W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

One of the main truths of all education is that if the young are not always right, the old are always wrong.

I'm not a big fan of young people.

Actually, I'm 130, but 125 is what I put on my resume, because that's what I look like I weigh.

Whenever I watch a show and twentysomethings have a lot of 'Star Wars' references, I know it's written by a 40-year-old dude.

There are younger directors, and anybody over 30 is ancient to them, because they're not that old.

Titchy little snapperwhippers like you should not be higgling around with an old sage and onions who is hundreds of years more than you.

The older generation sat looking at the younger, and Kat wondered exactly when and how the baton had been passed. She wanted to know if it was too late to give it back.

He hated it when adults told him he only felt the way he did because he was young. As if being young was like being insane or drunk, like the convictions he held were hallucinations caused by a mental illness that could only be cured by waiting five years.

One of the greatest gifts we can give to another generation is our experience, our wisdom.

The young have stolen our youthfulness, and flaunt it without shame.

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

It is always the older that emanates the new one.

Sooner or later the young always betrayed the old.

We don't need to be feminist in my generation.

It is a most curious experience for a man of seventy-two to be confronted with the greenhorn enthusiasms of his youth. Young people think they are so smart. Alas the doctrines they spout with such fervor turn out to be mostly parroted from their elders.

Society always consists, in greatest part, of young and foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of the courts and statesmen, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age.

Our basic fundamental desires are overly stimulated. A friend of mine said, "you have a generation of people that have been accidentally marketed to."

Youth is always an enemy to the old.

Middle age is when you stop criticizing the older generation and start criticizing the younger one.

Where did we get the idea of insultin' folks by pointin' out their age? ... It seems that we think youth is some special accomplishment brought about by the individual himself!

Nothing so dates a man as to decry the younger generation.

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.

Youth as glimpsed by its elders is a story that comes from afar, showing itself as either lovely to look at or a torment to endure.

Making every allowance for the errors of the most extreme fallibility, the history of Catholicism would on this hypothesis represent an amount of imposture probably unequaled in the annals of the human race.

I don't want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won't deal with it. If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.