Generational Insight Quotes

I did some stupid things when I was younger, but I got a lot out of my system. Every time, my mom was waiting there with an 'I told you so.' Moms are usually right. You're wrong if you don't think that they've done what we're doing, because they have.

As an older person, I do feel an obligation to tell the story about what was really happening in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, as I saw it.

Listen carefully to what country people call mother wit. In those homely sayings are couched the collective wisdom of generations.

The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.

No people ever sees clearly those steps in its own progress, those events in its own life, which future generations will count glorious.

I think young people are the most creative and the coolest - people that we should be learning from. Even when I'm at a party, I'm analyzing it and thinking about it in the context of how I would write about it. That side of me never switches off.

Quickness and momentum. You take the whole last generation of sports, listening to them, even reading about them, watching the games, analyzing them, arguing about them, instant-replaying them, second-guessing them, and all you'll distill from them is quickness and momentum.

As you get older you start to see these events and leaders, and movements of the pendulum swinging back.

We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.

The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new