Remorse is extremely useful for a generation which has in fact dirtied its hands but for the next generation you cannot ask, for instance, young Germans today to feel guilty about Hitlerism.
I would not be running for President if I didn't believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation - the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.
I feel so guilty about the state of young people today. And I say that because our generation fought for everything. We fought to sit down at a counter, to sit on a bus. They were left with nothing to fight for.
Somebody asked me what I thought next generation meant and what about the PlayStation 3 was next generation. The only next gen system I've seen is the Wii - the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement.
Evolution is all about passing on the genome to the next generation, adapting and surviving through generation after generation. From an evolutionary point of view, you and I are like the booster rockets designed to send the genetic payload into the next level of orbit and then drop off into the sea.
Perhaps a good resolution for the new year would be to keep asking what world we want to pass on to the next generation. Indeed to ask whether we have a real and vivid sense of that next generation.
Today's children are living a childhood of firsts. They are the first daycare generation; the first truly multicultural generation; the first generation to grow up in the electronic bubble, the environment defined by computers and new forms of television; the first post-sexual revolution generation; the first generation for which nature is more abstraction than reality; the first generation to grow up in new kinds of dispersed, deconcentrated cities, not quite urban, rural, or suburban.
Generation after generation, there is this never-ending, contemptuous, condescending attitude to the next generation or the next way of thinking: music, art, politics, whatever. And I have never been like that.
Today’s generation of young people holds more power than any generation before it to make a positive impact on the world.
Any given generation gives the next generation advice that the given generation should have been given by the previous generation but now it's too late.
Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth.
I meet young people everywhere who are wonderful and faithful; youth who want to do the right thing and who indicate the reality of what I have been saying for a long time, that we've never had a better generation of young people in the Church than we have today. They are faithful. They are active. They're knowledgeable. They are a great generation, notwithstanding the environment in which many of them are growing up.
If you look at the first generation of wireless, it really lasted about 15 years before we went to the second generation. When we implemented the fourth generation, which allowed us to do all the smartphones and the videos, the time between that and going to the fifth generation is going to be four years.
I get a little cranky with the whole business about kids not having attention spans. This reminds me of the usual business of thinking that the next generation is hopeless. Every generation has said that about every younger generation.
What cannot be talked about cannot be put to rest. And if it is not, the wounds will fester from generation to generation.
The preoccupations of young women-their looks, their clothes, their social life-don't seem to change much from generation to generation. But in every generation there are a few that make others choices.
I don't want to inspire the next generation of tight ends or linebackers to play the game. If I could inspire the next generation of architects and technology leaders and writers and illustrators and film directors, then I feel like I have fulfilled my life purpose.