“I have seen that Man moves over with each new generation into a bigger body, more awful, more reverent and more free than he has had before.”

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Thinking

The Open Mind interview (1985)
Context: I have the impression that the new generation of young people, are coming up on the scene with a sense "ancestorhood", and with more wisdom than was evident before. I think this comes about as a matter of necessity — Almost as if there is something in us that is innate, something inherent in us, that is destined for a longer term, rather than a shorter term future.

2010s, Commencement speech for Oberlin College Prep graduates (2015)
Context: ... Generation after generation, this country has become more equal, more inclusive, more fair, more free. My life and so many of your lives are a testament of that truth. But that has only happened because folks like all of you left their comfort zones and made their voices heard.

Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters (1997), preface

Source: Meditations (c. AD 121–180), Book VIII, 48

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.

Letter to John Bright (1860) on the negotiations for his free trade treaty with France, quoted in W. E. Williams, The Rise of Gladstone to the Leadership of the Liberal Party, 1859 to 1868 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), p. 20.
1860s

Source: Statement made by Errol Flynn about Fidel Castro in a TV interview on the Canadian TV program Front Page held in 1959. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=filBYa1AJEA