David Riesman Quotes

The generation that comes next is always going to rebel against the generation that came before, and they're always going to be at odds with each other.

Young people live exactly today... and they live in the immediacy of their world. And it's important for us, people from older generations to realize that a lot of our values, a lot of our truths are no longer truths, are no longer valuable.

There's an older generation that feels like they know what the future should be. And then there's your generation that may have an idea of what the future should be, but that could evolve.

Doesn't every generation feel like the one that's coming up behind them doesn't know how to grow up? I'm not sure if we're progressively getting worse or if your perspective shifts.

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

Every generation challenges the one that goes before.

Generation after generation, there is this never-ending, contemptuous, condescending attitude to the next generation or the next way of thinking: music, art, politics, whatever. And I have never been like that.

Every generation proclaims that each must lead his own life, but seldom grants the subsequent generation the right to lead theirs.

Sooner or later the young always betrayed the old.

When three generations are present in a family, one of them is bound to be revolutionary.

He doesn't translate well into our generation.

It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

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

The problem with the youth of today' is that one is no longer part of it.

The youth doesn't know what they want while the older generation remains stuck in the past. But the basic concept of entertainment remains the same - demand and supply - and that won't change.

I really related to that experience of being what we call the 'bridge generation' and always trying to navigate your more traditional growing-up experiences with wanting the latest Air Jordans or whatever it is: Trying to explain to your parents why, and they just, like, don't get it.

We live in an age of generational turmoil. Baby-boom parents are accused of clinging on to jobs and houses which they should be freeing up for their children. Twentysomethings who can't afford to leave home and can't get jobs are attacked as aimless and immature.

Classically, it's the child who looks up at their parents who says, 'This is how the future is going to be,' and it's the parents who don't understand because they're set in their ways. For me, it was the exact opposite.

I realize that there's a whole generation of kids out there like me who are totally disregarding the moral values taught to us by our parents.

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

A lot of youth today have become very narrow and conservative in a way, whereas we in the older generation are kind of living it.

People are ultimately threatened by young people taking positions of power.

Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parent. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.

Isn't it our job to be appalled by our parents? Isn't it every generation's duty to be dismayed by the previous generation? And to assert that we are different - only to discover later that we are distressingly the same?

Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation.