Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined bya hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall payany price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty.

-Kennedy,John F(itzgerald)
  Inaugural address, Washington, 20  Jan.

We in this country, in this generation, areöby destiny, rather than choiceöthe watchmen on the walls of the world.

-Kennedy,John F(itzgerald)
   Address prepared for Dallas luncheon on the day he was assassinated, 22 Nov.

John Clellon Holmes†and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent Existentialism and I said,'You know, this is really a beat generation'and he leapt up and said,'That's it, that's right!'

-Kerouac,Jack (John)
  Interview in Playboy,  Jun.

We have been too comfortable and too indulgentömany, perhaps, too selfishöand the stern hand of fatehasscoured ustoan elevationwhere we can see the great everlasting things that matter for a nation; the great peaks we had forgotten, of honour, duty, patriotism, and, clad in glittering white, the great pinnacle of sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven.We shall descend into the valleys again, but as long as men and women of thisgeneration last, they will carry in their hearts the image of those great mountain peaks, whose foundations are not shaken, though Europe rock and sway in the convulsions of a great war.

-Lloyd George (of Dwyfor), David, 1st Earl
  Speech, London,19 Sep.

A man must be sacrificed now and again To provide for the next generation of men.

-Lowell, Amy
  'A Critical Fable'.

The cardinal tenets of feminism divided my generation, effectively disempowering and disenfranchising its members. It does make me bitterlyangry that my generation, which prided itself so complacently on its soul, on its powers of intelligence and analysis, should have fallen so cloddishly for totalitarian simplicities which declared a war of eternal opposition between men and women.

-Lynd, Robert
  No More Sex War: The Failures of Feminism.

Mura tig's ann thea'  nas ni a Hallaig a dh' ionnsaigh sa'  baid nam marbh, far a bheil an sluagh a' tathaich, gach aon ghinealach a dh' fhalbh. If it does not, I will go down to Hallaig, to the Sabbath of the dead, where the people are frequenting, every single generation gone.

-MacLean, Sorley Gaelic name Somhairle MacGill-Eain
  'Hallaig'.

The future of America is based on one generation sacrificing for the next.

-Mayhew, Alex
Quoted by David Maraniss in CNBC broadcast,7 Mar1995. The phrase was popularized by Mayhew's former student, Bill Clinton.

The world goes on because a few men in every generation believe in it utterly, accept it unquestioningly, underwrite it with their lives.

-Miller, Henry Valentine
  The Air-Conditioned Nightmare,'With Edgar Var e' se in the Gobi Desert'.

Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.

-Mumford, Lewis
The Brown Decades, p.3.

A new scientific truth does not triumph byconvincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

-Planck, Max Karl Ernst
A ScientificAutobiography and Other Papers (translated by Frank Gaynor, published1949).

Je suis triste pour ma ge¤  ne¤  ration qui est vide de toute substance humaine. I am sad for my generation which is empty of all human substance.

-Saint-Exupe¤  ry, Antoine de
  Lettre au ge¤  ne¤  ral, no.10. Published10 Apr1948 in Le Figaro litte¤  raire.

Seldom is it given to one generation to have such an opportunity to rise again, but now before you is that opportunity in televisionöa larger, richer, broader opportunity than ever existed in radio.

-Sarnoff, David
c.1948  Speech to NBC station affiliates. Recalled on his death, 12 Dec1971.

With each generation the entire race passes through the body of its womanhood as through a mould, reappearing withtheindeliblemarks ofthat mould upon it, that as the os cervix of woman, through which the head of the human infant passes at birth, forms a ring, determining for ever the size at birth of the human head†so exactly the intellectual capacity, the physical vigour, the emotional depth of woman, forms also an untranscendable circle, circumscribing with each successive generation the limits of expansion of the human race. 720

-Iron
Women and Labour, ch.3.

You are all a lost generation.

-Stein, Gertrude
Quoted as epigraph in Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926).

Bankers'genes were Wall St. genes, especially in the big cities. If the banks were conservative just now [1955], it was because bankers still awoke in the middle of the night, trembling and sweaty with thoughts of the Crash. But intimeanewgenerationwouldtake over: ambitious, overcompetitive young men to whom1929 would be merelya date on a page; such menwould sever theroots of memory as if with an ax, not realizing that those tendrils were also the rudder cables.

-Thomas, Michael M
  The Ropespinner Conspiracy.

History is hard to know†but†it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the timeöand which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

-Thompson, Hunter S(tockton)
Fear and Loathing in LasVegas, ch.8.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

-Thoreau, Henry David
  Walden, or Life in theWoods,'Economy'.

The old man puffed into sight like a venerable battlewagon pressing up over the horizon. First a smudge of smoke, then the long cigar, then the familiar, stoop-shouldered hulk that a generation has come to know as the silhouette of greatness.

-Time
  Of Winston Churchill disembarking from the Queen Mary. 14 Jan.