Generational Hope Quotes

So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

I felt cheated by the way grown-ups told me that the future of the world was bleak when I became a teenager in the 1970s. The pollution explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. I genuinely want the next generation, my own kids, to know that actually it's possible that the future might be better than the past.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, people thought the last Soviet generation was going to be the great hope for democracy. When that failed, their hopes shifted to the first post-Soviet generation, and then the second one.

My dear young friends, I speak to you as one who stands on the edge of eternity. From that perspective, I see you as the choicest spirits ever placed on the earth. The promises in your generation's patriarchal blessings, if you are faithful, seem to exceed the promises in Sister Faust's blessing and in mine. ...I want you to know that I believe in you. I believe you can be in the world but not of the world.

We want American families to feel more confident in life. We want the next generation to know that yes, the best days of this country are still ahead of us.

My parents didn't get to have a dream. Their dream was to live in a country where their kids would have choice.

The young whites, and blacks, too, are the only hope that America has, the rest of us have always been living in a lie.

People like to think the younger generation's job is to steer the world to hell. But it's never true, is it? They're hopeful and good - and that's how it should be.

My greatest hope is to be able to pass the same dreams and hopes and vision that I've been able to enjoy in my life, on to the next generation. Not just for my children - because with a mother like Michelle, my kids are going to be great - but for all children. There are too many children in this country for whom the American dream is so distant and the odds against them are so daunting.

Every so often, you come across a member of the younger generation who makes you think, 'Well, perhaps the future's going to be OK after all.'