Quotes & Sayings About Four Generations

America was built by immigrants. Almost nobody that I know is any more than three generations, maybe four generations, American. — Michael Bloomberg

Three generations of women out on the front porch, four counting little Emily, trying to put words around a past and a future that could never be explained. — Lalita Tademy

The miserable specimens who call themselves ' liberals ' are really conservatives: they're desperately even hysterically defending a welfare-warfare kleptocracy that is now at least four generations old, against growing numbers of us (unlike Republicans , who seem to become more ignorant with every passing year) who have actually managed to learn something from history and are struggling to dismantle said kleptocracy. — L. Neil Smith

It's hard to imagine yourself in the future. It's why people do so many dumb things, because they're mired in the moment. Smoking, drinking, making disastrous marriages, putting off medical tests. The reason we've made a mess of the planet is that being its stewards required us to imagine not our own futures but those four or five generations removed. — Anna Quindlen

We have chosen to bring future generations into this world of rising seas and warming temperatures, droughts and floods, heat waves and wildfires, a world in which one in four mammals and one in eight birds are at risk of disappearing forever. While the damage we've done is irreversible, that doesn't give us the right to do nothing. — Leonor Varela

I grew up in Minnesota. Four generations of my father's people are buried there. — Peter Agre

If we could visit Highsmith today, I would lead you down the silent corridors until we came to a striking seal on the floor, a blood-red H carved in stone. This hallowed seal represents the sacred Honor of every student who spends four years at Highsmith.

The stone seal is indelible, consecrated by the generations of alumnae who have passed by, understanding and believing. No outsider, no matter how cunning, can ever steal that belief away. — James Klise

We have been through four and five generations of technology since the PATRIOT Act. — Carly Fiorina

I was naming the five warriors of our generation who have experience, four out of five I would argue were retired early out of the [Barack] Obama administration because they said things the Obama administration didn't particularly want to hear. — Carly Fiorina

One act of violence takes four generations to heal. — Gloria Steinem

Four Ingredients Plus Three Generations The recipe for an institution, then, is four ingredients plus three generations: artifacts, arenas, rules and roles that are passed on to the founding generation's children's children. Fail to follow this recipe by neglecting the transmission over generations and you are likely to leave little of cultural significance behind - at best, a few mysterious artifacts and hazy, nostalgic memories. Likewise, fail to follow this recipe by neglecting one of the four essential ingredients, and enduring impact is equally unlikely, because only the fourfold combination of artifacts, arenas, rules and roles is strong enough to sustain a cultural innovation through time. — Andy Crouch

In the 1920s and 30s, when Radio Shack was young, a much earlier generation of nerds swarmed into these tiny shops to talk excitedly about building radios and other transmission devices. You might say that Radio Shack helped define gadget culture for four generations, from radio whizzes up to smartphone dorks. — Annalee Newitz

My family came over from Spain about nine generations ago. I was born in San Diego, but by the time I was four days old, I was on a flight back to Spain because that's where my family was living at the time. — Bitsie Tulloch

even if you count back only four or five generations, you have an enormous number of living biological relatives descended from those ancestors. This is why it's not very unusual if you are descended from George Washington or another founding father or mother. — James Peoples

Good," said the First Speaker. "And tell me, what do you think of all this. A finished work of art, is it not?"
"Definitely!"
"Wrong! It is not." This, with sharpness. "It is the first lesson you must unlearn. The Seldon Plan is neither complete nor correct. Instead, it is merely the best that could be done at the time. Over a dozen generations of men have pored over these equations, worked at them, taken them apart to the last decimal place, and put them together again. They've done more than that. They've watched nearly four hundred years pass and against the predictions and equations, they've checked reality, and they have learned. — Isaac Asimov

The boat was vacuum-packed with Albanians, four generations to a family: great-grandmother, air-dried like a chilli pepper, deep red skin and a hot temper; grandmother, all sun-dried tomato, tough, chewy, skin split with the heat; getting the kids to rub olive oil into her arms; mother, moist as a purple fig, open everywhere - blouse, skirt, mouth, eyes, a wide-open woman, lips licking the salt spray flying from the open boat. Then there were the kids, aged four and six, a couple of squirs, zesty as lemons. — Jeanette Winterson

It wasn't just the size of it. It was the idea that four generations of the smartest people in the solar system had been living and working here as they helped drag humanity into the outer planets almost through sheer force of will. Amos — James S.A. Corey

Darwin found out that when you took horses up to the high country in the Middle East, they would then grow long hair after a season or two. But when you took them - these long-haired horses - back into the low, hot country, they wouldn't get rid of the long hair, just in case, for about four generations. — L. Ron Hubbard

It takes four generations to recover from every act of violence. — Rebecca Adamson

At least she's not guilty of integrity, and that's more than I can say of any Bell in four generations except my grandfather and myself. — James Thurber

The way I look at the top five, (Rod) Laver, (Roger) Federer, myself, Borg and (Ivan) Lendl. I think those five guys dominated their generations better than anyone. Maybe Roger will dominate better than any one of the other four. Maybe I put Andre (Agassi) as kind of six through 10 with, you know, (John) McEnroe and (Jimmy) Connors, kind of those guys. That's kind of how I see it. — Pete Sampras

Texas is my mind's country, that place I most want to understand and record and preserve. Four generations of my people sleep in its soil; I have children there, and a grandson; the dead past and the living future tie me to it. — Larry L. King

The four generational learning styles are Traditionalists Baby Boomers Generations X Generations Y or Millennials — Marina Arshavskiy

The look you get when you're reading in your van, and your feet are up and you sit so still, and your face is alight, and I don't know where you are; you could be anywhere, so far away, off in a part of your mind I'll never get to . . . It drives me crazy. The way you just came here, just got up, changed your entire life . . . I mean, my family's been here for four generations. It would never have occurred to me to do what you did, just to start over and do something different. Amazing. — Jenny Colgan

Three or four million heads of households don't turn into tramps and cheats overnight, nor do they lose the habits and standards of a lifetime ... They don't drink any more than the rest of us, they don't lie any more, they're no lazier than the rest of us ... An eighth or a tenth of the earning population does not change its character which has been generations in the molding, or, if such a change actually occurs, we can scarcely charge it up to personal sin. — Harry Hopkins

In four of five generations, sexual orientation will disappear and we'll just fall in love with people — Brad Boney

The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever corresponds beyond its four walls.At the same time, the television if the families chief connection to the world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather it seals them from it.The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning. — James Howard Kunstler

Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence, but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Four generations of women
"I'm a woman," Mary said to herself
heading off on a journey in a car. One of the dead, one of them dying, one of the driving, one of them just staring out. — Roddy Doyle

Her granny was asleep and Mary knew it was special, this trip. It was something that hadn't been planned. It was actually impossible. Four generations of women
"I'm a woman," Mary said to herself
heading off on a journey in a car. One of them dead, one of them dying, one of them driving, one of them just starting out. — Roddy Doyle

In the same way many Christians
whole generations of them, sometimes entire denominations
have in their possession a book which will do a thousand things not only in and for them but through them in the world. And they use it to sustain only three or four things they already do. — N. T. Wright

It's not so weird that four generations are living together under the same roof and trying to make it work. It's how a lot of people in this country are living right now. — Martha Plimpton

My great-grandmother grew up in a sod house in Nebraska. When she was a tiny girl - in other words, only four human generations ago - there were still enough wild bison on the Plains that she was afraid lightning storms would spook them and they would trample her home. — Derrick Jensen

Eccentricity, to be socially acceptable, had still to have at least four or five generations of inbreeding behind it. — Osbert Lancaster

Modernity has only lasted less than a dozen generations, while orthodox Christianity has already flourished for more than four hundred generations and shows no sign of fatigue. Yet orthodoxy seems like a newcomer in the university and to the cultural elites, since that is where it has been most forgotten. — Thomas C. Oden

YOUR GENES ARE RUNNING THE SHOW If you're anything like me, I know you're champing at the bit to get going on Diet Evolution, but hold your horses. I've found that most of us can stick to a program only if we understand how and why we got to our present state of affairs. The next four chapters will do just that. You can thank Mom and Dad for your beautiful baby blues, as well as your hair color, height, and build. All these traits were encoded in copies of their genes - half of them her's, the other half his - that now reside in your body. Any children you have will in turn have copies of half of your genes and half of your partner's, and so on through generations to come. Determining — Steven R. Gundry

You'd rather be here than in Africa. The trump card all narrow-minded nativists play. If you put a cupcake to my head, of course, I'd rather be here than any place in Africa, though I hear Johannesburg ain't that bad and the surf on the Cape Verdean beaches is incredible. However, I'm not so selfish as to believe that my relative happiness, including, but not limited to, twenty-four-hour access to chili burgers, Blu-ray, and Aeron office chairs is worth generations of suffering. I seriously doubt that some slave ship ancestor, in those idle moments between being raped and beaten, was standing knee-deep in their own feces rationalizing that, in the end, the generations of murder, unbearable pain and suffering, mental anguish, and rampant disease will all be worth it because someday my great-great-great-great-grandson will have Wi-Fi, no matter how slow and intermittent the signal is. — Paul Beatty

In total this journey will take five flights and fifty-five hours, but in reality it began four decades and two generations ago when my uncle died in Vietnam. — Tucker Elliot

I have two children. I have a daughter 29, and a daughter four. They are 25 years apart, so you speak about generations and I must tell you, I have a philosophy and that is every 25 years I'm going to sire another child. — Burt Ward

The third guy was different. He was what you got when you ate squirrels for four generations. Smarter than a rat and tougher than a goat, and jumpier than either one. — Lee Child

On the one hand, I was happy to have a proper diagnosis. Aside from a trust fund and a royal title, that was really the only thing I'd ever wanted in life. On the other hand, I was offended to learn that my brain was defective. Or, I suppose I should say, "differently abled."
One thing I was not was surprised. Four generations of manic depression on my mother's side of the family. Three of autism on my father's side. Drug addict uncles, a pyromaniac cousin, a couple of schizophrenics and suicides, several flesh-and-blood geniuses, and a pecan farmer. You just cannot mix those raw ingredients together and then stick them inside my mother for nine months and expect something normal to come out. It's a wonder I wasn't born with a set of horns. — Augusten Burroughs

No, pardon me, I consider myself and people like me aristocrats: people who can point back to three or four honourable generations of their family, all with a high standard of education (talent and intelligence are a different matter), who have never cringed before anyone, never depended on anyone, but have lived as my father and my grandfather did. I know many such. You consider it mean for me to count the trees in my wood while you give Ryabinin thirty thousand roubles; but you will receive a Goernment grant and I don't know what other award, and I shan't, so I value what is mine by birth and labour ... We - and not those who only manage to exist by the bounty of the mighty of this world, and who can be bought for a piece of silver - are the aristocrats.
-Levin — Leo Tolstoy

He never cried, not even when his alarm went off. Swaddled in his Moses basket, wires trailing out the bottom, his monitor flashing green, green, green, his entire four-pound body motionless except his eyelids, it seemed he understood everything I was working so hard to understand: his mother's love, his brother's ceasless crying: he was alreday forgiving me my shortcomings as a father; he was a distillation of a dozen generations, all stripped into a single flame and stowed still-burning inside the this slip of his ribs. I'd hold him to the window and he's stare out into the night, blue tributaries of veins pulsing his neck, his big eyelids slipping down now and then, and it would feel as if tethers were falling away, and the two of us were gently rising, through the glass, through the trees, through the interweaving layers of atmosphere, into whatever was beyond the sky. — Anthony Doerr

I knew I could never match my father as a violinist, and there were already four generations of outstanding cellists in the family. — Leonard Slatkin

Two [Massachusetts coal burning power plants] remain: Brayton Point in the South Coast region and Mt. Tom, just down the road. Within the next four years, both should shut down and Massachusetts should finally end all reliance on conventional coal generation. — Deval Patrick

A distant cousin sent me some genealogy report on my father's side, and it's sort of what I suspected. Coal miners for generations ... four or maybe five generations. — Gina McKee

Silver gray hair Neatly combed in place There were four generations Of love on her face She was so wise No surprise passed her eyes She's seen it all — Dianne Reeves

Two generations ago only a few unfortunate children ever saw anyone hit over the head with a brick, shot, rammed by a car, blown up, immolated, raped or tortured. Now all children, along with their elders, see such images every day of their lives and are expected to enjoy them ... The seven-year-old who hides his eyes in the family cops-and-robbers drama is desensitized four years later to a point where he crunches potato chips through the latest video nasty. — Penelope Leach

I know from your letters and from seeing you after your play that you feel a little bit lost right now about what to do with your life, a bit rudderless and oarless and aimless but that's okay that's alright because we're all meant to be like that at twenty-four. In fact our whole generation is like that. I read an article about it, it's because we never fought in a war or watched too much television or something. — David Nicholls

For four hundred years since Galileo, science has always proceeded as a free and open inquiry into the workings of nature. Scientists have always ignored national boundaries, holding themselves above the transitory concerns of politics and even wars. Scientists have always rebelled against secrecy in research, and have even frowned on the idea of patenting their discoveries, seeing themselves as working to the benefit of all mankind. And for many generations, the discoveries of scientists did indeed have a peculiarly selfless quality. — Michael Crichton

According to the wisdom of Indian Country on my own continent, it takes four generations to heal one act of violence. What — Gloria Steinem

Later that summer, as rain fell, such a moment shimmered and paused on the brink, and then began the ancient dance of numbers: two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and a new life took root and began to grow. And thus the generations past were joined to the unknowable future. — Mary Doria Russell

The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family. She — Malcolm Gladwell

As Wilson mourned his wife, German forces in Belgium entered quiet towns and villages, took civilian hostages, and executed them to discourage resistances. In the town of Dinant, German soldiers shot 612 men, women, and children. The American press called such atrocities acts of "frightfulness," the word then used to describe what later generations would call terrorism. On August 25, German forces bean an assault on the Belgian city of Louvain, the "Oxford of Belgium," a university town that was home to an important library. Three days of shelling and murder left 209 civilians dead, 1,100 buildings incinerated, and the library destroyed, along with its 230,000 books, priceless manuscripts, and artifacts. The assault was deemed an affront to just to Belgium but to the world. Wilson, a past president of Princeton University, "felt deeply the destruction of Louvain," according to his friend, Colonel House; the president feared "the war would throw the world back three or four centuries. — Erik Larson

It had to do with the knowledge that the world was as it was because of what men believed it was ... year by year, these past three or four generations, the minds of men had been hardened to believing that there was one God, one world, one way of describing reality, and that all things which intruded on the realm of that great one-ness must be evil and of the fiends, and that the sound of the bells and the shadow of their holy places would keep the evil afar. And as more and more people believed this, it was so, and Avalon no more than a dream adrift in an almost inaccessible other world — Marion Zimmer Bradley