36. I never fail to be moved by knowing that the ground on which I walk is layered with the past- with achievement and strife and the repeated passions and conflicts of the human creature, always changing, always the same. Generations passing like grass.
Eva Hoffman
#37. The problem is that this search for the perfect person can generate a lot of stress. Younger generations face immense pressure to find the "perfect person" that simply didn't exist in the past when "good enough" was good enough. When they're successful, though, the payoff is incredible.
Aziz Ansari
#38. Let us not only remember the past and its required sacrifice, let us also remember that we are responsible to build a legacy for the generations which follow us.
Thomas S. Monson
#39. We of Macedon for generations past have been trained in the hard school of danger and war
Alexander The Great
#40. What would it be like to feel so attached, so intrinsically bonded, so protective of one's own best connection with time and the ages, of generations past and future, of another human life, of their time?
J.R. Tompkins
#41. Centuries would yet pass before the mighty works of fifty generations of humans would decay past use. Only the declining powers of men, themselves, rendered them useless now.
Isaac Asimov
#42. German people get very uptight if you mention World War II. Germans today feel that what's past is past, new generations don't really remember it.
Donna Summer
#43. Any change in customs ... takes generations to accomplish, and must come about by general consent. Even a superficial study of sociology shows the futility of past efforts to make a lasting change in manners by an act of will or authority.
Millicent Fenwick
#44. The biggest challenge is how to get people to wake up and realize this is a one-shot deal. If we fail, we are witting participants in the biggest experiment humans have ever done: moving CO2 levels to twice their value in the past 670.000 years and hoping it turns out okay for generations to come.
Nathan Lewis
#45. Not only was he one of history's greatest leaders, Abraham Lincoln was one of history's most devoted readers. Doris Kearns Goodwin writes of Lincoln, "Books became his academy, his college. The printed word united his mind with the great minds of generations past.
Pat Williams
#46. We thrive when we are pulled by the future, not pushed by the past.
Crystal Kadakia
#47. The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.
Seneca.
#48. We are a part of everything that is beneath us, above us, and around us. Our past is our present, our present is our future, and our future is seven generations past and present.
Winona LaDuke
#49. If we humans can so easily wash the blood of our fellow humans off our hands, then what hope is there for sparing our future generations from a repeat of the genocides and mass killings of the past?
Thomas Buergenthal
#50. I discovered that Thailand was one of those countries, like Sri Lanka and India, where memory of past lives used to be commonplace. Go back a few generations, and you find people talking about earlier lives with total certainty.
John Burdett
#51. Writing about carrying the past on your back is a manifestation of my Irishness, because we go on and on and will for another two or three generations.
Jennifer Johnston
#52. Each generation supposes that the world was simpler for the one before it.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#53. There was no question of generation change or saying goodbye to the past or modernizing sloganising.
Geoffrey Howe
#54. Not to know what happened before you were born is always to remain a child. For what is a man's life if it is not linked with the life of future generations by memories of the past?
Marianne Curley
#55. Archaeological discoveries made in Egypt and in the Near East in the past hundred years have opened our eyes to a spiritual and cultural heritage undreamed of by earlier generations.
Samuel Noah Kramer
#56. The genome of every human cell has memory. You know what that means? As evolved beings we have in our genes memories of the far past, of long-ago generations, memories of experiences not our own.
E.L. Doctorow
#57. Because (grandparents) are usually free to love and guide and befriend the young without having to take daily responsibility for them, they can often reach out past pride and fear of failure and close the space between generations.
Jimmy Carter
#58. Northern Ireland still suffers from its past, and it will take generations to escape sectarianism and for violence to end totally. Nonetheless, it is in a different place now than during the Troubles, and it will not go back to the old days.
Jonathan Powell
#59. With cult foods, there is an underlying assumption that the best cooking ideas came generations ago. Yet culinary innovation is nothing to be ashamed of. When a chef tells me he is cooking with his grandmother's recipe, I always wonder why. Did talent skip the past two generations?
Nathan Myhrvold
#61. It's only been in the past two generations that we truly understood the impact our civilization has had on the natural world. To our credit as a species, we have turned this obscure scientific fact about carbon cycles into one of the most important political issues of the 21st century.
Annalee Newitz
#62. The young readers I have interacted with carry old concerns repackaged in the skin of a new generation: puzzlement over continuous national moral failings, contradictions with the elders, nostalgia for a nonexistent Kenyan past.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
#63. A child is a part of the self, and of the loved partner; a representation of generations past; the genes of the forebears; the hope of the future; a source of love, pleasure, even narcissistic delight; a tie or a burden; and sometimes a symbol of the worst parts of the self and others.
Beverly Raphael
#64. In the United States, there was no simpler, more agreeable time.
Sarah Vowell
#65. No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.
Laurie Colwin
#66. Three generations of women out on the front porch, four counting little Emily, trying to put words around a past and a future that could never be explained.
Lalita Tademy
#67. In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations.
Anne Bogart
#68. One day, When the whole world is in flames, The past will be the future through the eyes of the innocent.
Anonymous
#69. TODAY is the PAST of your FUTURE. So, make TODAY count for the sake of your HISTORY. Use your words, time & choices wisely
Fela Durotoye
#70. Happy but isn't the human factor what connexus a deeply to our past will future generations care as much for chronologies and casualty statistics as they would for the personal accounts of individuals not so different from themselves.
Max Brooks
#71. We must convince each generation that they are transient passengers on this planet earth. It does not belong to them. They are not free to doom generations yet unborn. They are not at liberty to erase humanity's past nor dim its future.
Bernard Lown
#72. The traces of our life here will lie cold and still, dreaming, like the brittle eyes of dolls in an abandoned cabin, and the last men will look to them for explanations, or apologies.
Tim Cahill
#73. The world of our fathers resides within us. Ten thousand generations and more. A form without a history has no power to perpetuate itself. What has no past can have no future.
Cormac McCarthy
#74. It's a wonderful feeling being a bridge to the past and unite generations.
Vin Scully
#75. It is my firm belief that I have a link with the past and a responsibility to the future. I cannot give up. I cannot despair. There's a whole future, generations to come. I have to keep trying.
King Hussein
#76. Every new generation believes its own period to be absolutely superior intellectually - greater than all past cultures yet equal among its modern cultures.
Criss Jami
#77. They have kept us apart for a thousand generations, Kachiun. They have ridden us until we were nothing more than savage dogs. That is the past. I have brought us together and they will be trembling. I'll give them cause.
Conn Iggulden
#78. The past leaders of our movement left us a clear message to keep Eretz Israel from the Sea to the River Jordan for future generations, for the mass aliya, and for the Jewish people, all of whom will be gathered into this country.
Yitzhak Shamir
#79. The lessons of the past should steer us towards ensuring lasting legacies for generations yet to be born.
Hun Sen
#80. He is overcome with the disease of love, the drunkenness of generations past. When are we ourselves, he wonders, trudging through the snow-covered banks, his coat illuminated by moon-light.
Patti Smith
#81. The enchanted world arising out of the dim mists of the past, into which he just stepped, quivered-and disappeared.
Ivan Turgenev
#82. The power of nonviolence is not circumstance-specific. It is as applicable to the problems that confront us now, as to problems that confronted generations in the past. It is not a medicine or a solution so much as a healing process. It is the active spiritual immune system of humanity.
Marianne Williamson
