A Quote by Thomas Paine

If the present generation, or any other, are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free: wrongs cannot have a legal descent. — © Thomas Paine
If the present generation, or any other, are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free: wrongs cannot have a legal descent.
If any generation of men ever possessed the right of dictating the mode by which the world should be governed for ever, it was the first generation that existed; and if that generation did it not, no succeeding generation can show any authority for doing it, nor can set any up.
We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country.
There's the generation that made the rules, the generation that codified them. The generation that broke them - that's mine. The generation that laughed at them - that's Tarantino's. And now there's a generation that doesn't know that there were any.
No other generation but ours can evangelize the present generation.
Everybody talks about the entitlement generation. There is no time I'd rather live in than now, and there is no generation I would more entrust the future of this country to than this one. There is a tendency to live in a nostalgic state in this country, and to think that other generations possessed an integrity and a tenacity greater than the generation that is now. I wholeheartedly disagree with that. I believe that this is a group that will rise up to any challenge that comes before them as well as any other generation in America would have done.
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.
However much one generation learns from another, it can never learn from its predecessor the genuinely human factor. In this respect every generation begins afresh. Thus no generation has learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning.
It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly.
One of the things that I am learning is that each generation will have its own negotiations with identity. And one generation can not necessarily help the other generation with it.
There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the 'end of time,' or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it. Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it.
It is to be kept in mind that the generations of men do not wait for the convenience of the church in respect to their evangelization. Men are born and die whether or not Christians are ready to give them the Gospel. And hence, if the church of any generation does not evangelize the heathen of that generation, those heathen will never be evangelized at all. It is always true in the work of evangelization that the present can never anticipate the future, and that the future can never replace the past. What is to be done in soul saving must be done by that generation.
There will never be a generation of great men until there has been a generation of free women - of free mothers.
I always feel that if you were the best in any generation, you most likely would have been close to the best in any other generation too.
What cannot be talked about cannot be put to rest. And if it is not, the wounds will fester from generation to generation.
Each succeeding generation of Gods follow the example of the preceding ones: each generation have their wives, who raise up from the fruit of their loins immortal spirits: when their families become numerous, they organize new worlds for them. [T]hey place their families upon the same.
I do not write for this generation. I am writing for other ages. If this could read me, they would burn my books, the work of my whole life. On the other hand, the generation which interprets these writings will be an educated generation; they will understand me and say: Not all were asleep in the nighttime of our grandparents.
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