Generational Comparison Quotes

My son is a better actor than me, only I was luckier.

When we raise our children, we relive our childhood. Forgotten memories, painful and pleasurable, rise to the surface.... So each of us thinks, almost daily, of how our own childhood compares with our children's, and of what our children's future will hold.

Who in the world remembers who won the 1975 Westchester Classic or the 1978 Western Open? Basically, the majors are the only comparison over time . . . played on the same courses for generations. All the best players are always there.

I can be pretty nasty. Not 'mean' nasty, but nasty by your parents' standards. But not by my parents' standards, because my parents were nasty for their day.

Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior.

Like it or not, to reach middle age with less money or less prestige than our father had is somewhat to lose face. Stupid of course, when put like that, but who is prepared to argue that we are not stupid in several important ways?

I would say basically the commonplace observation that kids aren't going to earn as much as their parents is now is a coin flip at this point. Are you going to do better than your parents? It's a 50-50 chance, whereas if you were born in the 1940s or 1950s, you had more than a 90 percent chance you were going to do better than your parents. So basically almost a guarantee for most kids that you were going to achieve the American Dream of doing better than your parents did. Today, that's certainly no longer the case.

all daughters, even when most aggravated by their mothers, have a secret respect for them. They believe perhaps that they can do everything better than their mothers can, and many things they can do better, but they have not yet lived long enough to be sure how successfully they will meet the major emergencies of life, which lie, sometimes quite creditably, behind their mothers.

I remember being awed by it - the uniqueness and nicety of style - and I suspect I was a bit jealous because we were more or less of the same generation.

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.

My father grew up in an era when to be an American - a white American, at least - was to be yourself. In some respects, his generation was more ignorant, complacent, self-centered and parochial than mine.

I think millennials are a generation that's a little bit behind, maybe four or five years behind the previous generation, as far as when they buy a house.

To a generation beaten down by skyrocketing unemployment, plunging retirement savings, and mounting home foreclosures, 'Mad Men' offers the schadenfreude-filled message that their predecessors were equally unhappy - and that the bleakness meter in American life has always been set on high.

My generation will actually be the first generation that is tamer than the one that came before it, and it will probably be poorer; less fun and less money.

...you could be the best team or the best player in different generations and people respect each other. Nobody cares who was the best.

When I grew up, people said, 'You'll never be the man your dad was.' And I said, 'Gee, I hope not.'

Everyone's generation probably feels like they're parenting in a better way.

My mom and my dad are still together, but so many of my friends who got married just a few years ago aren't. Maybe it's that we compare ourselves to our parents' generation, thinking, 'Who's still together, and are they happy?'

I don't feel I'm as good a mum as my mum was.

Back in the days when I was a teenager, Before I had status and before I had a pager, You could find The Abstract listening to hip-hop, My pops used to say, it reminded him of be-bop, I said, well daddy don't you know that things go in cycles, The way that Bobby Brown is just ampin' like Michael, It's all expected, things are for the lookin', If you got the money, Quest is for the bookin'...

The only story my grandfather tells me about his days in the NFL is how much better he was than me.

Your father is a fool skin deep; but you are a fool to your very marrow.

I never thought I had more fun when I was young than kids are having today. I think they have just as much fun. It's a different way to have fun.

I coach a few guys and they work very, very hard, but in our day we did it because we just loved it.

I guess that's one of the things about growing up in the fifties - it never occurred to me that you wouldn't be at least as successful as your parents.