Quotes about general
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“There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

Time

“The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Misattributed

World

“Astrology and all these mystical things are generally signs of a weak mind; therefore as soon as they are becoming prominent in our minds, we should see a physician, take good food, and rest.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Food

“There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.”

Ian McEwan Saturday

Source: Saturday

Life, Hunger, Happiness

“One doesn't generally look into mirrors when one is especially angry; one has better things to do, like pace the floor or throw things.”

Robin McKinley book The Blue Sword

Source: The Blue Sword

“Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours (24 April 1816)
1810s

People, Evil

“If, for example, you are miserly by nature, you will never go beyond a certain limit; only generous souls attain greatness.”

Robert Greene book The 48 Laws of Power

Source: The 48 Laws of Power

Soul, Nature

“He hates me more," says Peeta. "I don't think people in general are his sort of thing.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Hate, People, Thinking

“The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.”

Thomas Pynchon Mason & Dixon

Source: Mason & Dixon

Thinking, Science, Parting

“Strange though it is, Sarov still cares about you. He told me to leave you alone. But I think, this time, I must disobey the general. You are mine! And I intend to make you suffer…"

"Just talking to you makes me suffer," Alex said.”

Anthony Horowitz book Skeleton Key

Source: Skeleton Key

Thinking, Suffering, Time

“There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: Jayber Crow

Heart

“In general people put too much faith in the rich, the famous, the politicians, and not enough faith in themselves.”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

People, Faith

“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Source: The Thomas Sowell Reader, New York: NY, Basic Books (2011) p. 144, Forbes magazine, "The survival of the left" (Sept. 8, 1997)

Failure

“Study and in general the pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Letter to Adrianna Enriques (October 1921), p. 83
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)

Children, Truth, Beauty, Study

“But of course there's no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. It's the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons”

Dave Eggers book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Source: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Children, Color, Happiness

“Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington (16 January 1787)
1780s
Variant: Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
Source: Letters of Thomas Jefferson

Animals

“Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book The Guns of August

Source: The Guns of August

Dead

“Our standard rate. A doubloon a day."
It was generous. More than generous--some families would put him up for a week for a single coin.
"Half a doubloon a day," she said.
"No, you see, the idea behind bargaining is that you ask for a larger amount.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: On the Edge

Family, Idea

“If the events of September 11, 2001, have proven anything, it's that the terrorists can attack us, but they can't take away what makes us American -- our freedom, our liberty, our civil rights. No, only Attorney General John Ashcroft can do that.”

Jon Stewart (1962) American political satirist, writer, television host, actor, media critic and stand-up comedian

Freedom

“You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Dance, Night

“The Mollusks—generous hosts when they weren’t trying to kill you.”

Dave Barry book Peter and the Starcatchers

Source: Peter and the Starcatchers

“There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: one must live for the needs of the day, in other words, become oblivious. To become oblivious in dreams was impossible now, at least till night-time; it was impossible to return to that music sung by carafe-women; and so one had to become oblivious in the dreams of life.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Pt. 1, ch. 2
Source: Anna Karenina (1875–1877; 1878)

Life, Women, Dreams, Music

“Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

People

“What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.”

Peter Singer (1946) Australian philosopher

“As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.
The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber
Burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.
So one generation of men will grow while another dies.”

Homér Iliad

VI. 146–149 (tr. R. Lattimore); Glaucus to Diomed.
Alexander Pope's translation:
: Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,
Now green in youth, now withering on the ground:
Another race the following spring supplies,
They fall successive, and successive rise:
So generations in their course decay;
So flourish these, when those are past away.
Iliad (c. 750 BC)
Source: The Iliad

Men, Spring, Season

“Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare.”

Dale Carnegie (1888–1955) American writer and lecturer

from Dale Carnegie’s Scrapbook, ed. Dorothy Carnegie, as cited in Words of Wisdom https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0671695878, William Safire & Leonard Safir, Simon and Schuster (reprint, 1990), p. 87

Life, Chance

“It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The House of the Seven Gables

Source: The House of the Seven Gables

People

“Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious.”

Zhuangzi (-369–-286 BC) classic Chinese philosopher

Wisdom

“The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.”

Meg Wolitzer (1959) American writer

Source: The Uncoupling

“The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to trurh.”

Scott Adams (1957) cartoonist, writer

Source: God's Debris: A Thought Experiment

“I belong to a generation that didn't expect to be protected from every danger. We knew the risks and took them anyway.”

Kristin Hannah book The Nightingale

Source: The Nightingale

“Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peoples' money, except when it comes to questions of national survival when they prefer to be generous with other peoples' freedom and security.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

Money, People, Question, Freedom

“I was in the supermarket the other day, and I met a lady in the aisle where they keep the generic brands. Her name was 'woman.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

“It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.”

E.M. Forster book Maurice

Source: Maurice

People

“If you take a man by surprise, and behave with sufficient arrogance, he will generally do what you ask.
-Emerson”

Elizabeth Peters The Last Camel Died at Noon

Source: The Last Camel Died at Noon

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

Hilary Mantel book Wolf Hall

Source: Wolf Hall

Children

“We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

"The Education of an Englishman" in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 138 (1926), p. 192.
1920s

Thinking

“Is not general incivility the very essence of love?”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Variant: Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?
Source: Pride and Prejudice

Love

“No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.”

Laurie Colwin (1944–1992) Novelist, short story writer, food writer

Wisdom, Past, Cooking

“Even extreme grief may ultimately vent
itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“I'm feeling generous today. You get to live.”

Frank Beddor American skier and writer

Feeling

“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Attitude, Wise, Life, Life

“Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

Source: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

“The young do not know enough to be prudent, and so they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

As quoted in An Apple for the Teacher: Fundamentals for Instructional Computing (1983) by George H. Culp and Herbert N. Nickles, p. 190; also in Youth Quake: A Manifesto (2002) by Cousin Sam, p. 31

“You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Variant: You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was meant to be wooed and won by youth.
Source: My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930), Chapter 4 (Sandhurst).
Source: My Early Life, 1874-1904

World, Hurt

“In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folks in her literature, because see point a).”

John Scalzi (1969) American science fiction writer

Literature

“Chick Lit uses humor to reflect life back to us. It's a very comforting genre, and it's the first time our generation has had a voice. It's a very important genre for all of those reasons.”

Marian Keyes (1963) Irish writer

Life, Time

“If you play your cards right, the next generation will have so much more than you did.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: Two Boys Kissing

“Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Depressing, War

“Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, 'You're all a lost generation.' That got around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee! We're lost.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

People

“The most unpresentable persons are generally the most interesting.”

Teresa de la Parra (1889–1936) Venezuelan novelist

Source: Las memorias de Mamá Blanca

Personality

“We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”

Abraham Verghese book Cutting for Stone

Source: Cutting for Stone

“One of the sanest, surest, and most generous joys of life comes from being happy over the good fortune of others.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

Life, Joy, Happiness

“From my own experience, when someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them. I'm generalizing, of course.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Variant: When someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them.
Source: Kafka on the Shore

“The most truly generous persons are those who give silently without hope of praise or reward.”

Carol Ryrie Brink book Magical Melons

Source: Caddie Woodlawn's Family

Hope, Personality

“There are generations yet unborn,
whose very lives will be shifted and shaped by the moves you make and the actions you take.”

Andy Andrews (1959) author and corporate speaker

“She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.”

James Joyce book Dubliners

Source: Dubliners

Way

“There is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.”

Jane Austen book Sense and Sensibility

Source: Sense and Sensibility

Way

“Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

People

“What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Women, Men, Fight

“I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest

Source: Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest

Fate, Feeling

“It is an axiom in my mind, that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the State to effect, and on a general plan.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to http://www.familytales.org/dbDisplay.php?id=ltr_thj1489 George Washington (4 January 1786) 1780s Source: Letters of Thomas Jefferson

People, Business

“It felt bizarre to be ignored in general, much less by an embodiment of Aidan--who used to stare at her so hard that he'd run into trees.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Dreams of a Dark Warrior

Tree

“What the world stigmatizes as romantic, is often more nearly allied to the truth than is commonly supposed; for, if the generous ideas of youth are too often over-clouded by the sordid views of after-life, that scarcely proves them to be false.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXXII : Comparisons: Information Rejected; Helen to Milicent

Life, Truth, Youth, World

“Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. resistance is the enemy within.”

Steven Pressfield (1943) United States Marine

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“Today’s young people want to know everything about everyone. They think talking about a problem will solve it. I come from a quieter generation. We understand the value of forgetting, the lure of reinvention.”

Kristin Hannah book The Nightingale

Source: The Nightingale

People, Understanding, Problem, Thinking

“I don't know what you mean when you say 'the whole world' or 'generations before him.'I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now.”

Lois Lowry book The Giver

Source: The Giver

World

“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
Context: I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

Men, God, Hate, People

“On the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi's 70th birthday. "Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Variant: Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth. (said of Mahatma Gandhi)
Source: On Peace

Birthday

“Years ago, before this estate was generously and unwillingly turned over to the crown, the lord here was a genuine dimwit. He had a minister stashed behind his throne to whisper clever things to say.”

Shannon Hale The Goose Girl

Source: The Goose Girl

“One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

Source: On the Origin of Species (1859), chapter VII: "Instinct", page 244 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=262&itemID=F373&viewtype=image Source: The Origin of Species

Law

“What the younger generation didn't understand was that the grass was greenest where it's watered..”

Nicholas Sparks book The Best of Me

Source: The Best of Me

Understanding, Grass, Water

“At first sight, his address is certainly not striking; and his person can hardly be called handsome, till the expression of his eyes, which are uncommonly good, and the general sweetness of his countenance, is perceived.”

Jane Austen book Sense and Sensibility

Source: Sense and Sensibility

Personality

“Sometimes when we are generous in small, barely detectable ways it can change someone's life forever.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

Life, Way, Change

“Immigration policy should be
generous; it should be fair; it should
be flexible. With such a policy we
can turn to the world, and to our own
past, with clean hands and a clear
conscience.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Source: A Nation of Immigrants

World, Past

“Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially of the lower class of people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

1770s, Thoughts on Government (1776)

People, Youth, Education, Law

“Normal people dont generally find their homes ransacked by demons.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

People, Home

“The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Life, Dreams, Hope, Soul

“Noise is relative to the silence preceeding it. The more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap. Our masters have not heard the peoples voice for generations, Evey and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.”

Alan Moore V for Vendetta

Source: V for Vendetta

People, Silence

“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

First attributed to Johnson 15 years posthumously in a footnote in William Seward's Biographiana (1799), but written in slightly different form in 1764, in a profile in The Scots Magazine of Charles Churchill. The Scots Magazine, Volume 26 https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=y14AAAAAYAAJ&q=%22without+effort%22&redir_esc=y&hl=en#v=snippet&q=%22without%20effort%22&f=false Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/08/without-effort/, retrieved 17 May 2016 Misattributed Source: Johnsonian Miscellanies - Vol II

Pleasure, Effort, Reading

“Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.”

Bill Cosby (1937) American actor, comedian, author, producer, musician, activist

Music, Passion, Time, Clothes

“I saw the best minds of my generation who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade.”

Allen Ginsberg book Howl and Other Poems

Source: Howl and Other Poems

Time

“Everybody generalizes from one example. At least, I do.”

Steven Brust (1955) American fantasy and science fiction author

“It's true; life really is generous to those who pursue their destiny”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

Life

“I have a catchphrase to describe my plot-generation technique — "What's the worst possible thing I can do to these people?"”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

"Putting It Together" p. 6
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)
Source: Cordelia's Honor

People

“I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living and that one generation has no more right to bind another to it's laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Law

“Every general prohibition creates its bootleggers.”

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

Source: Time Enough for Love

“Posterity: you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

Attributed in The Rebirth of a Nation : With a Bill of Rights for America's Third Century (1978) by Robert S. Minor, p. 10; this is a paraphrase of a statement by his father John Adams in a letter to his mother Abigail Adams (27 April 1777): "Posterity! you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it".
Misattributed

Hope, Freedom