intergenerational progress Quotes

The secret to economic growth lay in the fact that that each generation attacked Nature not only with its own energies and resources, but with the heritage of equipment accumulated by its forebears.

The next generation will always surpass the previous one. It's one of the never-ending cycles in life.

For generations, the Jewish and African-American communities have stood together, helping each other overcome their greatest challenges and triumph in the face of sweeping discrimination, all while securing a brighter future for all of our children.

Within this arena, which grows more stable night after day, generations work and love and hope and vanish. New generations tread on the corpses of their fathers, continue the work above the abyss and struggle to tame the dread mystery. How? By cultivating a single field, by kissing a woman, by studying a stone, an animal, an idea.

In one generation, my family went from extermination simply because of how they pray to God to this ridiculously privileged life I live today. So how can I not love America?

Our people historically have gone through a lot. That is our story. You can trace it all the way back to slavery. But it is incumbent upon everyone, no matter what field, to make it easier on the next generation.

The American dream is not a sprint, or even a marathon, but a relay. Our families don't always cross the finish line in the span of one generation. But each generation passes on to the next the fruits of their labor. My grandmother never owned a house. She cleaned other people's houses so she could afford to rent her own. But she saw her daughter become the first in her family to graduate from college. And my mother fought hard for civil rights so that instead of a mop, I could hold this microphone.

In the end, the American dream is not a sprint, or even a marathon, but a relay. Our families don't always cross the finish line in the span of one generation. But each generation passes on to the next the fruits of their labor.

I don't have a college degree, and my father didn't have a college degree, so when my son, Zachary, graduated from college, I said, 'My boy's got learnin'!'

We, as adults, are the gatekeepers, and we have to check our own fears at the door because we want our children to be smarter than we are. We want them to be more fully human than we are.

Our system works. Over time, people will live better and better. We have a system that unleashes human potential, and now China has a system that unleashes human potential. We will have interruptions. We overshoot and undershoot sometimes, but your kids and grandkids will live better than you. Over time, we move ahead at a pretty damn rapid rate.

it takes as long as three generations of hard work, three generations of sacrifice to correct the wrong!

Iraq today does have a chance to shape its own future. They may not do that, or this generation may not do that. But maybe the next one will, I don't know. They may try and fail, and stumble, get up and fall back.

We should live and labor in our time that what came to us as a seed may go to the next generation as blossom, and what came to us as blossom, may go to them as fruit. This is what we mean by progress.

That is the American experiment. An ethnic group arriving on America's shores, to be reviled and hazed, living in squalor, or if they are lucky Squalor Heights, working hard to give their children or grandchildren the opportunity to sh*t on the next group landing on our shores.

If you work hard and play by the rules, you'll have a better life than your parents did, and your children will have a better life than you did.

Going for constant growth is not actually delivering a decent standard of living and the prospect of your children having a better life than you do. That is the key thing that politics needs to deliver: a better life for your children. That's why people are taking their lives in their hands and crossing the Mediterranean and the English Channel.

You, that have toiled during youth, to set your son upon higher ground, and to enable him to begin where you left off, do not expect that son to be what you were, - diligent, modest, active, simple in his tastes, fertile in resources. You have put him under quite a different master. Poverty educated you; wealth will educate him. You cannot suppose the result will be the same.

Every generation has the right to build its own world out of the materials of the past, cemented by the hopes of the future.

When we talk about something like student loans, what we should be talking about is the fact that every American wants their kids to do better than we have done. If we can get that, the other thing we'd really like is for our kids to be able to come home and raise their kids in the community where we raised them. What unites all of us, no matter where you live in the country, is we want our family to be safe, we want the next generation in our family to be more successful than us, and we would like our family to be close together.