Generational Understanding Quotes

It's so hard when you're young to look at older people and understand that they have been where you are. It's the weirdest thing. You just can't get your head around that, can you? You can't get your head around the fact that someone who is 60 was once 16, if you're 16. But the fact is they have been, and they remember it.

You might be surprised by how interested young people are in older people.

I have a very close relationship with my parents.

The people whom the sons and daughters find it hardest to understand are the fathers and mothers, but young people can get on very well with the grandfathers and grandmothers.

It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.

And we have not found any generational gap at all. If he wants to go a football game, he goes. If I want to go to a fashion show, I go. We don't have to do everything together. But we like doing most things together.

I learn something every time I go to work with a veteran. Every single time.

As long as any adult thinks that he, like the parents and teachers of old, can become introspective, invoking his own youth to understand the youth before him, he is lost.

Young people...have more compassion and tenderness toward the elderly than most middle-aged adults. Nothing--not avarice, not pride, not scrupulousness, not impulsiveness--so disillusions a youth about her parents as the seemingly inhumane way they treat her grandparents.

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.

A relationship with young people is very important to me. It's important to have a sense of what's going on in their world and not just in my own. So the opportunity teaching provides is a gift.

It's nice for me to be in touch with a younger generation.

Because (grandparents) are usually free to love and guide and befriend the young without having to take daily responsibility for them, they can often reach out past pride and fear of failure and close the space between generations.

[W]ords are fine, but it has to be what a generation reads into those words.

Being a teenager is as difficult as living with one. And we've all been there. Perhaps that's the reason we're so hard on them.

True adulthood occurs the moment we grasp that the people who raised us do not exist solely for our comfort and reassurance. From that point on, the steady stream of unconditional love and support we've expected from them all our lives has to flow both ways.

The Constitution needs allegiance and loyalty and renewal and understanding with each generation, or else it's not going to last.

One of the things I want to do as an artist is to connect generations.

Each child should try to see in his parents the children they previously were. Each parent should try to see in his child the adult he seems to be becoming.

When you're older you want to learn from other people.

My parents were adorable. They were very kind, and very broad-minded compared to people of their generation.

There is not that much of a generation gap these days.

Elderly people and those in authority cannot always be relied upon to take enlightened and comprehending views of what they call the indiscretions of youth.

Parents sometimes make not those allowances for youth, which, when young, they wished to be made for themselves.

The millennials are incredibly good about getting information out in a clear way, but more importantly, they are incredibly good about understanding how to protect one another, how to protect their parents and how to protect their grandparents.