“For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.”

Review of A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays by Herbert Read, Poetry Quarterly (Winter 1945)
Context: Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognise it as such, but one ought also to stick to one's own world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one's intellectual roots.

Source: Art Worlds (1982), p.x.

Talking Points Memo (2006-01-17) http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/--94387

Senate Foreign Relations Committee, , quoted in
regarding 2012 attack on US diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya
Secretary of State (2009–2013)
Context: With all due respect, the fact is, we had four dead Americans—was it because of a protest or because of guys out for a walk one night and decided to go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.

Source: Atonement

Variant: The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.

"Teacher" (played by Jame's Clavell's daughter Michaela Clavell, credited as Michaela Ross).
The Children's Story (1982)

Source: The Last Messiah (1933), To Be a Human Being https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4m6vvaY-Wo&t=1110s (1989–90)

Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)