Three Generation Quotes & Sayings

The fact that the biosphere responds unpredictably to our actions is not an argument for inaction. It is, however, a powerful argument for caution, and for adopting a tentative attitude toward all we believe, and all we do. Unfortunately, our species has demonstrated a striking lack of caution in the past. It is hard to imagine that we will behave differently in the future.
We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so. We never seem to acknowledge that we have been wrong in the past, and so might be wrong in the future. Instead, each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking by less able minds
and then confidently embarks on fresh errors of its own.
We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind. — Michael Crichton

I was born in 1966, at the beginning of the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War, and the war ended after three years. And I was growing up in school, and the federal government didn't want us taught about the history of the war, because they thought it probably would make us generate a new generation of rebels. — Chris Abani

The term of life of a dynasty does not normally exceed three generations. For in the first generation are still preserved the characteristic features of rough, uncivilized rural life, such as hard conditions of life, courage, ferocity, and partnership in authority. Therefore the strength of the 'Asabiya is maintained ... — Ibn Khaldun

Think!" cried the Professor. "This prodigious bowl was filled with ice to a depth of three hundred feet. And when we and our children are dead, seeds will have sprouted in the silt, and a young forest will nod over these stones. Here before you is one scene of a geological drama, past and future implicit in the present you perceive, and all within the span of a single human generation, and a human memory. — Oliver Sacks

With their big hit, PiL had reached a whole new generation of fans, and the gig had sold out very fast. But right down at the front were a crowd of about three to four hundred hardcore, old-school punks who had come creeping out of the squats of Camden and Shepherd's Bush to greet their hero. To — Simon Parkes

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation. — Kenneth Koch

Palo's three older brothers had died in the Paraguayan War, conscripted by the Argentinian government, taken off by force along with all the black men of their generation, because, Palo told young Santiago, they needed a way to not only win their war but also rid this country of us in the process, two birds with one stone. Buenos Aires was too black for them, one third of the population, that's enough blackness to swallow you up! to get strong on you! and so they sent our fathers off to war and opened floodgates to European steamships so that white men would pour into the city to replace us, and their plan worked, the bastarda, look at our city now. — Carolina De Robertis

That didn't make sense to me. That he would die and raise from the dead in three days." "It is the Messianic secret, kept hidden from the principalities and the powers. And yet it was in plain sight all along." "What do you mean?" "Jesus told us that no sign shall be given this generation of ours except the sign of Jonah. He said that just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. I remember reading a revelation from the angel Gabriel that was recorded on stone and stored in the library at Qumran. — Brian Godawa

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

Superstring theories provide a framework in which the force of gravity may be united with the other three forces in nature: the weak, electromagnetic and strong forces. Recent progress has shown that the most promising superstring theories follow from a single theory. For the last generation, physicists have studied five string theories and one close cousin. Recently it has become clear that these five or six theories are different limiting cases of one theory which, though still scarcely understood, is the candidate for superunification of the forces of nature. — Edward Witten

It was a generation growing in its disillusionment about the deepening recession and the backroom handshakes and greedy deals for private little pots of gold that created the largest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. As heirs to the throne, we all knew, of course, how bad the economy was, and our dreams, the ones we were told were all right to dream, were teetering gradually toward disintegration. However, on that night, everyone seemed physically at ease and exempt from life's worries with final exams over and bar class a distant dream with a week before the first lecture, and as I looked around at the jubilant faces and loud voices, if you listened carefully enough you could almost hear the culmination of three years in the breath of the night gasp in an exultant sigh as if to say, Law school was over at last! — Daniel Amory

We've got a generation now who were born with semiequality. They don't know how it was before, so they think, this isn't too bad. We're working. We have our attache' cases and our three piece suits. I get very disgusted with the younger generation of women. We had a torch to pass, and they are just sitting there. They don't realize it can be taken away. Things are going to have to get worse before they join in fighting the battle. — Erma Bombeck

When you found someone you liked, you jumped into a relationship. I don't think we thought, Well, there are another twelve doors or another seventeen doors or another four hundred and thirty-three doors," she said. "We saw a door we wanted, and so we took it." Now, look at my generation. We're in a hallway with millions of doors. That's a lot of doors. — Aziz Ansari

Overall, our population is in the worst shape it's ever been. Children are in terrible shape. We have absolutely unprecedented numbers of obese and overweight children - one in three now. A generation ago it was something like one in ten. — Neal Barnard

We have the potential for making massive change ... and the bottom line is that we can't be the generation responsible for wiping out three-fourths of life forms on the Earth. — Anthony D. Barnosky

To those who swear our young are on the road to perdition take comfort in this- every generation has felt somewhat the same for two or three thousand years and the still the world goes on. — Karen Hesse

I feel like maybe I'm part of that generation that became more of a gamer than a video consumer. It's always been something I've done with my spare time. If I had three hours on a Friday night, I'm not out partying. I'm probably playing video games. — Felicia Day

Regardless of how successful the Fifth Generation and New Taiwan cinemas have been in the international film milieu, this (limited) recognition usually is based on two aspects: the formal or the exotic. Their works are praised as highly formally innovative (in other words, how well the have mastered the new-wave visual language of the West -- thus, our modernist language) or exotic (as revealing the mystery of an inscrutable Other). This may explain why in the United States, mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan cinemas are still perceived as a homogeneous entity called Chinese cinema, though they are products of the vastly different cultures of three geopolitically segregated regions. — Tonglin Lu

There is a phrase for this that has become quite common: "I'm spiritual but not religious." Polls show that some 20 percent of Americans identify overall with that phrase. And some polls have shown that, in the younger generation - those between eighteen and twenty-nine - this percentage explodes to an astonishing 75 percent!2 In other words, three out of four young individuals have a deep spiritual yearning that no existing religion is addressing. — Ken Wilber

I see young people being dismissed for supposedly wanting only "stupid" and "easy" material, or that they don't have an attention span longer than three minutes. I disagree with all those statements; I just think they aren't true. I'm saying that our generation wants stuff that is substantial and challenging, as well as thoughtful and endearing. Well, I don't know if I'm doing that, but I'm trying. — Bo Burnham

(The North Korean army had to lower its height requirement from five feet three in the early 1990s because of the stunting of the younger generation.) — Barbara Demick

If you take all the money we've spent at NASA since we landed on the moon and you had applied that money for incentives to the private sector, we would today probably have a permanent station on the moon, three or four permanent stations in space, a new generation of lift vehicles. — Newt Gingrich

Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting, provocative and important European novelist of my generation. Period. No one else comes close. He has written two or maybe three great books, and his latest, The Map and the Territory, is one of them. — Bret Easton Ellis

No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create ... a generation of permanent cripples failed seekers who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebodyor at least some force is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel. This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. — Hunter S. Thompson

They convinced our mothers that if a food item came in a bottle
or a can or a box or a cellophane bag
then it was somehow better for you than when it came to you free of charge via Mother Nature ... An entire generation of us were introduced in our very first week to the concept that phony was better than real, that something manufactured was better than something that was right there in the room. (Later in life, this explained the popularity of the fast food breakfast burrito, neocons, Kardashians, and why we think reading this book on a tiny screen with only three minutes of battery life left is enjoyable. — Michael Moore

The most revolutionary aspect of technology is its mobility. Anybody can learn it. It jumps easily over barriers of race and language ... The new technology of microchips and computer software is learned much faster than the old technology of coal and iron. It took three generations of misery for the older industrial countries to master the technology of coal and iron. The new industrial countries of East Asia, South Korea, and Singapore and Taiwan, mastered the new technology and made the jump from poverty to wealth in a single generation. — Freeman Dyson

Pitt the Elder, had been prime minister a generation before (1766-68). He was a manic-depressive, had had a mental breakdown in 1751 while a Cabinet minister (Paymaster General) and had withdrawn from public office for three years. While serving in the highest office, clear signs of mental instability were evident. He spent most of his prime ministership sequestered away in a small room in his house at Hampstead, trying to avoid his ministers and the pressures of governing. During his time, his Chancellor was doing his own thing, unwisely levying the taxes on the North American colonies that would eventually ignite the War of Independence. — Phil Mason

There are three things that none of the young men of the present generation can do.They can't sit over their wine;they can't play at wist;and they can't pay a lady a compliment. — Wilkie Collins

What I am really writing about, what I have always written about, is the idea of human freedom, human community, the real world which makes both possible, and the new technocratic industrial state which threatens the existence of all three. Life and death, that's my subject, and always has been - if the reader will look beyond the assumptions of lazy critics and actually read what I have written. Which also means, quite often, reading between the lines: I am a comic writer and the generation of laughter is my aim. — Edward Abbey

I have a few different managers, and one of them hit me up today and was like 'I'm going to set you up with these guys doing beats and such ... ' I was like cool, as long as I can do what I do. Just because kids are going like this now, I'm not going to do that because I am not 18 years old. I'm not going to rap like I'm in grade three because it's popular. I'm just not going to do that. It's not because I'm being stubborn, and I definitely not that guy that is getting older and does not understand the younger generation. — Shane Bunting

Just as Rolland and I know that together with our team, God has given us the nation of Mozambique, our dear friends Brian and Pamela Jourden know that the Lord has a great revival to birth in Zimbabwe and across Africa. Many prophetic words have been released over their lives, and financial miracles grow their ministry. When they started Generation Won/Iris Zimbabwe in 2008, Zimbabwe had gone from being one of the most prosperous nations in Africa, called the "breadbasket of Africa," to being the poorest nation in the world. God spoke to them that Zimbabwe, which means house of stones, was like the stone the builders rejected, Jesus, but it would become a cornerstone nation, just as Jesus is the chief cornerstone, and a house of prayer for all nations. They have over twenty churches among three tribes, and they have seen HIV/AIDS and cancer miraculously healed as they preach the gospel. God is also opening doors with national leaders. — Heidi Baker

three conclusions: (1) at least weak forms of superintelligence are achievable by means of biotechnological enhancements; (2) the feasibility of cognitively enhanced humans adds to the plausibility that advanced forms of machine intelligence are feasible - because even if we were fundamentally unable to create machine intelligence (which there is no reason to suppose), machine intelligence might still be within reach of cognitively enhanced humans; and (3) when we consider scenarios stretching significantly into the second half of this century and beyond, we must take into account the probable emergence of a generation of genetically enhanced populations - voters, inventors, scientists - with the magnitude of enhancement escalating rapidly over subsequent decades. — Nick Bostrom

While we advance exponentially in technological capability, our spiritual or 'biological technology,' our maturity as a species, is still two or three thousand years in the past. This is because many of us live according to ideas that were original and groundbreaking ... in 500 B.C. Most people are unwilling or unable to ask the hard questions- as in, why do we do things the way we do, and what will the end results be? (p.120) Generation Hex — James Curcio

I find more people want to eat a little less. My generation, we're all watching our figures. They want to go to the bar and eat a few snacks, have a couple of cocktails or glasses of wine, and go home. People don't sit down at the table and have a whole three or four courses. — Todd English

It took from 1967 to 2003 - over three decades - to build the big men. It took a decade - 2003 to 2013 - to destroy them. I suspect a new generation of big men will return. No people can tolerate chaos forever. Dictators will offer a way out and many of the exhausted and brutalized people of the Middle East will accept them, and I suspect Washington will as well. — Richard Engel

A generation ago, three-quarters of the money used to buy food in the United States was spent to prepare meals at home. Today about half of the money used to buy food is spent at restaurants
mainly at fast food restaurants. — Eric Schlosser

An elderly woman gathering wood, plump and impoverished, tells me about her children one by one, when they were born, when they died. When she becomes aware that I want to go on, she talks three times as fast, shortening destinies, skipping the deaths of three children although adding them later on, unwilling to let even one fate slip away - and this in a dialect that makes it hard for me to follow what she is saying. After the demise of an entire generation of offspring, she would speak no more about herself except to say that she gathers wood, every day; I should have stayed longer. — Werner Herzog

I'm learning. The mick from the lanes of Limerick letting the envy hang out. I'm dealing with first-and second-generation immigrants, like myself, but I've also got the middle classes and the upper middle classes and I'm sneering. I don't want to sneer but old habits die hard. It's the resentment. Not even anger. Just resentment. I shake my head over the things that concern them, that middle-class stuff, it's too hot, it's too cold and this is not the toothpaste I like. Here am I after three decades in America still happy to be able to turn on the electric light or reach for a towel after the shower. — Frank McCourt

When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and Roman history, how many slaves' names are known to you? I can think of two, or possibly three. One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus. Also, in the Roman room at the British Museum there is a glass jar with the maker's name inscribed on the bottom, 'FELIX FECIT'. I have a mental picture of poor Felix (a Gaul with red hair and a metal collar round his neck), but in fact he may not have been a slave; so there are only two slaves whose names I definitely know, and probably few people can remember more. The rest have gone down into utter silence. — George Orwell

There have been delivered to us in the Gospel three Persons and names through Whom the generation of the birth of believers takes place, and he who is begotten by this Trinity is equally begotten of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ? for thus does the Gospel speak of the Spirit, that 'that which is born of the Spirit is spirit' (Jn. 3:6), and it is 'in Christ' (I Cor. 4:15) that Paul begets, and the Father is the 'Father of all.' — Gregory Of Nyssa

My generation was obsessed with scoliosis. Judy Blume dedicated an entire novel to it. At least once a month we would line up in the gym, lift our shirts, and bend over, while some creepy old doctor ran his finger up and down our spines. Nuclear war was a high-concept threat, two words that often rang out in political speeches or on the six o-clock news. Our spines. Lice. Nuclear war. The Big Three. — Amy Poehler

Two or three million years ago, the Earth was a ball of fire, revolving arround it's own axis. It took millions of years to cool under the constant downpour of rain. The Process was slow, imperceptible, but the gradual change - transition - came to pass. Same for generation after generation of evolution on Earth.
Nature never jumps. She works in a leisurely manner, experimenting continuously. The same natural transition can be seen in man. This gradual change, transition, works every where, silently building storms and destroying soloar systems. — Lajos Egri

The discussions of the prior generation, shaped by H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture (see chapter three above), still presumed "gospel" and "culture" as two disparate and divergent categories and realities. An incarnational and pentecostal approach to culture realizes that while distinct, the gospel always comes through culture and that culture can - indeed, must! - be redeemed for the purposes of the gospel. — Amos Yong

Crossing the Finish Line is a must-read for anyone concerned with the disturbing fact that Americans can no longer count on each generation being better educated than the last. Focusing on public institutions that educate more than three-fourths of U.S. students, Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson provide compelling arguments that institutions and policymakers must find new ways to overcome deeply entrenched patterns if our country is to regain its position as the most educated. — Molly Corbett Broad

The old process of social assimilation used to be mainly about English new money - generated in London, the mucky, brassy North or the colonies - buying those houses and restoring them, and doing the three-generation thing, mouldering into the landscape, and the 'community,' identifying with the place in a familiar way. — Peter York

A generation ago, or two, when there were three channels, plus PBS, and when you needed - when you needed 15 million people to make a living, the media could focus on the broad country. And most people had no choice about getting political information. It was there at 6:30 whether you wanted it or not. — David Frum

In this generation, along with the dominating traits, the recessive ones also reappear, their individuality fully revealed, and they do so in the decisively expressed average proportion of 3:1, so that among each four plants of this generation three receive the dominating and one the recessive characteristic. — Gregor Mendel

Warren Jeffs is both a problem and the symptom of a problem. The FLDS has created a lot of Warrens, men who are intoxicated with their own power, believing they need at least three wives to get into heaven and wanting to dominate women and children. Generation after generation of believers have been conditioned to equate obedience with salvation. People who have never been taught of allowed to think for themselves don't suddenly change. Change it too frightening. — Carolyn Jessop

Three-quarters of a kilometer long, a quarter of a kilometer wide - roughly shaped like a fire hydrant - and mostly empty space inside, the Canterbury was a retooled colony transport. Once, it had been packed with people, supplies, schematics, machines, environment bubbles, and hope. Just under twenty million people lived on the moons of Saturn now. The Canterbury had hauled nearly a million of their ancestors there. Forty-five million on the moons of Jupiter. One moon of Uranus sported five thousand, the farthest outpost of human civilization, at least until the Mormons finished their generation ship and headed for the stars and freedom from procreation restrictions. And — James S.A. Corey

Led Zeppelin has been there through three generations of teenage angst. And there's a generation of kids now who won't know it, post-Linkin Park. — Robert Plant

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) is probably the most influential film of my generation. It's the personification of good and evil and the way it opened up the world to space adventure, the way westerns had to our parents' generations, left an indelible imprint. So, in a way, everything that any of us does is somehow directly or indirectly affected by the experience of seeing those first three films. — J.J. Abrams

Reynolds Lucius Wadsworth III was Waddy's real name, the result of a three-generation tradition of unparalleled cruelty in the naming of first-born boys. — Terry Brooks

Each of the 630 pupae killed by Gambrus hatched not just one wasp but, on average, thirty-three. That is, these pupae represent 630 x 33 = 20,790 individual ichneumon parasitoids, which could potentially produce 20,790 x 33 = 686,000 more parasitoids in the next generation, and this wasp can have more than one generation in a year. One — Bernd Heinrich

"A Tale of Three Cities" is a tribute to our parents' generation, who escaped from city to city in search of their loved ones and in search of a place to build a better home. The story is set during the turbulent war years in China in the '40s and '50s. — Mabel Cheung

But before we cue the brass section to blare "The Stars and Stripes Forever," it might be worth taking another moment of melancholy silence to mourn the thwarted reconciliation with the mother country and what might have been. Anyone who accepts the patriots' premise that all men are created equal must come to terms with the fact that the most obvious threat to equality in eighteenth-century North America was not taxation without representation but slavery. Parliament would abolish slavery in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. A return to the British fold in 1776 might have freed American slaves three decades sooner, which is what, a generation and a half? Was independence for some of us more valuable than freedom for all of us? As the former slave Frederick Douglass put it in an Independence Day speech in 1852, "This is your Fourth of July, not mine. — Sarah Vowell

Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace. — Salman Rushdie

All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel. — Hunter S. Thompson

She was a woman still controlled by the traumas of her girlhood. It made more sense to put her three-year-old self in the dock. As Dr Byford explained, she was really the victim of a vicious, peculiarly female psycological disorder: she felt one thing and did another. She was a stranger to herself.
And were they still like that, she wondered - these new girls, this new generation? Did they still feel one thing and do another? Did they still only want to be wanted? Were they still objects of desire instead of - as Howard might put it - desiring subjects? No, she could see no serious change. Still starving themselves, still reading women's magazines that explicitly hate women, still cutting themselves with little knives in places they think can't be seen, still faking their orgasms with men they dislike, still lying to everybody about everything. — Zadie Smith

Our country is failing to live up to its promise of opportunity and fairness. It used to be true that if you went to college and you worked hard, you could count on having a decent middle-class life - but that's just not true anymore. Economic and political changes that have occurred over the past three decades have made the middle-class American dream for today's twenty- and thirtysomethings far less possible than it was for their parents' generation. It's not that we're lazy, that we have no work ethic, or that we have outrageous spending habits. It's that we've been screwed. — Camille Perri

On my US tour maybe three out of 30 shows there was an Elvis impersonator in the crowd but that's it. I usually get younger fans, and those that come that are of an older generation end up walking out because it's too loud. — Lisa Marie Presley

We all grew up, our grandmothers and mothers had about three channels to watch, so we watched those soaps and now, a generation has grown up with the Internet and computers and video games. — Jack Wagner

I knew it was coming. I knew they didn't have the nerve.
Three days in and they've got faces like vexed tomatoes, their skins flaking sci-fi style: burnt to fuck. They were an embarrassment; not only to me and the wife and The Fall fans but to their own generation. — Mark E. Smith

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously ... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create ... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody ... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel. — Hunter S. Thompson

If every parent understood the huge educational benefits and intense happiness brought about by reading aloud to their children, and if every parent- and every adult caring for a child-read aloud a minimum of three stories a day to the children in our lives, we could probably wipe out illiteracy within one generation. — Mem Fox

The trans-rational spiritual approach is a simple concept with wide-ranging practical implications. There are three major components involved: (1) not denying rationality, (2) pursuing the experience of a peaceful internal state, and (3) allowing that inner peace to guide behavior. — Gudjon Bergmann

All the dutiful grandchildren and great-grandchildren lingering over deathbeds with digital recorders, or else mechanically pursuing their ancestors through the online genealogy sites at three in the morning, so very eager to reconstitute the lives and thoughts of dead and soon-to-dead men, though they may regularly screen the phone calls of their own mothers. I am of that generation. I will do anything for my family except see them. — Zadie Smith

I'm trying to influence the next generation or two generations or three generations behind me. That's a big ambition of mine. — James Frey