Generational Trauma Quotes

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. 'Stop!' cried the groaning old man at last, 'Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.

John Adams and John Quincy Adams had six sons. Two of these were great statesman and four were drunks. For the Adams family it was the White House or the Ale House …. Family pressure is part of what drives people to drink.

Only the guilty are guilty: the children of killers are not killers, but children.

Some kids get called "bundles of joy" or "slices of heaven" or "dreams come true." We got "the fifty-fourth generation of DNA experiments." Doesn't have the same warm and fuzzy feel. But maybe I'm oversensitive.

Conservatives have rightly attacked rap for its misogyny, violence and over-the-top vulgarity. But it is important to remember that this music is a fairly accurate message from a part of society where human connections are fractured and impossible, so fraught with disappointments and pain that only an assault on human feeling itself can assuage.

For my entire life, I have held the cards of my complicated family history very close to my chest.

As a European from a different, younger generation, the trauma that was Nixon's presidency never really had a hold over me. For one thing, I never voted for him.

I was born in 1988, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and people of my generation were taught that utopian dreams are dangerous.

If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.

I could direct a very decent Holocaust film, but I don't have the same experience as a young boy who was rocked to sleep in the lap of a grandmother who had a tattooed number on her arm, who told him stories of the people who disappeared, the relatives she never saw again, as he drifted off with his cheek nestled next to that number.

Growing up with my mother who grew up during World War II being half Filipina, half Okinawan, and literally running around the jungles in the Philippines escaping Japanese military chasing after them - I grew up with what they deem now as trauma, generational trauma.

I think rappers are the fall guy because some of us don't have the wits to point the finger back. The thing is when you take a whole generation and whip them out, string the mothers out and put the fathers in jail - the reason I know respect is because my father is the mediator between me and my grandfather. I'm the mediator between my son and my father because I'm old enough to understand where my father is coming from and young enough to understand what my kid is trying to do. When you whip out the mediator the kids run wild and the old people are scared of them.

When you kill somebody's little sister with a missile, he's going to hate you forever. And the next generation will hate you even more.

The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it.

I experienced Nazism as a child. Like many of my generation, I was motivated by the desire to prevent another war at any price.

The burdens of generations of poverty and powerlessness lie heavy in the fields of America. If we fail, there are those who will see violence as the shortcut to change.

…these poor men…who are bound, not only for all their lives, but for those of their children.

I always thought that a film about how my father's life was shaped in his early years in Hong Kong would be a worthwhile story to share so we could better understand him as a human being and a warrior.

My mother was one of seven girls whose parents went to bed hungry so their children wouldn't. My father lost his mother when he was nine. He left school and went to work for the next 70 years. They emigrated to America with little more than the hope of a better life.

My parents never told us that our great-grandmothers had been slaves.

I can't admit to myself that the creation of a Palestinian state won't happen. What I know is that with each passing year it gets more and more difficult to happen, not least because there is more and more bloodshed, generation upon generation.

I recognize the unknowing, involuntary effect that 'Facts of Life' had and continues to have on several generations of people.

People are so terrified of other people. I see it in my generation a lot. There's so much anxiety and angst, and the pressure just keeps getting worse.

I got a job in advertising. So even though I was writing, I was always supporting myself. That's the thing that would matter for my father, who was absolutely a creature of the Great Depression.

When I was growing up my mother would say, 'Your dad may have to learn about being a father because he lost his own and that would have affected him'.