Anthony Crosland Quotes

When people say this isn't the America they grew up in, they're right. Nobody gets to grow old in the America they grew up in.

We cannot pick a lifestyle and tell two generations after us to live like that. It is impossible.

Every generation is more open to new things.

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

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

Every generation reinvents the wheel - and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman's burdens.

Those times are over and gone, and good riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we're the tick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we're in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away.

The heterodoxy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next.

That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.

We now know how things were in the '60s and how things have changed, but I don't think we appreciate how much things have changed.

We don't need fashion to survive, we just desire it so much.

Each new generation of children grows up in the new environment its parents have created, and each generation of brains becomes wired in a different way. The human mind can change radically in just a few generations.

A huge change has taken place in my lifetime.

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

The affluent society makes no meaningful distinction between luxury and necessity.

The history of the world demonstrates that man becomes what we call civilized by increasing his wants.

Each generation confronts new problems, encounters new facts, and tells our history somewhat differently.

The verdict of history ... is that worn out ideas have never risen to power among a people who have worn them out.

It frequently happens that an element of the standard of living which set out with being primarily wasteful, ends with becoming, in the apprehension of the consumer, a necessary of life.

In the affluent society no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessaries.

It is hardly possible to exaggerate the power, as an incentive to action, which the love of luxury exercises over the majority of people. The desire for Luxury is almost universal and is constantly expanding. Things that were formerly considered Luxuries are now held to be Necessaries, and this is as it should be. The world is approaching an era when not the pressure of Necessity but the lure of Luxury must be depended upon to keep society moving onward and upward. Let us avoid Puritanical denunciation of Luxury; the Puritans were dead wrong; their drab lives led to stagnation. All of the great periods of history have been periods characterized by Luxury, by art and by the delight in beauty and splendor.

I'm not materialistic. I love clothes and all that stuff, but I don't need it to live.

I'll use any excuse to buy a new backpack.

The Caribbean world has changed radically since the 1960s, and postcolonial generations have very different mentalities from those that went before.

It takes more than a few generations to change a human nation. Those who are intent to bring (change) will do so.