Russell Baker Quotes

Trouble is, kids feel they have to shock their elders and each generation grows up into something harder to shock.

All good technology should be used to piss off people's parents.

Get a grip, Dad. I'm not going to do anything you wouldn't do at my age.' He stands up and says, 'That's it. You're canceling this date.

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

There is not that much of a generation gap these days.

It's a sad moment, really, when parents first become a bit frightened of their children.

I was a rebel. I went to Carmel Convent in Delhi where I was a complete rebel. I thought I was 12 going on 18. I wanted to go out with friends older to me, stay out late - my parents were horrified. It was then that we began having our first disagreements.

I really have a generation gap about modern clothes.

Don't trust anyone over thirty.

These kids today, everything is about hitting a vocal home run.

I'm not of this generation.

You can never empathize with your parents as a teenager. You just think they're just on another planet.

It took us a long time to find out that we had been lied to by our parents' generation. The moralities that were followed during our parents' generation were basically arbitrary. This caused a rift between the two generations, which was brought on by the beatniks.

You can rebel against everything adults say. When I want to find out what the new music is, I find out what parents hate.

When I hear music that parents hate, or older musicians hate, I know that's the new music. When I hear older people saying, 'I hate Rap or Techno' I rush to it.

I just have a problem with youth culture.

I was one of those daughters who saw my mother as my enemy when I was a teen.

Every generation has had some sort of focus for their unrest and discomfort with growing up. But today, the music that's in the charts is probably liked by their parents as well, and I think it's a part of youth that you need something that isn't liked or understood by the older generation.

I always say that even though my dad was alive during Woodstock, he was just not invited. He just seemed like he was from a different generation.

My father used to say, 'What the hell are you listening to? Put that bloody rubbish off.' And it was The Beatles.

I'm not electronically geared at all; I'm really a 19th century cartoonist. I have a 15-year-old daughter, and what she's attracted to is of course iPod and this pod and that, I mean stuff I don't even begin to know - I never learned how to type for Christ's sake! I can't get in her head and find out what she would do if she had the kind of talent I had, I don't have a clue. Every generation comes up with its own quirkiness and its own culture which gets its inspiration from what's in the air at that time.

I don't want to speak too disparagingly of my generation (actually I do, we had a chance to change the world and opted for the Home Shopping Network instead), but there was a view among the student writers I knew at that time that good writing came spontaneously, in an uprush of feeling that had to be caught at once; when you were building that all-important stairway to heaven, you couldn't just stand around with your hammer in your hand.

My aesthetic is probably closer to a 15-year-old's than my dad's, but I get his conviction.

Youth is something very new: twenty years ago no one mentioned it.

Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth.