Peggy Noonan Quotes

I feel I grew up in a different century than I live in. I think most of them are changes for the good.

I think the culture today is very, very different from what it was in the '60s, and I feel lucky that I grew up at a time when I had these very strong female role models.

While the older generation is content to sit around and critique culture, that culture is moving beyond them. At some point the traditional church and all of the expressions of that church will become essentially irrelevant.

How could 30 years be the blink-of-the-eye it felt? It was the difference between black-and-white footage of the Second World War and David Bowie on 'Top of the Pops' singing 'Life on Mars.'

Five-hundred years ago people were saying in manuscripts, "Can you believe these kids today?" They were saying that same phrase everyone says now. No one can believe the youth and what they're doing and how culture is going and how it might fall apart.

I'm not very nostalgic, you see. I just don't think anybody has that kind of thing anymore. By culture, by breeding, by whatever, it's not there. The kids today-what the hell are they going to be? I like young people - yes, I do. But when I talk to people at the schools, and they say, "I saw you on the Twit," I don't even know what they are talking about.

Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.

Each decade, I've lived in that decade, so I could easily shed the '20s, the '30s, the '40s.

It's hard for me to get used to these changing times. I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.

It's been fascinating watching all those pictures of me with a lot more hair Jeremy, and looking very young. And we've all got things we've said, twenty, thirty years ago, indeed the whole world has changed since then.

Some people accuse the new generation of being ignorant, maybe ignorant for the old generation, but it's a new language.

For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture.

If readers, young and old, would take even a moment to reflect on our rapidly shifting culture and ideology, I would be happy. Many leaders of the older generation dismiss emerging culture. Those leaders are at risk of becoming a feeble voice-piece without followers. Most of the younger generation is going deaf to the truth.

I'm interested in Scotland now and then, how it's changed. I want to get the reader to think about that by thinking about something from the past. How has society changed, how has policing changed, have we changed philosophically, psychologically, culturally, spiritually?

Every generation renews itself in its own way; there's always a reaction against whatever is standard.

It's very hard for our parents who see us enter a world that they can't imagine.

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn't understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

There certainly have been a lot of changes, although they come in such gradations that most people have either forgotten, or, if they're too young, they never knew about them in the first place.

Mourning the loss of the phone call is like pining for buggy driving or women in hats or three-martini lunches. They've gone.

Cultural change always precedes political change.

Life used to be a rite of passage in and of itself. But it's not our parents' generation anymore.

Almost anybody from the past will hold views discordant with the present.

Democratic foursomes don't work in the '70s like they did in the '60s, when there were fewer musical directions.

Probably the only thing that I really don't like about being an old guy is so many of the people who understand what we know are gone.